Her debut long-player LP1 is proof that talent can only thrive in the shadows for so long.

Beneath the rainbows, emotional resonance may ultimately be Gardner's most distinctive calling card.

Tarpaper Sky proves that the Houston Kid in his 60s remains as vital as ever, balancing ballads and bar room stomps, both cut with his characteristic sense of autobiographical detail and precarious mortality.

Hummingbird's layers complement its psychic search.

It's a smörgåsbord of carefully culled influence, one that Krell indulges in with gusto.

He'll always sport that BSS tattoo, but with this effort, Jason Collett's no longer searching for a defining sound.

All of it builds up to quiet closer "In Times of Cold," a beautiful and crushing duet with Patty Griffin made even more poignant by the guiding hand of George Reiff in one of the local producer and bassist's final efforts.

The Electric Word captures the full glory of the Relatives' second coming, though ringer Tyron Edwards nearly steals the show with his mountain-high falsetto ("Things Are Changing"), the gravy to Western grit.

Forget that it's probably the middle part of some overblown epic song set and enjoy it for what it is: 13 songs that try to break new ground, and generally succeed, while managing to sound like the Pumpkins we know rather than plastic studio production.

Buddy Miller in the producer seat allows Thompson some breathing room, plus the trio of guitar, bass, and drums gives the material just enough ambiance to fulfill its innate power.

Honeys marks the band's sharpest, smartest work yet, hypermasculine yet self-defeating.

For a band with so many fascinating implications, You're Nothing's catchiness shouldn't be overlooked.

Gibson avoids awkward genre mash-ups with memorable vocal melodies and a knack for seamlessly matching timbres of the traditional and contemporary.

"Get the Point" and "Big Decisions" strike a personal honesty James hasn't revealed before, and closer "Only Memories Remain" hearkens George Harrison as simultaneously devastating and uplifting. The personal is the universal.

Goatwhore channels every evil impulse of its blackened death thrash into Constricting Rage of the Merciless, sixth LP of ill intent.

Graceful, honest, and wringing every understated ounce of emotion from the tunes.

The scion sounds most at ease on the album's back half, which burns with guitar solos.

Spanning glacial, lonely instrumentals ("Being Her Shadow") and muffled Americana ("Vital,"), this abyss proves worthwhile.

Eschewing Top 40 twang's shellacked production as well as God-and-guns patriotism, she adopted a gritty, unfettered small-band approach. Pageant Material maintains those standards, but spruced-up production and the "aw shucks" wonderment of her new reality.

Us Alone feels like a life coming into focus and meaning as the songwriter rolls into his forties with patience and appreciation.

Transcendent.

A languid yet invigorating shrine to indie-pop, Americana, and nudie shirt psychedelia that electrifies the blood and squeegees the mind.

Enter Brian Burton, better known as Danger Mouse, the beat scientist behind Gnarls Barkley, whose shape-shifting production – from the swelling organ of moody opener 'All You Ever Wanted' to the backward guitar in the heavy blues of 'I Got Mine'--results in the Akron, Ohio, duo's most diverse and subtly psychedelic work to date (just check the flute solo on 'Same Old Thing').

Restraint is what makes The Fool so smart.

Small-town blues burst at the seams of Bugg's songs, but he reacts to the restlessness with an impressive sense of detail and narrative shot in concise tunes.

Rouse has pushed out the boundaries that molded his first two full-length albums. And he's done it in all directions.

Metallic hardcore still gallops in short, sharp, steely blasts on a pair of two-minute openers, but Nineties grunge-dripping Seaweed now coats Ryan Patterson's punk heroes.

Be Your Own Pet's two-minute blasts of post-pubescence are true testament to the loud, fast rules of punk.

A nimble, melodic wordsmith, Bada$$ casts his effortless flow over a loose collection of jazz and boom-bap backdrops.

With The Suburbs, the baroque pop outfit attempts to reconcile its past and present.

Self-production and guests like Loudon Wainwright III and the Roches scales back Are We There in all the right ways, letting the drama ooze from vocal performance above all else.

Commencing the hourlong disc is brazen seven-minute opener "Time Collapse," its stoner psychedelia mash enduring throughout 14 tracks.

Now 'Em Are I, arriving in the wake of connubial catastrophe, comes chock-full o' rat-clever rhymes and tinny triple entendres that could've been titled Systematic Death (of the Heart).

The epic finally coalesces into an explosive, screaming climax that finds clarity in chaos.

Alpinisms is a futuristic manifesto.

Adding to the pages written by Elliott Smith and Lou Reed, Buckner is the modern age wrapped up in the frustrations and sympathies of a wanderer.

Have One on Me runs about five songs too long, which stands out during a two-hour listen, but largely she invites you in rather than challenges.

Front to back, this 14-song slice of bop-worthy Americana hits the spot like hamburgers and coffee.

Sounding like it was recorded in a musty shoebox, II nonetheless overflows with tweaky charm.

The Brooklyn duo returns with material that stays true to its trademark song structure but turns the musicality up considerably.

The second CD of Led Zeppelin III expands on its mothership's psychograss exhilaration.

Some might write off this album as a collection of novelty work à la Ween, but there's more going on here than being goofy for goofiness' sake.

The Glasgow threepiece has figured out what works: in this case, catchy funk-pop ("High Enough to Carry You Over") that threatens the radio friendliness of Bruno Mars, and nods to early Depeche Mode.

Although too saccharine in places, She & Him's second time around spins wonderfully bittersweet.

Guerilla Toss summons skull-rattling intrigue by crossing maker lab art-punk with distressed basslines and salvage-yard funk percussion.

The Devil You Know: smart, joyous rage for our times.

Deeply romantic and just as melancholy.

It's interesting and challenging without being abstruse.

Electro quips work alongside Meath's measured soprano, both perfectly scaled and bigger than the sum of their parts.

Any complaint with this set begins and ends with the list price of $54.98. Beyond that, no Cure freak can do without it.

With sound, Arthur paints with both broad and subtle brushstrokes, and his lyrics can stand free as poetry.

Despite easy-listening atrocity "Lost in the Night," Let It Roll sparkles with more gems than the locals' custom suits.

Central to Birth of Violence, the Northern Californian's stunning voice and insular lyrics tie everything into one clear, bewitching vision.

Using acoustic country gospel to explore the doubt-ridden downside of faith and her weakness to "my own destructive appetites," Lewis enlists Nashville twins Chandra and Leigh Watson to soften her sharp words with sparkling harmonies.

Beatmaker Shy FX reaches dizzying speeds on summertime jam "Da Feelin'," Maths adding up to an all out "Flex" of muscle and clout.

He's written better songs and told better stories, but Blunderbuss lends rare perspective on a man who generally lets image speak for him.

Welcome to the desolate wasteland of Destroyer.

Everything we love about Local Natives remains, but they make us work harder for it.

Still relaxed, LAHS clouds over with less reverb, punchier drums, and – at long last – vocals at the front of the mix.

Brighter than Bloodflowers, denser than Wish, The Cure presents Smith as a wild-haired sorcerer's apprentice, conducting another mad symphony of infatuation and angst.

Roaring Night is an immersive, captivating experience, beautifully lush yet uncompromisingly powerful.

Opener "I Only Want You" busts the QOTSA model with a little funk and jive. The rest of the album follows suit: a Queens backbone and Seventies rib.

Moderating the spellbinding verbosity that saturated previous high-water marks like "Ducking & Dodging" from 2014's Sunbathing Animal gives this latest batch more space to develop and marinate.

The expansive arrangements fill the edges of Bon Iver, Bon Iver's sound without losing Vernon's haunting aesthetic, balancing both a fullness and ethereality.

The music is like some unholy amalgamation of Born to Run-era Springsteen and Billy Joel shazam. This is a good thing.

Freaks of Nurture captures Holy Wave as it takes a step toward greatness.

Nashville's harmony constant wrote/co-wrote all but two of the 13 tracks on her latest career high, though the Ron Sexsmith cover titling Hard Bargain demands its very own songbook.

There's no doubt that the reality rapper with "an ice maker for a heart" is steady "Thuggin'," but Gangsta Gibbs can also ride any track the Beat Konducta throws at him.

Everybody Works feels like a good jumping-off point, Duterte potentially able to take the project anywhere she wants.

Arguably the whole of Give Me All You Got, plays out as a hymn to the free-spirited sinner who embraces the compulsion for adventure, as well as the need to put down roots. In one long breath, Carrie Rodriguez sings with equal affection for both.

Earle cleverly uses the almost-hokey comfort of his music to couch lyrics with deep sadness, rescued from desperation only by the resulting irony.

While the tale and methods of In Colour are well-worn, Jamie XX, like Burial and Four Tet before him, proves himself a master storyteller.

Get Ready is one of New Order's better works, and that's saying a lot.

Built mainly of solitary guitar/keyboard figures and elementary rhythm parts, the songs are too direct for this to be Daniel's Kid A, but he's obviously enjoying tweaking people's expectations.

The local quintet's 10th studio offering is polished and direct but still distinctly and eclectically Gourdian.

Across a decade and eight LPs, Brooklyn fivepiece Woods have perfected a lo-fi folk prone to spastic jam breakdowns. Ninth offering City Sun Eater in the River of Light now shatters any preconceived notions.

L'Enfant Sauvage... is the merde.

Guitars, energy, and emotions are dialed up in a manner that's unique to Yoakam.

Yet even when the album starts to sag ("The End of the Line," "The Unforgiven III"), the guitars crack the spine of every skeleton in Metallica's graveyard, making Death Magnetic one of the fiercest comebacks of all time.

Gainsbourg's whispered nothings are mystery no more, translated here alongside the French lyrics. While there are no bonus tracks, the accompanying booklet features extensive essays from music writer Andy Beta and electronic musician Andy Votel.

Tomboy's an ambitious work that finds its power and grandiosity in the slightest moments – an album that demands headphones, yet equally compels to crank the stereo.

The Traveling Kind bests Old Yellow Moon by merging folk ballads, C & W, and a dollop of Texas soul.

Revealing and inspiring, Landing on a Hundred bangs on the headphones, but sounds like a minor masterpiece on your speakers.

Rough going at 75 minutes, but it's as pure an expression of Merzbow's vision as the first half is of Boris'.

Ultimately, Nine Types of Light offers a reminder that love's sometimes best at the bitter end.

While missing the reverbed recklessness of early Pains tracks like "Come Saturday," Abandon proves leader Kip Berman can mature while maintaining his songs' finer attributes.

Though there's no 'The Boys Are Back in Town' here, if it's authentication rather than retro rock you're jonesing for, catch this quartet when they roll through your burg.

Being dropped from her former label, Columbia, and enduring a break-up inform some of the album's blues, but like any woman who knows her worth, she confidently tailors each song to those grand pipes, showing just how much she's matured as a songwriter.

The Demos, Remixes & Live Radio half of Illmatic XX, the 20th-anniversary celebration of the Queensbridge rapper's seminal debut, deviates the right direction from its 10-year predecessor.

Each track here employs "straight" in the title, but Josh T. Pearson remains crooked as a bag of snakes.

Engineer Barone could lose a layer or three of vocal gauze from the mix, and a certain She & Him retro preciousness will bother some tourists even though Tennis and Beach House go together like Three's Company, but as a debut, Cape Dory goes swimmingly.

The Oakland trio's sixth battering ram rebounds from 2010's scattershot Snakes for the Divine, blowtorching the veneer off previous summit Death Is This Communion in a sh*tstorm of scabrous distortion.

Derek Trucks, jazz axe John Scofield, and producer/Soulive guitarist Eric Krasno all go toe-to-toe with the phosphorescent Vieux.

What's striking about this set is that except for some drum parts and Neil playing bass on one tune, Liam's Lightning is bottled in his own one-man band, old-fashioned studio tricks and tape manipulation filling the gaps since he proudly proclaims that no computers were used in the making of the album.

Rare treat to see a band come of age so quickly, and Trouble leaps forward.

Feast of Wire is even more intricately arranged than The Black Light, though the sheer diversity of this album prevents it from approaching the grand gestalt of Black Light.

Wise beyond his decades, Masta Ace stands at the altar with lyrical depth as his bride.

Throughout, Ludacris' wordplay is sharp, tight, and filthy, filthy, filthy.