Chesney isn’t one to rest on his laurels, and his 17th album, Cosmic Hallelujah, bears that out.

A taut display of his dry wit and ability to wring beauty out of even the most harrowing human ideals.

Their fifth album, Like An Arrow, isn’t reinventing any wheels, but it is a solid collection of punchy tracks, their loping guitar solos and growled lyrics shot through with last-call urgency.

At times “Mothership” can get a little wearying. Part of that comes from the grab-you-by-the-shoulders urgency of the paired vocalists, who can be a bit much even once you’ve bought into their good-guy bad-guy conceit.

The manufactured atmosphere ultimately distances the listener. With a few exceptions, including the song “Blue Mountain,” the production also fails to find the best way to deploy Weir’s voice, holding it too far back in the mix.

While those [early] songs lay the base for Springsteen’s eventual legend, the other tracks whip through his catalog quickly and almost too efficiently.

Shape Shift With Me is a sharply penned love letter both to the idea of romance and the people who engage in it, brimming with deep yet concisely expressed emotions that can only be worked out through top-of-the-lungs bellowing.

A world-weary yet ultimately optimistic statement about the power people may not even know they possess.

It’s a roller coaster, to be sure, but it’s one that Olsen controls with a steady hand even as she sings for her life.

Zedek’s voice, neither conventional nor wholly tamed, serves her ends potently, its warp and grain enhancing unvarnished solidity.

A pop album that operates on its own terms, partly thanks to the way the white-hot notoriety of the star at its center allowed her to, after all these years, rule her own pop fiefdom.

Time might have pushed along, but it was obvious how much Ocean’s rich, detailed, and urgent storytelling had been missed once it was here again.

There’s plenty here--the sinuous “Drunk Like You,” anthemic “Graffiti,” sly “Ship Faced,” and crunchy “Peace Love & Dixie”--to prove the Cadillac Three’s figurative truck has plenty of gas in the tank, its dog still hunts.

Loveless continues to manifest a remarkable combination of bruised vulnerability and desperate longing, alongside a tough, self-deprecating resilience, but there’s more of the former and less of the latter this time.

Young the Giant’s finely tuned ear for pop is on grand display here, and frontman Sameer Gadhia excels at playing ringmaster, testing the edges of his vocal range while spinning yarns with brio.

Heart devotees should appreciate these new updates on their classic sound.

There’s less party and more perspective. He sees the troubles he went through before prison for what they are.

What results is an album to live with, and to live inside: engrossing and necessary.

The net result is an assured and engaging country music debut.

An out of the ordinary offering, the disc proves Beck still hasn’t stopped growing.

Much of Somewhere sounds remarkably consistent, even organic. Tyler, who co-wrote all of the album’s strongest material, proves a solid storyteller with a gift for melody.

Further songs follow suit, rarely deviating from verse-chorus-verse-chorus rigor. The upbeat “Sunday Love” breaks that mold with its rhythmically catchy verse and earworm chorus, which almost hides the fact that the song--about the would-be bride seeing a girl everywhere she goes--repeats the album’s most common problem: It’s unclear just what the song is about, and how it relates to the core concept.

Even at its moodiest, this is a deliriously inventive and often whimsical dance record.

His deeply felt meditations on matters of the heart and the soul are matched by the meticulously detailed, gorgeously rendered music that surrounds them.

While her sonic template, modern and spare yet lush, works wonders for “Don’t Go,” it’s otherwise isolated moments — the discordant saxophone blats pulling her toward St. Vincent in the danceable and lopsided “Waste”; the chewy synth bassline of “Crazy [Expletive]”; and the line “When you left me, I was ready for you to leave” in “Walls”--that suggest an excitement the songs can’t quite sustain.

Conscious may be polished to a high gloss, but it lacks the personality and emotion that made Broods’ debut such a shadowy revelation.

This is soul music with personality and real instruments; best of all, it’s unflinchingly honest.

The Mountain Will Fall utilizes a wealth of live performances and ingenious programming to create an album that’s funky, futuristic, and thrilling for new fans and old heads alike.

The earworm riff of java paean “Kafe Mania!”; the huffy boom-bap funk of “Life Is Suffering”; the TV-metal urgency of “Learning to Apologize Effectively,” urgent synths nicked from Bon Jovi; the claustrophobic electropop revamp of “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire”; the power-pop jangle of “Plastic Thrills”--it’s all irresistible.

[An] unapologetically polished album, which reframes their music without sapping their identity.

This fourth release from the Texas native is in a singer-songwriter mode; four songs feature just Jarosz and acoustic guitar, while others are tautly arranged progressive-folk gems with backup from guitarists Luke Reynolds (Guster) and Jedd Hughes (Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell).

Her songs have the sophistication and idiosyncracy of a singular talent. At times (“Show Me Love”) the ethereal arranging meanders, but mostly (“Bread,” “Kiss My Feet,” “Angel”) it has the authority of a signature.

Co-producer Jacknife Lee overcooks tracks, alternately adding too much sugar and bluster (“Bitter Salt”). Throughout, it seems Bugg’s ambition has clouded his creative judgment.

The album is simultaneously beautiful and shocking, its razor-sharp originality infinitely relatable.

Here, it’s less about what Y.G. does than how he does it; digging deeper into vintage G-funk flavors with a blend of personal, party, and political tracks, the young Compton rapper takes a sizzling step forward.

Echoey wall-of-sound sheen, soft-rock flourishes, guitar bombast, and omnipresent programming predominate. Presumably the intention was to create a sonic mood to match the album’s thematic concerns, but too often the execution leaves the songs sounding plodding and inert.

If you’re looking for alternatives to mainstream country, Clark is still providing one with Big Day in a Small Town--you just have to keep listening beyond the first two tracks to find it.

Re-examining its signature brat rock through an industrial prism, Garbage forges something more haunting and honest.

Colvin & Earle is rough, just this side of ramshackle, and thoroughly charming.

The band’s glossiest record yet seems geared toward merging its brassy, retro-glam aesthetic with a commercial-minded agenda. For a time it succeeds, meting out earworms with take-no-prisoners rapidity. Eventually, though, Fitz’s mainstream pop ambitions outpace its once-emblematic sense of funk (and fun).

The album that resulted is Simon’s richest, most instantly appealing collection since “Graceland.”

The maturation of the Kills continues with this taut, emotionally complex fifth record, which deepens their sound even if it doesn’t break new sonic ground.

“Highway Anxiety” shimmers with melancholy and evocative locomotive persistence; “Gone Clear” travels from Tyler’s intricate fingerpicking to a barrage of chiming bells and back again.

The Quins’ voices give songs like “Faint of Heart” extra dramatic heft, while adding anxious shades to the steely-eyed façade of “Hang on to the Night.”

Finally, the Strokes sound as if they’re having fun again.

While satisfying, the record could have used a bit more of that invention and risk.

The group’s power has always come from its Spice Girls-like ability to form a massive unit of self-actualization, and the peppy 7/27 has no shortage of that, both lyrically and musically.

Kidsticks swings back toward electronica; the problem is that it’s poorly done. It’s the first time she’s written on synthesizers, not guitars, and frankly it’s a mess.

A sophomore record that does Catfish few favors in exposing its limited lyrical scope (mostly concerned with lost lovers) and tedious reliance on shoehorned guitar solos and uniform drum lines.

The middle of the album is a problem, especially the Hiatus Kaiyote number, “Little Church,” a strange, bloodless clunker that drags down the Mvula (“Silence Is the Way”) and KING (“Song for Selim”) features that follow. The Badu track, the electro-bossa nova “Maiysha (So Long),” is fine but familiar. Miles Davis concept aside, Glasper’s still in “Black Radio” mode. It works, but it needs a little dirt, and probably a new challenge.

After an all-covers debut, this second album is a major step forward.

The new album is as fiery and romantic as a youthful tryst, a rock ’n’ roll experience unsullied by the inevitable passage of time and unspoiled by the burden of experience.

The results are mixed. Half of I Still Do falls into the easy-listening, cruise-control blues of Clapton’s later career, a long way from his fiery days with Cream and Derek and the Dominos.

The few gold nuggets too easily get lost among the many chunks of lead.

The album glides through styles, maintaining a slightly menacing yet sexed-up vibe throughout.

Whereas second LP “You’re Gonna Miss It All” delivered Facebook rants from a self-pitying underclassman, Holy Ghost is the hard-charging graduation speech.

Trainor continues the self-esteem party on Thank You, and the cracks that were already forming on her debut grow a little wider and deeper on its followup.

Six years later she returns healed, exuding hope and whimsy on her often wondrous new record.

The album’s title refers to the feeling of never being quite done, but “99.9%” oozes poise and confidence.

Unlike the haunting ambiguities that comprised the Johnsons oeuvre, Anohni doesn’t traffic in subtlety here; boldface subversiveness makes Hopelessness lethal.

Again Porter delivers passion and craft in abundance, owing to the songwriting, the acoustic-jazz arrangements (by producer Kamau Kenyatta and pianist Chip Crawford), and his corduroy-warm baritone, pliant and powerful.

As for “Sweet Reward,” a marvelous moment-in-time narrative sketch delivered by the murmur of Doe’s voice, and “Rising Sun,” where a reverberating guitar line gives way to a singer sounding like a Sonoran Sinatra amid the song’s slow, swirling rise and fall--at moments such as those, Doe simply is making some of the most striking music of his career.

A bright, challenging album.

Simply stated, here’s the experimental-listening event of the year.

With nearly 20 production collaborators, the record has plenty of invention--and way too many cooks in the kitchen. ... [A] busy, unfocused record.

The short, melodically complex songs cohere into an often stunningly moving suite.

Save for the playfully tempestuous “Th’Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame (Sonnet 129),” they’re serviceable and, like the spoken-word reprises by the likes of William Shatner and Siân Phillips, take few risks.

Smith creates wide-eyed compositions with textures that cascade over one another, capturing the vast celestial wonder of synthesized sound.

His first release in six years is filled with downtempo, darkly intimate tracks--eight of the 12 are ballads.

The album generously includes 16 new songs, so if you’re a fan you’ll find enough to like. But finding a new lyricist should be a higher calling.

The Hope Six Demolition Project might derive its title from a Housing and Urban Development program designed to “transform public housing,” but the bleak picture Harvey portrays on this stunning album gives that title a second, and more ominous, meaning.

With producer Shane Fontayne adding dimension and tension to the music, Nash’s first album of originals in 14 years is marked by hope and possibility shadowed by loss.

“Welcome to Earth (Pollywog)” starts the record with a foreboding sound that moves to stately piano and tremolo strings before exploding into soul. Nirvana’s “In Bloom” is turned into sweeping countrypolitan; “All Around You” offers killer country soul. “A Sailor’s Guide” confirms that Simpson isn’t content to stand in the same place for very long.

Whatever the particular style, Little Windows is a series of sparkling pop gems; clocking in at just under 26 minutes, the only thing the record leaves you wanting is more of it.

Highlights album come when the songs stretch beyond Hawthorne’s solo comfort zone.

Gore brings together light and dark, airy and grinding, in a way that makes these seemingly disparate qualities seem like natural allies.

The result is less serious than his last release--the kind of thing we might hear back from aliens in response to radio waves that escaped our stratosphere long ago.

Distortland, the band’s ninth album, sounds downright insular: fully formed, in its way, but nearly impenetrable.

Lukas Graham connects best when relying on pop smarts, without reaching for grand epiphanies.

The band’s masterwork to date, IV delivers a listening experience as thrill-packed and invigorating as the loftiest comparisons you can throw at it.

It makes for an often remarkable synthesis of the visceral and ethereal. The nine streamlined, artfully structured songs are patient and less dense, frequently relying on the separation between beats for power.

What drives Super, though, is the duo’s overarching vision, which helps the album flow together like a night at a club: one that Pet Shop Boys exist inside and above, simultaneously.

The music ranges from Beach Boys baroque-pop to the awkward hip-hop flow of “Thank God for Girls” when not reiterating rote (if pleasant) Weezer crunch-pop anthems.

Patch the Sky might not be saying much, but Mould’s putting his all into saying it.

For those on the lookout for alternatives to what currently passes for country music, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter is the latest reason to cheer.

Regardless of the constantly evolving mood, RJ finds new ways to surprise and engage your ears.

Zayn sounds tentative when he’s venturing into lyrical territory beyond his former band’s purview, which compromises the album’s clearly wide-ranging aims.

An unusual but rewarding album.

[A] solid, surprising set.

This confident new album is among his finest works, a terrific showcase for his finely honed, deeply humane songcraft.

It’s a stark, sinewy affair that foregrounds the punk-rock lifer’s voice, a finely weathered instrument, all knowing vibrato and bemused sneering.

Divorcing the music from its maker and inspirations can pose varying degrees of difficulty. But listeners who can imprint themselves on these songs will find much to enjoy in Stefani’s Truth.

It all sounds compellingly real; guitarist Adam Dutkiewicz adds brain-splitting riffs, and the rhythm section of Mike D’Antonio and Justin Foley locks it down hard.

There’s a tremendous amount of preserved intimacy on these unearthed first studio recordings.

Overall, in fact, the music on Good Grief isn’t as expansive as was “Wildewoman.” But it still comes across that way thanks to Wolfe and Laessig, who infuse their performances with a joy that’s almost unfettered, even when wallowing in pits of sorrow.

Eraser Stargazer is exactly the sort of album that pushes a local scene to be greater.

Through 13 glorious tracks spanning back-porch hootenanny sessions to countrypolitan elegance, Lynn proves that at 83 she’s a national treasure who still exudes the earthiness of her rural roots.

In a way, it’s all as tightly woven as his Grammy-winning work, even if none of these cuts fit that album’s meticulous narrative.