The album has a movie score feel, but this time every track is its own short film.

Occasionally the band’s vision pays off here.

While a few of the experiments feel a little arid, the best songs balance menace and buoyancy, melody and groove.

He continues to deliver enough melodic flair to support his earnest reflections on life’s little epiphanies.

She’s the star of her own movie--and that’s very much what this album feels like--and she’s in charge.

Unfortunately, Tesfaye can veer toward the portentous with his youthful, conflicted lyrical vision, which often confuses sex with love.

So much of Feels Like Home indeed feels natural. When it doesn’t, it’s tough going, as on the obvious bids for radio play like formulaic first single “Easy” and “We Oughta Be Drinkin’.”

2 Chainz’s fixations are the same: money, women , clothes, drugs, and lots of trap beats. Still, things come off more polished.

Ultimately, though, the album is weighed down by verbose lyrics and excess ambition.

There is nothing hesitant about this collection of songs which manage to be fraught with heated emotions while simultaneously composed of chilly, fidgety grooves.

This is the unusual album that’s beautiful and ugly, tender but tough, and that much more rewarding because of it.

Maybe too spirited at times; without the madcap intensity of Hanna’s best work, too much is simply frenzied.

All of Legend’s strengths are present: keen melodies, smooth vocal understatement, and artful arrangements.

Although it meanders in places, the mood remains high-spirited.

Arriving toward the end of summer, Another Self Portrait feels perfectly suited for the type of reflection that accompanies autumn.

It’s the work of a talented rapper who takes palpable pleasure in the possibilities of language.

This is the album for people who used to be Franz Ferdinand fans but strayed. It gives them a reason to come back.

Nobody else is doing what Holter is doing, and it’s well worth following her lead.

Ferg reaches beyond the boroughs and borrows from various regional musical and linguistic influences to create a set of songs laced with introspection, menace, and smartly conceived verses.

While they may stretch out for improvisational flights in concert, Made Up Mind is concise and compelling.

These new songs are so amiable that you wonder where they’re meant to take you. Often the breezy journey--while pleasant enough--leads to dead ends.

This isn’t complicated, just tasty, and performed with wit and expertise.

A few tunes here transcend their formulaic trappings, including the heartfelt “Dirt Road Diary” and the gauzy summer-at-the-beach memories of “Roller Coaster.” But the majority of the record is given over to Party games we’ve heard Bryan--and many others in contemporary country--play before.

As debuts go, this is a marvel by a singer and songwriter who has no desire to fit snugly into one category. Her talent isn’t that easily contained.

The results in no way surpass those towering originals--how could they, when songs such as “Wichita Lineman” and “Galveston” are towering peaks on the map of popular music? These new takes do offer some worthy alternative perspectives.

She jumps around genres like a Bowie-esque chameleon, but this new effort is a staunch improvement from some of her musical wanderlust.

The songs drift between familiar buoys of Echo & the Bunnymen and Simple Minds (with producer Mark Verbos lending more electronic thump than was heard on 2011’s “By the Hedge”), but it’s a tenuous comfort, a listlessness that feels endangered.

The tension that fills The Civil Wars, giv[es] the songs a sense of weight and purpose that wasn’t apparent on their 2011 debut, “Barton Hollow.”

This elegant, elegiac disc is filled with emotionally direct, expressive songs confronting loss and mortality.

The Brit funk-soul band’s first record in six years is a solid, if uneven, effort that marks a reunion with N’Dea Davenport.

The whirring Stars Dance is a confident but not aggressively blatant move to a more grown-up pop playing field.

Bakersfield gives us two current masters paying homage, not through note-for-note reproduction, but by putting their own reverential take on the music of two country music titans.

Whether it’s literally providing oxygen like some kind of romantic scuba mask on “Breathe” or helping get the party started on Euro-disco throbbers like “Permanent Stain,” it is taking care of business.

Moving from urgent dance-pop (“Bad Idea”), to minimalist pillow talk (“Friends to Lovers”), to bassy underground undertows (“Lost and Found”), Body Music is the sound of AlunaGeorge just getting started--and they could go anywhere from here.

Double entendres are commonplace in pop, but here he descends into wink-and-nod juvenilia.

Befitting someone who has worked with artists as varied as Dre, Duncan Sheik, and Linkin Park offshoot Fort Minor, Don’t Look Down suits varied moods.

Drenched with joy in its own noisiness, the album is nonetheless easier listening than some of the group’s earlier work.

Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros finds the band/collective in the less useful act of simply aping a style, in this case the electric praise music of feel-good Christian hippies.

In other words, classic Guy Clark.

It’s a brave account of how you can fall out of love just as easily as you fell in. Like the first blush of a new romance, it is intoxicating.

Pratt’s home-recorded songs are quiet gems cradled in the rudimentary but delicate fingerpicking of her acoustic guitar.

Undoubtedly one of the strangest albums in recent memory.

Nothing Can Hurt Me consists of rejiggered mixes of performances released on the band’s original albums. That makes it unessential, but it somehow reveals more new angles on the power-pop standard bearers’ perfect songs than 2009’s “Keep an Eye on the Sky” box set managed over four discs.

[Producer] Stuart Price coaxes the best out of the Boys here for some of their finest dancefloor work since 1993's limited edition "Relentless."

Despite his place among metal royalty, Anselmo remains a convincing outsider, partially because he doesn’t exclude himself from his own rants.

Despite dipping into hip-hop and reggae, there are footnotes to ’70s pop throughout. That doesn’t diminish the sheer pleasure of the tunes’ playful intentions, but Hawthorne’s DJ crate-digging tendencies seem to be bleeding into his songwriting.

It’s a vastly superior record, drawing you in with its electronic, murky ambience and the impression that these songs are coming to you from a singer submerged in water.

The multi-instrumentalists expertly weave the country flavors of their fiddles, dobros, and banjos into a beguiling folk-pop-singer-songwriter sound that could appeal equally to fans of their main gig and of artists such as Indigo Girls or James Taylor.

There are 19 songs here, and at some point one feels replete, but they are concise--some in the manner of a sketch that leaves options open, others more decisive, like the sharp coastline vista once the morning fog has cleared.

Musically, she remains a sophisticated, confident formalist, but a sense of playfulness or adventure is missing.

On his debut for Sub Pop Records, Gibson comes off as a sound collage artist feverishly darting from one idea to the next.

Since her 2004 smash, “Goodies,” Ciara has had trouble finding the right commercial song and it appears she’s still searching.

This new record is a return to his trademark jazz-and-funk Afro-beat grooves but is solid throughout if you appreciate energetic big-band arrangements, a theatrical backup chorus, and Femi out front wailing from the heart and giving hope to the voiceless.

Both the pleasure and frustration of Lightning Dust’s first two albums derived from how scattershot the songs were. Brooding and despondent one moment, they would suddenly spike in tempo and mood the next. Maybe that’s why Fantasy, the third release from the Vancouver indie-rock duo of Amber Webber and Josh Wells, is so satisfying as a whole

Those expecting Wale to finally take his game to the next level will have to wait as his third record is inconsistent and mostly forgettable.

The album closes masterfully with “Time to Go,” a look at an older musician and the indignities he’s facing as an opening act far from his peak. It is one of several tracks making this an album that every Harry Connick Jr. fan should own.

Sound the Alarm is the sound of summer.

Stelmanis’s voice, as ever, remains the focal point, swooping down hard on notes with a tremor that belies just how sturdy her songs are.

"Dirty Laundry" is brave (and dramatic) stuff. But the track itself, a forgettable slow groove, makes the tune more compelling as confession than music. People should venture further into Talk a Good Game, because a good chunk of the rest of the album--a mix of easy pop, shiny dance tracks, and a dab of retro soul--reflects a better balance of sound and sentiment.

Hopping from house nods to drum-and-bass winks and into spells of bottomlessly deep garage and bass, With Love isn’t so much a trip down memory lane. It’s more like a really wild shortcut.

The flawed set is buoyed by its clear vision and diverse musicality.

The electronic soul band toes the fine line between club cuts and after-hours ballads.

The generic gloom of “Loner” is the only flat spot among the eight songs.

Tomorrow’s Harvest is as strong a return to form as it is stunning an update, with the Scottish duo refining their blend of nostalgic sonics and futuristic sheen.

Few bands are clever enough to make you feel giddy singing a song called “Keep Your Children in a Coma.” Gonson, as usual, is a refreshingly natural singer, bringing heart and soul to songs that would seem to be bereft of such qualities.

While the writing has a tight focus and singer John Baldwin Gourley sounds like he’s whispering his thoughts directly to you, the rest of the record bursts with all manner of sonic color.

It’s the first Eisley album that fails to improve on its predecessor, recapitulating earlier ideas while seemingly in retreat.

The-Dream barely breaks new ground artistically and the set doesn’t approach his finest effort, “Love vs. Money,” but the music is often so seductive it’s easy to ignore a misstep (“New Orleans”) and often distracting auto-tuning.

You’d be hard-pressed to name another songwriter who sounded so fully formed at such a tender age.

With help from a diverse coterie of peers, fans, and friends, Wrote a Song for Everyone offers fun and fresh takes on well-worn tunes.

Love Is Everything is not his strongest release of recent years, with a few too many generic midtempo cuts and stately ballads. But Strait is the type of consistent artist and singer whose marginal cuts are often better than some folks’ best and that is true here, too.

The Moroccan born New Yorker’s long-delayed debut finally arrives, and much of it lands with blunt force without quite demonstrating a fully formed vision.

There’s definitely an epic heft to it, aided by a deep, varied bench of guest talent.

Trouble Will Find Me is the Brooklyn, N.Y., indie-rock band’s sixth and most deft album yet, a haunted and lugubrious meditation on loss and despair.

The crossover “Make It Out This Town” is too obvious a stab at pop psychology and chart topping but that’s a rare misfire. The set is filled with quotable lines and tough but inviting beats.

Produced by Aaron Dessner of the National, the Brooklyn, N.Y., indie rockers who once took Local Natives on the road as the opening act, the album feels like a pronouncement, as if to highlight how much the quartet has grown since its last outing.

Demi sounds like Lovato’s grasping for hits, when she used to sound like she was making music and having fun.

Her return to music is a quiet triumph. For the most part she has flown the Chicks’ country coop for this solo debut, which is a well-curated mostly covers affair.

Now there’s an expansiveness in the music, borne out of a confidence that allows the songs to unfurl rather than rebound like pinballs.

The gentle kisses on Silver are preferable to its contemporary teeth; the thumpy, funky aphasia of “You” harks back to days when Bibio could have been mistaken for a Prefuse 73 knockoff--it just sounds dated.

Over the slack strum of guitar, Spaltro tells a spectral tale that feels like a hazy dream until a violent outburst yanks you elsewhere. That’s precisely where Spaltro likes to keep you: on edge.

The group wisely broadens the musical palette here and goes full-bore pop by adding bigger choruses, alluring sonic textures, and electronic rhythms.

Deschanel comes from the tradition of singers not technically impressive but charismatic enough to cast a spell. Ward’s fretwork is excellent throughout, and it’s nice to hear his voice on a spirited duet of “Baby.”

Golden puts some welcome bite back into the proceedings with a more minimalist approach to production and a more substantive approach to the lyrics, which gives the whole album a crisper, more present feeling.

Little Boots’ hooks rarely fall flat but can’t fully take off, either--they’re chained to the dance floor.

For the album’s driving first half, the messiness is captivating, culminating in “Dream Captain,” reminiscent of T. Rex on “Bang a Gong.” The second half teeters on standard bohemian dissipation, but with a sly and rare self-knowingness.

The disc’s more subtle moments are also the sweeter ones, with just enough whimsy to honor the brand and earn this new crop of self-styled mutants their name.

There are a couple of strutting blues-rock winners, a couple affected synth-rock stinkers, but most of the rest, like the infections “One Girl/One Boy,” flash new-wavy funk moves reminiscent of late Chic, early Prince, and prime Rick James.

The music is patently dirty and rough, but Pop’s subdued moments sound more solo career than Stooge.

Chesney returns to that reflective, often acoustic, place for Life on a Rock and again hits a high-water mark.

Thirty years in, LL still spins taut couplets as often as he licks his lips and delivers them with nimble style.

As on 2009’s “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,” the elite pedigree of these bright, well-mannered Frenchmen shows in their impressive aural plumage.

As intended, there’s a little something for everyone.

Intentions may have been good, but the result smacks of carpetbagging.

It flat-out confounds.

She wanders back to Nashville for her seventh release, Thorn in My Heart, and doesn’t miss a step.

They all take some liberties with the music, but Drake's lonely outcast vibe is well-preserved.

While outstanding songs ("The Catastrophe") stand on their own, this is a song cycle that demands to be absorbed whole.