On “Jackal,” O’Brien’s digressive songwriting was held together by a unifying palette. Here, he’s all over the place.

It’s comfortable, familiar, expected, and joyful.

Easy listening this is not, but Shaking the Habitual is at least bold and brash, the work of a band hungry to explore strange sonic textures.

Per usual, the writing is sharp and the guitar playing impeccable. Paisley cooks through honky-tonk, country swing, the blues, rockabilly, and weepy ballads with assured command.

Despite two potent blasts, “Gunwalk” and “No Worries,” the disc is both numbingly haphazard and inconsequential.

At least seven of the 10 tracks score immediately.

If you’ve made your peace with his artistry, the rewards are considerable.

You hear him at the peak of his powers on the title track, whose acoustic soul reels in the band and lets Bradley tell his story, one wounded sentiment at a time.

New elements like keyboards and lap steel guitar are deployed carefully, filling out the sound rather than leading it astray.

The number of guests (including Matthew Dear, Apparat, and Caribou’s Dan Snaith) and the songs’ lengths, depths, and varying textures make it easy to get spun.

The album may be based on a true story, but it doesn’t offer enough personal touches to distinguish it from a lot of other tales coming out of Nashville.

The Strokes’ hallmarks--those lean melodies, that steely interplay among guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. and bassist Nikolai Fraiture, the urgency of Julian Casablancas’s vocals--are largely absent on Comedown Machine, their fifth studio album. In their place is a looseness that’s refreshing enough, until you realize these guys are perhaps running short on ideas.

Drummer Jean-Paul Gaster keeps things going at a crisp clip while managing subtle shadings. The drummer’s tight control and bassist Dan Maines’s aggressive low-end let guitarist Tim Sult go nuts.

Phosphorescent’s Muchacho is the kind of album that will take two listens to decide you hate it and then another three to realize how much you actually love it.

The Invisible Way is as spare, heavy, and lovely as anything Low’s ever done, but it feels essential; there’s an extra beauty to the bleakness of these songs.

Decade-long hiatus or no decade-long hiatus, Bloodsports finds Suede in exactly its element.

Younge rarely puts a note wrong in his arrangements; his stripped-down approach echoes the Delfonics’ influence on artists like RZA and El Michels Affair without sounding derivative.

For all its detours, this is a record intoxicated by its own grooves--silken, sexy, a little aimless, and a lot of fun.

The Next Day offers many sides of a multifaceted artist and almost all of them mesmerizing, as the songs grow richer with each listen.

The best way to enjoy What About Now is to not listen too closely, ignore the clumsy lyrics (“I feel just like Picasso, and you’re my masterpiece”), and ignore that it’s watered down U2 flirting with pop-country.

As personal as it feels, The Beast in Its Tracks, like the great breakup records before it (Beck’s “Sea Change” comes to mind), is universal in its scope.

The Hendrix estate, along with Newton-based archivist John McDermott and producer Eddie Kramer, have done themselves proud here.

The debut from the once-anonymous LA duo of Rhye--Danish electro-soul producer Robin Hannibal and Canadian vocalist-producer Mike Milosh--floats with ease on this wave [of R&B experiments].

As the age-old debate of what constitutes country music continues in some quarters, Son Volt leader Jay Farrar quietly, and compellingly, makes a case for the classic sounds on the beguiling Honky Tonk.

[A] rich, dark collection of songs.

Sally Shapiro has beguiled fans at the intersection of electronic dance music and twee indie-pop with its near-perfect time capsules of ’80s synth-pop. The format hasn’t strayed much on this third full-length album, although the landscape has.

The Messenger, his second solo album, is a bracing reminder of his talents as a sonic architect.

AMOK is heady dance music, in love with its jittery rhythms but never content to give over to them completely.

This sensual song suite about the ephemeral nature of love and what it takes to sustain happiness should end up among this year’s finest efforts.

With cuts like the melodically nifty “Taking Off” and the high-impact jangle-and-scree “Careless,” Beach Fossils find the right balance often enough.

Those first drawn in by the Stax/Warp hybrid he offered on 2005’s “Multiply” will find the energy of this effort familiar, but he’s added a splash of New Jack, and synth trimmings from ’80s freestyle.

Sometimes his baritone carries lyrics that are blunt and tart, and others opaque and blurry, but never lacking bite.

It works better in theory than in practice.

This album was written collaboratively with the entire band’s input, so there’s a lot of ground covered on these 15 songs, and plenty of room to get lost.

An “anything goes” approach to recording, which included opening up to let his bandmates collaborate on the songwriting, pays off in this captivating collection.

Lost Animal is the project of Australian musician Jarrod Quarrell, whose hypnotic songs sound utterly suspended in time and free of genre.

Unlike their previous overdubbed recordings, the album has the nicely ramshackle clomp of a live band, and Dawn loosens up accordingly.

He sounds completely adrift here, struggling to articulate vulnerability or trying to figure out relationships. More problematic, he seems to have cherry-picked beats off a thrift store rack.

While the sound of mbv is reassuringly familiar--openers “she found now” and “only tomorrow” tread melodic paths that seem strangely familiar even as they wander--its newness is remarkable.

The album continues in the vein of longtime Groban producer David Foster’s Olympic-ceremony pop: panoramic in scope, the better for Groban’s clear, tremulous tenor to stand on mountains and call out vague blandishments.

Kristofferson’s voice, which is front and center and unvarnished, is something to behold here: craggy but beautiful and forged with wisdom that comes to a lion in winter.

While there is a handful of tracks that will pass airplay muster--the inane but catchy “Truck Yeah,” the breezy Swift and Keith Urban-assisted “Highway Don’t Care”--it’s more interesting when McGraw goes either a little sideways or steps back into contemplative mode.

Their charms are distinctly vintage here, from pop standards to country tearjerkers to 1970s funk.

The songs are less oblique than their last couple of albums, almost to a fault.... But their lyrical theme of being embattled with themselves remains.

The album is a beguiling mix of acoustic and electric blues, with harmonica legend Musselwhite weaving in and out like a roadhouse virtuoso.

He may offer less of an alternative than he once did, but that old-school concern and a wider sonic palette keep Allan just this side of the mainstream.

At first it sounds like scratchy old vinyl, but actually it's the crackle of fire that leads off the warm and sumptuous new album from Brooklyn's Widowspeak.

Bad Religion shaves its anti-establishment messages down to bare essentials and sounds practically feral.

Despite the experimentation, most of the album sounds as brittle as a demo.

What sets this collection of doo-wop and early rock era tunes apart from the jaded pack is Neville's peerless voice and crystal clear passion for the material.

Lysandre, his solo debut, is a slip of an album, 11 songs under 30 minutes, and it's a fascinating curveball.

Just about every note and lyric on Erin McKeown's Manifestra is a step away from the norm. Yet the songs are so beguiling you can't help but follow.

Fade isn't a dramatic reinvention, or even necessarily any progression at all, just Yo La Tengo not needing to be anyone else.

While each movement works on its own, Elements is best experienced in one long pass.

Harlem's A$AP Rocky finally delivers his long delayed major label debut, and while it builds on his mixtape legacy and emphasizes his strengths as an inventive stylist, it also amplifies his flaws.

Sometimes things sound more Jimmy ("I Lost My Job of Loving You"), sometimes more Buddy ("It Hurts Me," a searing ballad written by Miller's wife, Julie), but as with every good duets record, their combined voices have produced something greater than the sum of its parts.

The Boston-accented mash-up of Irish folk and punk is still infectious.

This isn't pop music in her sister's obvious, melismatic, and melodramatic mold; rather it's pop music for people who didn't know they were looking for pop music.

Berberian Sound Studio is like a notebook filled with a lost love's handwriting.

It's an acquired taste, but is undeniably calming with its softly vibrating, reverb-rich piano and synth improvisations, enhanced by exotic Moog guitar from Leo Abrahams and treated violin-viola textures from Neil Catchpole.

This is among his most overtly jazz-tinged work, produced by Morrison and recorded in his native Belfast.

The sophomore LP from Virginia dream-pop project Wild Nothing, bandleader Jack Tatum at times seems fixated on darkness. But that doesn't stop the songs from glistening with a melancholy polish.

He's less dexterous and creative on this interminable 17-song, 73-minute disc as he indulges in all of rap's worst impulses.

Sounds like Bruno Mars is trying to rough up his image a bit on his strong, if sometimes oddly lyrically aggressive, second album.

Green Day still sounds best when it's confused, angry, and playing with abandon.

Big Boi goes a long way in carving out an individual identity while still waving the Outkast flag.

Grace/Confusion goes above and beyond the call of pop, and signals grander adventures to come.

The songs are uniformly good and produced with restraint to allow the singer room to breathe life into the first-person narratives. Unfortunately, there are two requisite MC cameos, which threaten to sink strong songs.

Ben Bridwell's voice remains a beguiling instrument in both high and low registers, and there are moments of stark beauty.

It's not just that it's larded with harsh dissonance; the compositions, arrangements, poesy, and performances come at the listener in discrete shards.

Too many cooks in the kitchen notwithstanding, it amounts to 12 songs here with some 40 perfectly crafted hooks.

While it's naive to think PE will ever have the same impact it did back then, there's still too many strong moments on Evil Empire to dismiss it.

While the album is uniformly sleek and upbeat, a few tunes hew too closely to the generic template; but as boy bands go, fans--and their wary parents--could do much worse.

There's nothing bad about these 13 tracks, but nothing remarkable either.

The results might qualify Live From Alabama as something more than a way station between Isbell's last studio record and his next one.

Keys has rarely ever sounded so at ease, so downright sensual, as she does as her latest.

The result? Another record--and a good one--very much like the records Parker has been making for the past decade.

Phillips may be an artist of just a few ideas, but he believes in them. And he's not afraid to use them over and over.

Throughout the album, Rock, who clearly understands his vocal limitations, employs some dynamite backup singers who enliven, fill out, and otherwise beautify their surroundings nicely.

Ultimately, Pitbull sounds like a slave to the beat, while rhymes become an afterthought.

Even the club bangers ("Phresh Out the Runway" and "Numb," featuring Eminem) are heavy with bass that rumbles more in your chest instead of rattling your feet. Ballads work well for Rihanna, and this album has two of her finest.

The latest edition stays true to the blueprint, enlisting a broad swath of artists of varying degrees of fame and genre.

Thanks, in part, to Sudbury native and co-mixer Daniel Lopatin (lately more well known as vibe-conjuring electronic artist Oneohtrix Point Never), the sound of Free Reign is both fantastically new and classic Clinic.

There are missteps, including needless Auto-tune and a few of what sound like Rihanna or Katy Perry leftovers. And there are several tracks that sound mindlessly repetitive as sedentary listening experiences but will likely improve with the addition of a dancefloor.

The result is another engaging, club-inspired nightmare. This one, though, doesn't ever jolt you awake.

Twenty years on from "Kerplunk," Green Day couldn't possibly replicate its early urgency, but the band can manage to keep its sound nicely unhinged.

The album is consistent in its Eastern-minded psych-pop, and aside from a few flourishes to distinguish the "bands"--goth synths in "Receive," a song supposedly by a German architect band called Taohaus, for example--it sounds like the effort of a single group.

Aerosmith returning to the sound and fury of its '70s halcyon days is a welcome time warp.

Gone are the club-friendly gloss and beats, replaced by live, mostly acoustic instrumentation (including orchestra) that creates a palpable sense of physical space. A few songs thrive in new settings.

Ultimately, it's the love songs that make the biggest impression on this nicely balanced disc.

Stott doesn't just produce these tracks, he haunts their halls.

Too often bloat tempers the brilliance.

Magic Moment easily meets the primary requirement of any Christmas album, which is that it's a worthwhile addition to his fans' collections.

The Everything But the Girl gal follows up her superb 2010 solo album, "Love and Its Opposite," with this gently lovely seasonal release.

Hip-hop's bountiful fall continues with this taut, often terrific, major label bow from the Philly native.

Blak and Blu pays off; it's not a perfect album, but it is bold and exciting.

The Compton MC's long-awaited major label debut is a breakthrough, as he both resurrects and reinvents West Coast hip-hop.

It's not Bob Dylan, but the songwriting is leagues ahead of where Swift was as recently as two years ago.