40 years after his debut, the curly-haired songwriter continues to play to his strength: three-minute social commentaries that might sound bitter if they weren't so funny.

It is, first and foremost, a guitar album, full of extended compositions that display the inventive, intricate embroideries of his fingerpicking.

That ghostly sensibility dances perilously close to dirgelike in a few of the album's more droning, melancholic, and low-energy corners; but the band never lets the mood slacken beyond grasp, always offering a sharp vocal edge or mesmerizing interlude to keep listeners leaning in.

With "Heaven Is Whenever,'' it seems unlikely that the Hold Steady will again change how we talk about modern rock, but when a band has already framed the parameters of the debate, it doesn't necessarily have to.

The album is dense and intriguing, neither a straightforward rock record nor so wildly experimental as to be inaccessible.

Put some headphones on, find a good window to stare out of, and let time stretch to the horizon; A Deeper Understanding will reward your patience.

Even better is “Round and Round,’’ with its jagged interludes and echoes of Arthur Russell. A metaphor for life as a merry-go-round, the song eventually comes into focus and ramps up into a wild roller-coaster ride. The same could be said of this exhilarating album.

With nothing particularly unusual to recommend, non-fans will miss out on yet another in a long string of superb collections.

This isn't new territory for Ghostface, and it's something of a marvel that his signature narrative style still feels fresh on his seventh solo outing.

With a musician as important as Bob Dylan, our appetite for fresh material and new insights is as deep as the artist's song trove, and Tell Tale Signs, the eighth installment of the songwriter's Bootleg Series, is a feast for casual fans and Dylanologists alike.

On first listen, the disc seems unassuming because of its subtlety, but slowly it reveals its layers. The tracks about love, devotion, and transcendence are refreshingly honest and (mercifully) lacking in leering lasciviousness.

Building on a foundation of shameless proto-gangsta synths and witty but under-enunciated lyrics, Fujiya & Miyagi makes party music that is fresh but not (that) foolish.

The results are coolly sophisticated, an unfussy, mostly instrumental set of slink-and-slide joints shot through with a harmonic imagination that turns even a traditional hymn into an after-hours swing.

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

This is also his first studio album in 13 years. But, man, he hasn’t lost it, and he wants us to know it.

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

Like much of this mini album, “Monument” is not thumping music for the club; it’s the soundtrack for when you get home.

Harcourt's fourth album certifies his musical genius with songs that are catchy enough to be plastered all over the summer airwaves, bathing us in sweeping melodies and infectious beats.

These gauzy songs are an ideal fit for Gainsbourg's dreamy, impossibly light voice.

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

Each song’s darker instrumental aesthetics balance the fun with an undercurrent of rumination.

Alt-rock guru Steve Albini is back at the helm and once again proves the ideal midwife for the Breeders' fiercely independent vision.

Composition is just part of what makes pop music work, and the best tracks on In Conflict succeed on the arrangements and production as well as the writing.

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.

Mascis doesn’t just go unplugged here; he pulls back the curtain to reveal a troubadour at his most vulnerable.

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

This delightful album revisits artists that Miller recorded during cruises in 2014 and 2015.

Cue up any of the songs on Nashville and you hear the sound of Stuart's mission being fulfilled.

With these songs, Bains surely wants to make you think; he surely will make you shake.

Common Ground has the pluck and swing of a porch pickin’ party, with the Alvins swapping licks and vocals on a number of Broonzy classics.

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

Nearly every song on the new Courtney Barnett album has something to recommend it--a familiar melody that takes distinctive turns, a lyric that grows deeper with each listening, strong backup from a band led by Barnett’s rough-hewn guitar riffs.

LaMontagne is a complex man who won't talk about his personal life, so we don't know how many of these songs are autobiographical, but they touch upon universal themes and they touch deeply.

They take prime garage rock and global beats from past works and flirtatiously commingle them to craft a gossamer rock - steady creation.

The production throughout is more soulful and seamless than on previous efforts.

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.

An album that’s incredibly enjoyable even as Jepsen stands on the precipice of heartache.

Throughout, Harte infuses much of the record with the chopped-up high-hat propulsion of DFA-style dance-floor abandon that makes studying your history a lot of fun.

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

Ripatti's restraint is still his strongest suit; he's not so much leading the way as lighting it.

Brad Mehldau is back in his comfort zone with Live in Marciac, a solo set of two CDs and one DVD recorded at the jazz festival in France.

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

Thomas Mars sings with a casual amiability so hard to resist that it helps carry Phoenix through some of the less immediate material on the album's back half.

She & Him, the duo of Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward, cover a lot of ground here, rendering each song with warmth and radiance.

The Bravery’s adrenaline-rush, retro-new-wave/punk rock is back with a flourish. The album is a sonic high, but a mixed bag of lyrical ups and downs.

Sixteen radio-length tracks that include a gorgeous, ethereal version of "Across the Universe" whose somber violin and country twang could bring on tears; a honky-tonk take of "Revolution" that makes you want to square-dance; a sleepy, dreamy redo of "Imagine" in which Frisell takes considerable care to pick just the right notes not only when he plays the melody but when he improvises; a folk cover of "Julia" that contains not an ounce of cynicism; and an almost ambient sketch of "Give Peace a Chance" that dares the listener to find the original melody buried deep within.

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

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.

The record is further evidence of the quartet's easy chemistry. The band is both bold and geeky, creating a signature sound that typically triggers strong reaction; one man's progressive is another's pretentious.

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.

Some tunes were “inexplicably excised from the original multitrack master,’’ the liner notes say, but the bottom line is that this is a potent release full of Jimi’s improvisatory guitar mania.

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

Few can match the Weakerthans's lyrical ingenuity without succumbing to earnest excess, and the result is an at times wry, at times touching exploration of life's overlooked corners.

With its deft blend of nostalgia and futurism, Transit Transit is not only a fantastic delivery on a forgotten promise, it's the best reason so far to be optimistic about 2016.

If there’s an elegant groove hiding in a lost soul record, Oddisee’s found it, from the horns of “Contradiction’s Maze” to the bells of “Counter-Clockwise.”

These are high-flying songs in search of a place to land, and the warmth and seeming innocence of Pfunder's voice combined with all the familiar electro-disco trappings make this a record worth hearing for anyone not ready to let the past go without a fight.

Distortion isn't an easy listen, with its strict, difficult palette. But it's an endlessly fascinating and provocative one.

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.

Here Lies Love is a sumptuous two-disc feast of harmony, melody, and Latin-accented grooves that the Studio 54-loving Marcos herself would likely appreciate.

His most recent albums, however, have been uniformly excellent, and that includes Tempest.

On a rock solid and expansive set of songs, Lambert mixes backbeats, production styles, fuzzed-out vocals, slinky slide guitars, and other offbeat elements into a cohesive whole.

It's taken nine years and two tries, but Dido has finally given her debut the follow-up it deserves.

On A Woman, A Man Walked By, they create a world both beautiful and depraved, an unhinged record heavy on heartache and bristling with aggression.

Rather than indulging the impulse to ride grooves this mellow off into the sunset, the band keeps one eye trained on the meter (most songs clock in under three minutes), while the other drifts off into the clouds, like on the ’60s-era antiwar singalong 'People Say.'

Lloyd complements Williams’s plaintive growl with his own tenor saxophone cries, in some cases the obbligatos becoming an ongoing commentary. ... “Blues for Langston and LaRue” shows off Lloyd’s buoyant flute work. The Lloyd/Frisell duet on Thelonious Monk’s “Monk’s Mood” is capacious and endearing. And the album closer, Jim Hendrix’s “Angel”--with just the trio of Williams, Frisell, and Lloyd--is a spare and apt benediction, dispelling darkness with the faith of art.

An album as lean, mean, and gritty as the cover image of someone behind a steering wheel, peering into the rearview mirror with windshield wipers in motion.

As usual that pep is paired with tunes that seep into your brain with the stealth of Mann's own beguiling murmur and lyrics that range from poetic to narrative.

A forthright album of pop songs that make it clear she is ready to be honest and even vulnerable in her music.

These 14 songs are sun-kissed with playful psychedelia and a sense of stardust.

The mellifluous melodies and tasteful instrumentation fall in line with the adult-contemporary pop of previous albums such as "Ingenue" and "Invincible Summer."

Worthy is another finely curated set of songs.

Acoustic ballads, space-rock forays, and splashes of glam bubble up before it’s all over, while a pervasive darkness holds the album together. Happily, it seems BRMC’s odyssey continues.

The record is the most unvarnished rock music Palmer's ever created, leaning heavily on '80s goth and the oddball New Wave of folks like Lene Lovich.

Unlike previous efforts at stylistic hop-scotch, "Phantom Punch" is Lerche's most comfortable album since "Faces Down."

Call it emo for adults.

On its fifth record, the group creates a rich, fully realized work.

Throughout this unfussy, beautifully sung set, the 23-year-old Mario taps into the tenderness of early Maxwell.

Forget the salacious material; you come away from Untitled marveling at his craftsmanship. When he’s on his game, no modern R&B artist even approaches the Chicago veteran (here working with various producers).

The knock on them has always been that their albums surround great singles with skip-able filler, but this time out they’ve put together a relatively tight, cohesive record. It’s not without its flaws, but Wonderful Wonderful still might be the best Killers album yet.

On his first album of new material in eight years, the Michigan rocker is in good form.

It's fantastic.

The group deftly submits to the forms and tropes of electro-pop and vintage EBM.

The 12 tracks blend essentially everything STP ever did well without sounding like a stitched-together version of past hits.

Gamel melds past and future, resulting in a present joyfully reconfigured.

The brisk 38-minute, 10-song collection brims with sideways guitar pluck and twang, warbly keys, and earwormy tunes that demand immediate repeated listens.

Jones furthers the exploratory path he's committed himself to, with tranquil yet compelling acoustic steel-string guitar compositions built from thoughtful open tunings ("Of Its Own Kind"), expressive bottleneck guitar ("Even to Win Is to Fail"), and even banjo ("The Great Swamp Way Rout").

'Cold Cold Heaven,' the 15th--and last and best--track on "Mentor Tormentor is the kind of cozy hymnal Earlimart does best: a wash of strings, the major-key wail.

She's 18--wide-eyed, naive, hopeful--and that's how she sounds on Fearless, her superb new album.

The rock quintet wastes no time reestablishing its high-energy bona fides on Teeth Dreams.

Singer-songwriter Josh Ritter is moving fast on his eighth album, but he never puts a foot wrong. The 12-track collection, produced by Trina Shoemaker over two weeks in New Orleans, is positively giddy with wordplay.

On Proof of Youth, the samples are made-to-order--Chuck D chips in on 'Flashlight Fight,' and Brazilian artist Marina Vello shows up on the riotous 'Titanic Vandalism.' Precious else has changed.

A highly listenable rebirth.

Far from a compilation of rough mixes and rejects, any of the songs on this disc -- as spare in sound as they are elegant in form -- would have fit beautifully on a mid-'90s Elliott Smith album.

Ten-plus years and four records later, their raw, post-punk-colored-funk attack still sounds as compelling as it did at the start.

Riding in on a humid wave of 1990s guitar rock and ’60s girl-group harmonies, the debut from the new project of Frankie Rose and Drew Citron is pure ear candy.

Throughout "Back to Me,'' Fantasia appears to be an artist reborn - or maybe just in love.

Collapse Into Now builds on Accelerate for something less primal, but much more insightful, varied, and, frankly, pleasurable. It's hard to remember the last time R.E.M. seemed so at ease and yet still so vital.

Co-produced by Plant and critically revered singer-songwriter-guitarist Buddy Miller, Joy is a mostly covers grab bag stitched together by Plant's sweetly urgent croon and finely crafted layers of sepia-toned instrumentation and vocals.