Add in a clutch of terrific songs that perfectly balance leader Grohl's gift for pairing earworm melodies with both chunky power-pop guitars and thrashy screamers and you've got the most vital, stem-to-stern enjoyable Foo Fighters album in quite some time.

The often elliptical lyrics are both penetrating and hypnotic--the sounds of words are as vital as their meaning.

Ghost Notes unsurprisingly reflects (and reflects on) the band’s maturity, but retains the confidence and playfulness that made it an alt-rock touchstone.

Upping the studio gloss, turning the amps up--way up--and reining in their more twee impulses, the Montreal bloggers' heroes unleash their inner beast, growing by taking a page out of their colleagues' playbooks.

This isn’t a blockbuster--no Drake cameo, no Dr. Dre co-sign--but that’s the beauty of it.

This year's model is not quite as stark or stirring as its predecessor; the emphatic melodic thrusts and vocal bravado of "Whose Hands Are These" and "No Words" will resonate with fans of Diamond's adult-contemporary glory.

Arc Iris puts Adams through the paces, as a composer of mercurial melodies, a nimble singer, and a force to be reckoned with.

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.

What keeps Seventh Tree from lapsing into music for looming by is Goldfrapp and Gregory's inventive instrumentation, which harvests the warmth of electronic pop and marries it organically to acoustic instruments.

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.

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

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

Moore does acoustic music as pastoral, cloudy-weather folk, at turns both bold and irresolute--in fact, it's quite beautiful. Regardless of volume level, however, Demolished Thoughts is no doubt a great guitar album.

[A] backstory is meaningless unless there are songs to back it up, and, like Mellencamp's other recent releases, Better more than walks the walk.

Every song here features cascades of syllables, careful integration of repetition, and narrative momentum.

On Mayhem, her third album, May proves bygone eras are merely sources of inspiration for her spirited take on American music.

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

While accordions, fiddles, acoustic guitars, and human voices are prominent--befitting the songs' back porch country, folk, and blues vibe--canned clap tracks, woozy keyboards, and whirring sound effects sometimes sit uncomfortably alongside them.

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

His richly contoured, slightly raspy voice and the production work of Austin Jenkins and Josh Block (of the scruffy Texan rockers White Denim) give the album heft.

More than just another tapestry of gorgeous guitar-scapes to get lost in, it’s the fullest portrait yet of the human behind that Cheshire Cat grin.

It's very much a smartly produced album that, while adhering to the blueprint for commercial-radio country music, successfully lassos a loose party vibe.

Ripe with propulsive tempos, drum machines, and electronic embellishments, the album sounds like nothing else she's ever done.

Sex & Gasoline is a really a continuation of what Rodney Crowell has been doing since his return to recording in 2001 with the brilliant, semi-autobiography of "The Houston Kid."

Like everything else the band has done since it graduated at the top of New York City’s millennial post-punk class, the songs are sometimes off-putting material, requiring patience.

By reinventing the idea of what a guitar-centric band should sound like from the bottom up, Girl Band has established itself as a much-needed force in rock, and Holding Hands With Jamie is among most exhilarating opening salvos of 2015.

This album is not just a revival, but a complete rejuvenation for John Fogerty. It's easily his best solo record, and what makes it so special is that he embraces his swamp-rocking Creedence Clearwater Revival days.

Sound the Alarm is the sound of summer.

The album was 33 songs a year ago, and it’s 32 now, yet it unfurls cohesively like a film.

This is a set of power pop with hooky choruses and chiming harmonies to go along with splashes of synths mixed in for throwback '80s flavor (especially 'Red Belt'). It makes for a 40-minute blast of smart songcraft.

At a time when guitars serve more often as props than as centerpieces, this album is a wondrous reminder that the simplest palette can be used to paint the most profound results.

DeVotchKa's fifth album, A Mad and Faithful Telling, is an accomplished if meandering variation on its punk-rock mariachi horns and Roma rhythms.

It takes band mastermind Ellen Kempner exactly eight songs in 30 minutes to hook you and leave you wanting to hear more.

Made in the Dark announces its intent early: it's straight electro, with a naked disdain for the minor key.

Wolf Alice balances the difficult combination of seeming guilelessness and utter confidence.

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.

The magnificence here comes when a gang of Jersey punks try something big, while acknowledging how small they are.

Whether The Stand Ins is a sequel to "The Stage Names" album, a companion piece, or a reimagining hardly matters; its pleasures and frustrations are entirely approachable on their own terms.

With electrifying cameos from Chicago’s Vince Staples and song-stealing Dreezy, these vital, relevant tracks remind how good Common can be when he’s focused.

FFS is more than worth the wait: a stylish, outsized romp that balances Franz Ferdinand’s gentlemanly muscle with Sparks’s adoration for the theatrical.

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 album is very much a producer’s piece, all layers, overdubs, and effects. Yet the swirling miasma of sound wholly suits Scott-Heron’s mood, which is angry yet humble, and even more his voice, which is rich and intent as ever.

What is both surprising and remarkable, then, is how unflinchingly direct, bracingly unfiltered, and wholly intimate the new album, which is out today, sounds and feels.

Roll On finds Cale back in vintage form.

This project may be too esoteric for some, but it’s a vital reminder of a history long forgotten.

With her second album, "Where Country Grows,'' Shepherd merges her deep-country style with a contemporary country sound, setting a modern groove to her rural Alabama persona.

Compared to James’s 2013 breakout “No Beginning No End,” this one is bigger, thicker, less sensual but arguably just as sexy.

At the heart of the mood is something that only comes naturally: the plaintive croon of hand-in-glove brotherly harmonies.

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.

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.

A sudden 69 minutes of Drake binging on hypnotic soundscapes, spitting out gleefully hung-over flows.

The middle of Matangi, including the masochistic grind of “Bad Girls” and the hard dancehall influence of “Double Bubble Trouble,” contains uncommonly straightforward songs that would’ve fit easily on Rihanna’s last two albums. M.I.A. doesn’t stint on the bangers, though.

The Rip Tide establishes Beirut's music as not merely an ode to Condon's worldly bag of influences, but an entity that stands on its own.

"Cassadaga"... delivers on the wildly unlikely promise that very young, very gifted artists can grow up without losing their balance.

With her slight but sweet voice, Musgraves has a way with a sing-songy chorus, many of which she co-writes with her frequent collaborators and fellow hitmakers Shane McAnally, Brandy Clark, and Luke Laird.

The band’s grim outlook remains bearable after all these years thanks to strong songcraft.

The result is a stunning reboot.

An unfamiliar listener coming in cold to Yeasayer’s second full-length album probably wouldn’t make it too much further than the opener, “The Children.’’ It’s a choppy, dirge-like downer, the soundtrack to a spooky submarine’s descent into the abyss in cinematic slow motion. But it would be a tragic mistake to abandon ship on this avant-pop Brooklyn trio just before the fun starts.

Luckily for him, his band Destroyer more than makes up for his occasionally strained croak, and "Trouble in Dreams," their follow-up to 2006's acclaimed "Destroyer's Rubies," is an unqualified triumph.

Slow, spare, and offhand, the song ["I Want to Go Back" ] admits to the restlessness that has led the gifted 42-year-old through many unpolished musical shifts, and it epitomizes the decidedly secular, deceptively low-key revelations on Revelation Road.

Edge of the Sun, the band’s new album on Anti-, is no less adventurous, but it feels curated in a way that sets it apart from previous releases.

Clark has penned some classics through the years--'L.A. Freeway' and 'Desperados Waiting for a Train'--but this new album settles for too many dirge tempos and not enough inspiration.

If "We Were Dead . . ." is a little much to take in all at once, the sheer mass of the tunes becomes easier to manage over repeated listens.

The songs are sparer, she’s picked up a scratchy electric guitar, and there’s air around her low, enigmatic voice--like Nico, waking up on the right side of the bed.

The album is solid and consistent, just not as bold as it could have and should have been.

The results are several shades of enchanting as this occasionally delicate, at times warped folk song cycle is suffused with a kind of yearning familiar to anyone who has spent late nights into early mornings contemplating love and life.

Where previous Phosphorescent albums burned like embers, this new album cracks wide open with rolling piano, blasts of horns, twangy electric guitar, and washes of pedal steel. It's a direct album made from and for the road.

A hypnotic collision of cultures and influences, of tradition and innovation.

It sounds like a campfire sing-along at the most evil band camp in the underworld.

Each of those sessions turns out to have a distinct sonic character. The Helsinki tracks have an urgent, constructed intensity about them. ... In contrast, the Paris songs, which make up the bulk of the record, have an organic immediacy that encompasses both the jazzy and the poppy. ... The two collaborative songs offer yet another change-up.

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

The new music is more song-oriented, with a verse-chorus format versus some of the loosely knit, stretched-out mayhem of the past.

The album is assured and seductive, to the point that the despair underpinning so many of the songs isn’t immediately obvious.

Costello gives us Momofuku, titled in tribute to the inventor of the Cup Noodle, and this collection goes down as easy and tasty as its namesake's ingenious snack.

From its suave title to the very first words on it--"So here we are/ It's the end of the night/ Yeah, I had a good time, too/ You know, it doesn't have to end here"--Mayer Hawthorne's amusing new album comes across like a pickup line uttered at last call.

His juxtaposition of dreamy, doors-of-perception tunes and frustrated romantic ones can feel odd, but the musical brilliance keeps the project in focus through to the angst-ridden, Harry Nilsson-like folk of “Get the Point.” Just don’t expect a light listening experience.

Much has been made of Leithauser's voice, which often feels choked, but on You & Me, could one imagine a more perfect instrument?

The eleven songs on The Sea are richer, much less accessible, and marked by a sense of loss and introspection. Bailey Rae moves closer to capturing the vividness of her live shows as she allows her bluesier and rock sides to emerge with hints of jazz in her vocal phrasings.

For all the lyrical power of those songs (and others here), the album’s most affecting moment may be its most plain-spoken: At the set’s end, Lund shares a song about a young niece who died of cancer, “Sunbeam,” that brims with quiet, heartfelt beauty.

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

They're perhaps hastily put together but still fraught with a moment's sincerity that will nonetheless stick with you long after the party is over.

The group has expanded to four pieces for its most accomplished, most musical album yet.

With 10 songs clocking in at just 33 minutes, Modern Guilt feels fleeting, even temporal, and that seems to be the point. It's destined to be an artifact of an age that's rocketing, Beck suspects, toward oblivion.

On her second album, Wainwright occasionally overshoots in trying to write songs that rise to heights of the sound she can produce, but she's rarely boring.

The 40 minutes of Guilty are a storm of shoegaze, noise-rock, and slow-core, surging together into something lovely and lethal.

From the languid, early Bowie dreaminess of “Empire Ants’’ to the chilled-out fuzz-funk of “Stylo,’’ featuring a startling eruptive vocal from the legendary Bobby Womack, Plastic Beach captivates.

The touchstones (Cohen, Dylan, Morrison, Yorke, Brion, "Hunky Dory"-era Bowie) are obvious as the album progresses, too obvious at times, but Perkins has his own stories to tell, and he often does so in a mesmerizing fashion.

While the sound of Flesh Tone is electro cool, the songs reveal a deep humanity.

Most Messed Up is a full-blown, album-length expression of the Old 97s’ vintage, railroad-beat careen stripped of all embellishments.

A bright, challenging album.

The Canadian quartet is back with Fantasies, another extra-strength pop album, anchored by 'Help I'm Alive,' another extra-strength pop anthem.

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.

The Boys still sound like nobody but themselves, and to hear them making music again is an unexpected delight.

This Welsh singer-songwriter wears her love of the Velvet Underground proudly, particularly on Mug Museum, her third album, which jingles and jangles even when the subject matter turns dark.

Far from losing control, Adams sounds like he’s in total command.

Though Matthews occasionally splashes around in shallow lyrics, the band overall cooks, fleshing out these tunes in an integral way.

The CD, recorded last spring, is a collection of tunes that sound more groovy than gritty.

For an album that’s seemingly been in turnaround for so long, Broke sounds very much of the moment.