[“If You Really Love Nothing” is] one of Interpol’s best recent songs, but its standard proves difficult to maintain on what is in many ways a typically hit-and-miss latter-day Interpol album.

The boys with crow's feet and bum hips have made an album that speaks to the inner 16-year-old of their audience.

She reportedly considered 70-plus songs and hired a variety of collaborators, ranging from Babyface to M.I.A. producer Switch, and yet the album feels skimpy, half-finished.

Mostly the arrangements feel amorphous and vague, and matters aren't helped by the way Orton's voice is positioned in the mix. Her tone veers between conversational and angelic, just another texture in a scattered and shapeless series of musical pieces.

Over seven increasingly ambitious albums, they refined the approach, and Turn Blue contains their most atmospheric and somber music yet.

The nine-song album aims for a more unified and introspective feel, a good deal darker, denser and less instantly accessible than the debut. Instead of concise singles, it more fully embraces the duo's interests in waving the Barrett-era freak flag

It's luxurious as all get-out, and yet vaguely disturbing – this is mood music designed to unsettle as much as soothe.

It all sounds a little off, at times broken or aggressively annoying, an intentionally wobbly frame around an imagination that's churning at 1000 miles an hour. Call it avant-garde at your own risk, but at times this music has as much in common with electro-punk as it does hip-hop.

An understandable reverence prevails over most of these primarily straight-forward interpretations, but a handful dig a level deeper.

These aren’t classic Petty songs, but they are sturdy vehicles for a terrific, if frequently underrated band.

Even though the 33-minute album comes off as slight, Pop still manages to reaffirm his gift for integrating seemingly opposed impulses.

With the Strokes, Casablancas exploits the tension between his behind-the-beat, just-woke-up vocals and the band’s hurtling rhythms. On Phrazes, the slower-moving tempos match the unhurried pace of his distinctive croon, and the melodies and arrangements aren’t strong enough to make up for the loss in urgency.

With "The Courage of Others" (Bella Union), Midlake singer Tim Smith sounds like a refugee from the late ‘60s English-folk scene, with songs delivered in an unaffected, understated voice that could’ve easily complemented Sandy Denny or Anne Briggs, or fit in with Pentangle or Fairport Convention.

Several of those tracks anchor Oceania, which adds up to Corgan's best work since the '90s.

It's the kind of hair-raising music that one wishes occurred more frequently on this overly subdued collection.

The sense that we’ve all been here before, twice, is exacerbated by the tired samples and interpolations.

Subtlety isn't a typical pop virtue, but it suits Sande.

For the Shins major-label debut, he [James Mercer] has enlisted pop producer Greg Kurstin (who has worked with everyone from Kesha to Beck) to sharpen, polish and broaden the sound, and the results are decidely mixed.

Rather than a personal statement, the music becomes an exercise in smoothness. Even La Havas' vocal power plays don't translate as an emotional imperative so much as a pop formula.

Wilk does an adequate job on these extended tracks, but it’s the vitality of Iommi on guitar and Butler on bass that impresses.... Butler’s lyrics find their perfect match in Osbourne. In these songs, the singer wrestles with demons--psychosis, self-abuse, existential dread--with which he’s had considerable personal experience. It makes 13 something a bit more credible than just a souvenir for a reunion tour.

Had Broken Bells combined the best songs from their two albums, they would have made a heck of a statement. As it is, they offer promising glimpses of what might have been.

Georgeson was a key architect of the new Millennium's folk renaissance in indie-rock with his productions for Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart, among others, and his thumbprint is all over Morrissey's songs, for better and sometimes worse.

When Zonoscope sticks to concise songcraft, it's a satisfying, if sometimes trifling, pleasure.

Though the instant hits are lacking, Bankrupt! is more cohesive than its best-selling predecessor.

What better band to cover R.E.M. than R.E.M.? That's exactly what the longtime Athens, Ga., trio sounds like it's doing on its 15th studio album, Collapse Into Now.

Little wonder that their "Broken Bells" (Columbia) project, on which they play all the instruments, packs 11 meticulously orchestrated songs into less than 38 minutes. Burton puts a little wobble on just about every sound he conjures and Mercer pushes his voice outside its comfort zone, particularly in the upper register, making this a chilled little side-trip of an album.

The singer goes on autopilot for "Jamaica Moon," a thin rewrite of his Caribbean-flavored '50s composition, "Havana Moon," and "She Still Loves You," a cousin to his forlorn "Memphis." When Berry wanders outside his songwriting safety zone, stranger sides of his personality emerge.

At times, the singer-producer's one-man band approach can be wearying.... Yet the singer's blend of tones from his stacked vocals and keyboards is more often strange and surprising.