The Crying Light may not be as directly moving or as astounding as its predecessor, it’s a fine album on its own.

The songs on Bloodsports are suitable to excite the fans (Yes, they do still exist!), enthuse the critics, engage the occasional casual listener, and elicit a shrug from the general public.

Throughout the two albums, Lambchop effortlessly and repeatedly cross country, rock, soul, jazz, and cinematic borders. [combined review of both discs]

Malkmus, along with producer Beck, direct the music on Mirror Traffic with playful lyrics and flourishing styles that versatile and extended enough, shine with ease.

This is one of the most unique, inviting, and ultimately thrilling song cycles released this year.

Gorilla Manor consists of twelve very intricate and charming songs. The record has a sense of liveliness and reaches out to human abilities, emotions and reactions.

As with Mark's other musical incarnations, whether as Red House Painters or under his own name, a fine-tuned and patient ear, and a good turn of the volume knob towards high, is required to fully appreciate the nuances of his music.

About as good as a live album can get.

Wyatt At The Coyote Palace shows us a performer whose energies are intact and whose music and lyrics retain their ability to provoke, charm and occasionally disturb us.

He may like his disguises and perhaps enjoys provoking his audiences but underneath the image and the keen ear for wordplay a really quite serious songwriting talent is very determinedly making himself heard.

The Sunlandic Twins is a dizzying, exhilarating, and almost endlessly fun ride, breezy almost to a fault, romantic and lighthearted.

He covers an impressive amount of ground on Lucky Shiner, and the variety works in his favor. Perhaps he's missing a degree of originality, but what these tracks might be lacking in idiosyncratic branding will likely be made up for with a longevity of listenability.

It’s pretty hard to turn down, just as his collection of self-referencing, string heavy ballads "You‘re So Silent Jens" was.

An extremely beautiful and captivating slice of electro-pop.

It’s a glorious low-frequency hootenanny that slurs soul, punk, psych-rock, and pop until you’re not sure what language you’re hearing anymore.

It’s no mystery that the band’s most focused, intelligible, and pop-oriented record is also its best.

The poetry of pain is so strong, and mixed with superbly produced music that doesn’t take a nanosecond for granted.

While their LPs are again, consistently, some of the year’s best albums, it is definitely true that their EPs are no slouches either.

Although The White Wires put a fun, sunshiny spin on things, this type of music has been played out by countless bands ever since The Ramones perfected the formula in the mid-70′s. But if you're just looking for something rowdy, fast and fun for the drive to your favorite party spot, put on WWII and crank it up!

Whilst Still could certainly have benefitted from a greater cache of stronger songs (a couple of which could have been swapped-in from the largely electric self-produced Variations EP that comes with early CD editions), as a combined entity it holds together convincingly as an amiable summary of what latter-day Richard Thompson is all about.

Even if You’re Nothing lacks the raw immediacy of their debut, it sees Iceage defining the parameters of their sound.

It's as though they've found the link between tightly driven post punk and loose garage rock. Songs such as "Trouble," "Mystery Zone," and last year's single "Got Nuffin" bridge the gap between Nuggets and the Stiff Records label. This is certainly what indie rock has been based on for the past 30 years and so far only Spoon has done it with any success. As though to balance out the rock or to satisfy their interest in each end of the song writing spectrum, Transference also satisfies.

As a unit, the group amassed some of the best music of their careers onto this singular, ‘effusively sentimental,’ career.

At 21, he has the raconteur’s wit of a younger Nick Cave still buoyed by the weightlessness of possibility.

Music like this is a reward just waiting to happen and if you give it a fair shot, it will surely win you over.

Goodbye Bread is a fitting development on an impeccable path. The depth accomplished through five albums is obviously grand and it's definitely as if Segall is purely improving with every passing year.

It is easily the band’s most accomplished, interesting record, a record that will simultaneously alienate stodgy diehard “fans” and attract a new group of listeners to the band.

For those who found that record [Nouns] to be a trying listen though, it's unlikely that the duo will win them over with Everything In Between, another lean and visceral assemblage of songs that expounds on many of Nouns' most endearing qualities.