Chesney's sincerity is never in question, but his songs are uniformly garden-variety and obvious no matter how they are dressed.

Noel Gallagher comes up with a half-dozen tracks as good as the classic-rock epic 'The Turning,' or 'The Shock of the Lightning,' which swaggers as confidently as Oasis did a dozen years ago.

They succeeded admirably on a pair of sexually frank EPs in 2006 and earlier this year, and they're back for more on their full-length debut.

Many of Hynde's new songs call for honesty and compassion, and even if she never quite finds those things, her search yields some pretty vital rock 'n' roll.

As always, her uniquely sooty voice gives her the feeling of an old soul while lending levity to her darker songs.

City of Refuge is an eerie, archaic record, and even the CD version sounds as though there's years of thick dust packed into the grooves.

The result is a wealth of different musical imaginings, which provides a fascinating glimpse of his creative process on Tell Tale Signs.

Folds is clearly having fun, but is he laughing with us or at us? Sometimes it's hard to tell. But it's even harder not to smile.

She has a magnificent voice that deserves a lot better than this formulaic pop and soul.

Built with introductions and interludes as if it were a live performance, the 25-song set is an exercise in community that employs friends and family wisely, enlisting a choir to fill out the jaunty 'Wonderful Friends' and making Seeger's quavering yet impressively vital voice the centerpiece of his again-relevant Vietnam-era protest, 'Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.'

The album is a refreshing reminder that, in the right hands, the blues is very much a living genre that need not be stuck in a formulaic 12-bar past.

It's the mark of a great band when each new album is better than the one before it, and with Only by the Night, Kings of Leon shows once more just how great a band it has become.

Dear Science finds the band pushing still further, using its big beats and graffiti textures in service of its most accessible songs to date.

Hagerty's chords radiate like heat from hot concrete, forging shapes from the nothingness, like an audio mirage. So it goes for most of the album's 33 minutes.

If it's a well-worn groove, it's also an accomplished one.

Few songwriters are capable of making misery sound so elegant, and even desirable.

The Way I See It doesn't break any new ground, but it's a very well-executed homage that serves to remind that classic soul is timeless.

They responded with Death Magnetic, the best Metallica album since "Metallica."

It's a gorgeous, low-key album, full of musical nuance that unfolds with slow grace and exerts an irresistible pull back to the start after the last note has sounded.

She boils songs down to their bare essences, and colors them in simple, evocative ways.

These songs are fine, if unexciting, vehicles for her voice.

The Kentucky-bred singer builds an ideal showcase for her strengths on Sleepless Nights, unearthing a string of jewels from country's past with a passionate, pure revival of classics both familiar and rescued from obscurity.

The 46-year-old Kentucky native rejoins the production team from her breakthrough on Little Wild One and spins a broad spectrum of rock tapestries married to warm, personal musings centered on a common theme.

Soft Airplane feels deeply odd and resoundingly alive.

His sun-and-fun lyrics can be saccharine and anachronistic, but his complete lack of artifice helps to sell the sticky likes of 'Forever She'll Be My Surfer Girl.'

The Atlanta crack rapper's third album is largely a faithful rehash of his first two platters, which transformed him from unrepentant hustler to unlikely inspirational figure.

There's something of a jukebox feel to Apollo Sunshine's third album, despite the near-radioactive levels of reverb-hazy psychedelia throughout.

The 58-year-old songsmith shifts gears and lets someone else produce for a change on Sex and Gasoline, but continues to hit the right notes and nerves on tunes with earthy roots charms bubbling over with smartly phrased discontent.