Streisand's somber production and emotional vocals evoke melancholy more than joy--a fitting mood for these theatrical but not sentimental songs.

The R.E.D. Album orbits around contradictions like that. It might be the most compelling portrait of confusion we'll hear from a rapper this year.

Traffic is a handy metaphor for the album; it's a gorgeously orchestrated mess.

All the same, Drums Between the Bells makes for a richly atmospheric listen, one that allows the listener to cut the cord from reality and float off into a beautifully curated space.

Three new tracks (including a dreamy take on the gospel standard "His Eye Is on the Sparrow") provide a glimmer of what Stone might accomplish if he ever rouses himself more fully.

Bridges' frayed charisma fits these songs perfectly. Nostalgic yet out of time, welcoming but secretly brooding, the combination creates an audio correlative to the beloved characters he's played on-screen.

As effective as it is predictable, Welcome Reality will inevitably soundtrack thousands of summer and fall blowouts. Even if they're just fiddling with the formula, Nero understand how to make things burn.

Taken in its full, cumulative glory, Skying ultimately dazzles, musically varied but singular in its ambition.

The two kings prove much more nimble and disciplined, displaying a confidence that suggests they're not going anywhere.

It's a remarkably consistent album, full of snappy arrangements, surprising chord changes and tasteful instrumentation, but Collingwood's voice embodies its true appeal.

She does herself no favors by choosing consistently bland material, and her third album does nothing to dispel the sense that Rowland should be more selective.

She clearly wanted to craft a grand-scale melodic-pop opus, but she hasn't delivered stories and emotions commensurate with the panoramic production work.

The result, surprisingly, is Stone's most conventional record yet: handsome soul singing, sturdy blues-rock arrangements, lyrics about refusing to cry oneself to sleep.

With Kickback, they prove they know how to throw a good party. Next time, the threesome will need to strive for better than par.

Every song teems with surprisingly memorable choruses, melodies, and, well, quirks that prove hard to forget; after such a deluge of stealthy and refined charms, resistance to the TMBG formula becomes futile.

Each of the thousands of individual beats, bumps, dots and dashes on Dedication sound forged with a sculptor's eye for form and shape, crafted and shined until they glisten.

For all her internal chaos, Friedberger's debut is a concise, considerate effort.

All of You puts a significant amount of force into the illusion of effortlessness; its scrim of summer-fun abandon obscures a stage busy with high-level record-making.

She's clearly capable of belting a worthy song out of the park, but once again she's hampered by bloop singles and the infrequent double.

Here their playing [Marc Ribot on guitar and Meshell Ndegeocello on bass] creates some valuable tension beneath Peyroux's still-placid singing.

As a singer, Lloyd possesses a levitating croon and admirably fills out most of producer Polow Da Don's synthetic boudoir songs.

He's got an undeniable flair for layering trashy techno-rock textures over hard-thumping disco-metal grooves.

Parton's irrepressible personality is the star attraction, and on Better Day it shines.

Faithfull delves into what she seems to know best: decay of all varietals, including the decay of passion, of relationships, even of civilizations in Tennessee songwriter-playwright-actor R. B. Morris' benedictory "That's How Every Empire Falls."

Taken together, 4 is a surprising, confident turn, even if the surprises are of a subtler variety.

Long trafficking in a sometimes spare yet intricately drawn sort of Americana that could fit just as comfortably at the turn of the 20th century, their latest delivers the same deceptively simple alchemy of dustily lilting voices, vivid lyrical twists and crisp acoustic flourishes.

As usual with the ever-insightful Alvin, the specifics of his raw material are the means to broader truths rather than an end in themselves.

Following a pair of brilliant EPs, Shabazz attacks with Black Up.

It's not the exquisite crispness of Yacht's bass lines that makes Shangri-La so appealing (though that certainly doesn't hurt). Rather, it's the band's knack for giving weighty ideas the lighthearted gift of groove.

Vernon on Bon Iver solidifies his place not as innovator, but as someone who's found a nice, fertile plot of land somewhere near where folk, rock, R&B and indie rock intersect, and is happy to wander across its great expanse honoring all of it.

The deployment of cliched lyrics and programmatic rhythm tracks undermines her message of determined individualism.

Wild and Free is as casual and familiar as a Friday afternoon. You might not remember it in six months, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a pleasant enough way to idle away the time.

The result is a free-form, almost stream-of-consciousness ride through a surreal, atmospheric and sometimes funny alternate universe.

The duo's taller half, Ronnie Dunn, was long regarded as the more distinctive singer, and on his solo debut, there's no more sharing of the spotlight to hold him back. That's about the only difference between a Brooks & Dunn record and this similarly hit-and-miss collection of odes to blue-collar empathy, patriotism and the transformative power of love.

Suck It and See (English slang for "give it a try"), slows the pace but ultimately feels even more detached.

Putting aside the coy playfulness of the act's name, Josh Epstein and Daniel Zott actually specialize in tenderness, crafting a collection that places a premium on harmonies and a studious reliance on electronics.

The Lips' catalog is exhaustingly long, but Arabia Mountain is a fine reassertion that its talents extend far beyond running from venue security.

If Gaga had only spent as much time on pushing musical boundaries as she has social ones, Born This Way would have been a lot more successful.

There are moments when the bear-voiced Jim James and company sound as if they're scraping an old dinner plate for a last lick, retreading what they've done better elsewhere, but then they strike on something inspired enough to renew their license to rock-trot all over the globe.

On his band's new album, Codes and Keys, Gibbard's picked up a bit of L.A.'s sun-scarred optimism and a droll domestic satisfaction that's alternately smug and insightful.

The instrument's intrinsic sweetness seems to head off any inclination to succumb to despair, and contrasts evocatively with his sandpapery, quavery vocals.

If King maintains a tight focus for much of Flogging Molly's fifth studio album, his bandmates (on guitar and drums, as well as tin whistle and Uilleann pipes) employ broader strokes, pushing the music toward arena-rousing Bruce Springsteen territory.

At times sprawling and eccentric enough to have her schooling a fictional audience on the flute-accented "Woo," this melding of old-school funk, jazzy instrumentation and dancey bleeps nevertheless flows well.

This Is Country Music still has a lot of what keeps Paisley at the head of the contemporary country class, but with several of the 15 songs merely competent, it could have been 30% stronger with a 30% edit.

Much of Torches doesn't aim much higher than being a fizzy soundtrack for windows-down elbow tans. Which is fine, but for all his ease at getting attention, hopefully Foster will want to command it more thoroughly.

The jokes are reasonably funny and the riffs rock reasonably hard. But Argos never convinces you that his unlikely persistence is paying off.

Yet if Todd makes it easy to poke fun at her earnestness, she also makes music that's hard to resist: Layering airy but precise vocal melodies atop hushed, largely acoustic arrangements, the singer offers up a crystal-clear distillation of the vintage Laurel Canyon sound currently in vogue among Todd's feather-and-denim cohorts.

While the sounds are fantastic, the compositions tend to slip by, just another Mediterranean sunset.

All the songs are encased behind such stylish glass that it's hard to feel much of anything while listening to Destroyed, much less identification with the plight of the nomadic musician.

As on Incredibad, the group's hit 2009 debut, the jokes here work thanks to the seriousness with which they're delivered.

Jones makes a quietly convincing case that when it comes to soul music, all roads do seem to lead to Memphis.

The cussing, the horror, the anger, the disappointment, the alienation, the frustration, while real and scary and sad, gets tiresome. That's a lot of Tyler, and so much ego-maniacal nihilism, while fascinating and at times revolutionary, wears thin very quickly.

Dismissing it as overly familiar obscures the point. Saadiq is a classicist of the best kind - one who not only carries on tradition but expands it.

In its best moments, "Helplessness Blues" sparkles like some sort of divine plan, but a plan that knows the value of mistakes, surprises and even regret.

The Beasties' irreverence is what made them stand out in the first place; that their willful chaos continues to charm and mutate so many years on is the big surprise.

Coming from a star whose weekly "Idol" pronouncements emphasize the value of charisma, "Love?" definitely disappoints.

The characteristically festive result is generous to a fault: Collins triggers warm memories but leaves us with only a shallow sense of how precisely his four decades in the business have affected him as a man.

Until then, Jollett will have to make do with the brass ring he's holding on to with all his fortitude; everyone else can just come along for the ride.

Producer T Bone Burnett and his ace crew of musicians help Earle with masterful skill and deft subtlety.

Ray Charles surely would have admired the inventive and lively jazz-drenched arrangements accompanying many of his standards.

The downside is that along with heart and brains, Hollywood Undead has filtered out any sense of humor from its music, which makes American Tragedy virtually impossible to listen to for longer than a few songs at a time.

In the end, Lennox's dueling ambitions leave Tomboy in a singular place--a strange, almost devotional record to get lost in.

Playing with a band of her own (an alt-country collective dubbed the Siss Boom Bang) for the first time in a couple decades, Canada's sometimes strings-besotted crooner has found her guitar groove again.

Any TVOTR fans hoping for a return to the band's heavier early days might have trouble with Nine Types of Light, an album full of such a brilliant clarity that the title could be referencing its track listing.

As a result, Holy Ghost! has created a classic pop album, albeit one dressed for dancing in hipster finery.

Sparhawk and Parker have written songs more memorable than the 10 collected on "C'mon." Maybe Beckley should've cracked the studio-pro whip.

Most contemporary country musicians steadfastly bypass the dark territory Krauss and her mates mine here, missing out on the deep emotion lurking within it. The loss is theirs.

For Simon, the divine isn't in the persistent hook of pop music but in the most far-reaching of global folk, where sounds, structures and techniques long ago abandoned can be employed in the service of something new and unknown.

The songs' little jabs infect the listener again and again: they suck you back in even as they draw a little blood, but never quite a gushing wound.

The performers on this one likely count it among their career highlights, but those who have kept up with the quality of Davies' output in recent years may well be more interested in what he has yet to say rather than revisiting what he's already said so beautifully.

On Femme Fatale, her seventh studio album and plainly one of her best, the erstwhile teen-pop princess is less the center of sonic attention than the occasion and enabler for a dozen of the age's most accomplished record producers to show off their wildest moves from behind a plastic Britney mask.

When he's not trying to satisfy different demographic demands, Snoop returns to his roots to create a laissez-faire funk full of laid-back raps and Jheri Curl groove.

Berman and his bandmates also play more purposefully here than they did on their debut, as though the bigger arrangements finally provided the shy-guy contrast they'd been looking for. Their move toward muscle feels genuine.

Hot Club of Cowtown isn't out to bowl listeners over with musical fireworks, but there are moments that might spur you to let loose with a hearty "Ah-haaaa!"

Not everything is worth making the journey; indeed, it's hard to know why the band bothered adding five new songs to the superior nine-track version of "All You Need Is Now" that Duran Duran released through iTunes late last year. But with their sleek keyboard lines, trebly guitar chatter and frontman Simon Le Bon's swooping vocal melodies, taut neo-New Wave gems like "Being Followed" and "Girl Panic!" make a strong argument for the lasting utility of these hitmakers' original formula.

His notoriously screwball wordplay takes a back seat to a more sedate menace, but Gucci's inimitable rasp is where it should be--as prominent as, well, a frozen snack tattoo on your cheekbone.

Hudson has a big, warm, church-trained R&B diva voice, a sure instrument for belting the blues and affirming the spirit. But that voice has never seemed comfortable among the bright shiny toys of a pop studio.

Best of all, Angles captures that now-all-too-rare excitement of musicians playing off of one another.

All of it is done capably, even superbly in some cases, though F.A.M.E. also feels strained and sometimes downright desperate. That said, there's no denying he pulls off some neat coups.

Catchy and immensely singable, the endless vocal refrains on The Excitement of Maybe aren't going to leave your brain anytime soon.

Fans who look to Iyer solely for high-flying piano jazz might struggle to find familiar footing as the album's intricate sonic interplay takes some time to unpack. But Iyer's willingness to take listeners to places they've never heard remains something to behold.

More than 20 years in, Screeching Weasel is providing tuneful evidence that one can be childish without coming off as adolescent.

The man of seemingly a thousand alter egos - including bawdy-yet-urbane uptown bandleader Buster Poindexter and grizzled old bluesman - Johansen weaves elements of his catholic musical tastes in with the brash Bowery-bred punk that's always been the heart of the Dolls' music.

It's a moderate disappointment, then, that Lasers feels more like a compromise than a cohesive album.

She's not there yet, but the effort is fascinating, and hopefully she will keep on this path.

Shaolin Vs. Wu-Tang is his successful quest to return to the days when it was simple, blessed with the wisdom to know which philosophies work.

Long sometimes gets a little lost in his own imagination, but it's better to display a weakness for overreaching than the writerly laziness that afflicts many young bards.

The problems arise on Goodbye Lullaby when Lavigne compartmentalizes her softer side, to the point where it eclipses her finger-jabbing cheekiness.

Combined, the result is a dynamic, human album, one that's easy to fall in love with. Highly recommended.

She's a mediocre singer with a very interesting voice, a fan of classic handmade pop and the ways laptops can serrate it, and a writer obsessed with sex and with sexing up obsession.

When it comes to carrying the torch for an earlier generation's idea of rock 'n' roll perfection, no one means as much business as Liam Gallagher.

DeVotchKa creates music that explodes with the desperate passion of someone standing at the end of a pier, or lost in the middle of a desert.

The soul-endangering threat of our current man-machine moment is unlikely to register.

Overall, 21 shows that Adele, now 22, is towering in the same landscape where some of her contemporaries, beehived or not, have lost all their bearings.

The duo lends each other gravitas and levity on this very curious but ultimately immersive LP.

Carll is every bit as expressive a singer as he is a writer, drawling his trenchant observations with deceptive ease.

Whatever name Dulli is working under, his creative project stays the same: providing an opposition to indie rock's sensitive-male majority.

This music reminds us that subtlety is sometimes worth the time it takes to comprehend it.