Here is a man unafraid to rep for the drippiest balladeer ever, Dan Fogelberg--and no one will call Edmonds on it, because his restraint and care eliminate any sense of the maudlin.

100 Days, 100 Nights deserves every accolade it has and will receive.

The result is a sprawling, 75-minute immersion in the dynamic between Patterson Hood's Neil Young/Tom Petty-influenced folk and rock and Steve Cooley's mix of Rolling Stones, stone country and Band-flavored folk-rock.

Crow's progressive lyrics hit like rubber-band pings fired by some joker in the back row at school. No one is likely to sing her verses at a march on Washington. But by addressing serious issues in the language of pop, they remind us that political speech and casual breeze-shooting can and do often intersect.

Overall, the album's humor level is a little lower than usual for Davies, but the reflective songs are among his most intimate and touching.

The result is a collection of demanding, disquieting and beautiful urban hymns that reveal their rewards on repeated listenings.

It's an unusually rich, solidly traditional country record with 17 songs, all written by Jackson, a first in his 18-year recording career.

Duffy's not a belter, but she boasts a cool power that is immensely aided by the cleverness of Rockferry's instrumental settings, which employ mostly acoustic instruments for a warmer sound that, in combination with Duffy's vocal prowess, stays sweet, soulful and satisfying.

Ayers' revealing account--his first album in 15 years--stands with his best '70s works of besotted, droll sophistication.

Though several doses of this languid, tension-filled music get a tad draining, taken altogether it is a suitable sound for our troubling times, and there's an invigorating mysteriousness.

Nouns showcases the appealing joy to No Age's process, the band attacking its music with relish and humor.

Bun B's second solo record is an impressive late-career triumph, one with a poignancy and resonance worthy of his dedication and devotion to the memory of his departed friend.

Featuring some of the Reverend's finest work in years, Green's latest is proof positive that as important as it is to show up, you still need to know how to lay it down.

Though it tails off toward the end, the second Weezer-Rubin collaboration (and the band's third self-titled album, out June 3) is a rush, starting with a sustained, four-song soliloquy on pop music's allure.

The sound is more varied and lighter on its feet with touches of harpsichord and banjo but anchored by the Hold Steady's signature: thick, humid arena rock, a high-pressure system of cresting guitars and pianos that injects these dramas with tension and embraces all their contradictions and ambiguities.

Releasing another full-length effort less than a year later is unusual, but the accelerated pace might account for the infusion of freshness that makes Hymn and Her so arresting.

Along with peers such as Emmylou Harris and John Hiatt, who also launched their careers in the '70s, Crowell seems to have found the fuel to just keep getting better.

It's no surprise that Ne-Yo sings about women on his excellent third album, Year of the Gentleman.

There's a raw energy on Little Honey--which arrives this week, a little more than a year after 2007's "West"--that's as refreshing as it is palpable.

Though he gripes that fans are always bringing up Tribe, The Renaissance is a showcase for Q-Tip's cool and empathetic consciousness.

Despite the fret board fireworks, this is an honest love letter to the art of making music.

Animal Collective still struggles with effective counterweights to its euphoric beauty--the attempt at romance on 'Bluish' is off-putting and some of the murkiness can exhaust and undermine--but it shifts so rapidly, with such conviction, that it's more fun to hunker down and surrender.

Ultraviolet is brimming with the artist's down-to-earth candidness.

Most tracks stir the pulse; a few evoke the film’s overarching tenderness. Rahman’s trademark sound is polyrhythmic, nuanced and utterly polished but without sacrificing an edgy contradiction that keeps all the songs spinning on their heads.

All I Ever Wanted is a masterful rapprochement with the mainstream, full of cheerfully ear-snagging tunes, inventive production, exhilarating vocals and enough inherent Kelly-ness to put aside fears that her label bosses implanted blond electrodes in her brain to make her behave.

He organically forges those into an utterly distinctive voice that takes what's come before and artfully moves it forward with the power of a certain steel-driving man.

These songs contain O's most expressive singing yet, and the tension between her vocal performances and the band's playing results in music richer in emotion than anything the trio has done since 'Maps,' its breakout hit from 2003.

UGK 4 Life is the rare swan song that manages to be essential for the music alone.

There's plenty of apprehension in Metric's lyrics, but Fantasies isn't about wallowing. As Haines sings, "If somebody's got soul, you've got to make them move." Metric more than gets the job done.

If Swoon isn't quite this year's "Tusk," the Silversun Pickups are exploring fresh territory of their own and keeping it easy to follow.

Its musical and lyrical themes recur without fuss, and each track has its own strong identity that speaks to but isn't weighed down by the larger (and beneficially looser) narrative.

Michele is more wry than most feel-good sisters, and never sentimental. She doesn't offer any solutions to the predicament of women caught up in sweet, rough love; like those blues queens of yore, she just takes you there. The journey is gift enough.

A feast for repeated listening, Veckatimest yields the kind of eccentricities a fan can spend months winding and unwinding.

Vancouver duo Brian King and David Prowse throw themselves into every song as if it's the last one they'll ever play. That go-for-broke attitude carries their third album, which is less about the songs than the sheer joy of playing them.

Marrying firebrand lyrics with massive, pedal-pushing guitar riffs, SSSC (it sounds like a union acronym, doesn't it?) revels in the kinds of big, earnest gestures that emblematized 1990s alternative rock.

The fables and fantasy lives they depict are rendered in fairly understandable terms. Yet Far still shows the range that Spektor can travel within her dreamy world.

Its songs cast the universal emotion as gentle on the surface, with a riptide, and some bubble with quickening desire.

He sings of the land and of people who struggle to hold on to some small piece of it. It's especially powerful considering the ways in which he's transcended significant struggles of his own.

Despite its undercurrent of outrage, Branches--which expands Pedro's folksy sound with creamy keyboards, processed drum beats and the occasional spritz of glam-rock guitar.

Cassie Ramone sounds like a more confident guitarist, stretching out her leads, while the bass lines of Kickball Katy bubble out front to carry the melodies. And once again those melancholy harmonies are to die for, as Ramone chips off pieces of her heart in lamenting the boy who got away.

Heartbeat Radio is Lerche's most eclectic outing yet, with no overarching concept beyond a consistent level of excellence.

The music of AFI wasn't always as daring as its fashion sense, but the NoCal band has grown with accelerating sophistication, stepping further beyond easy pop-punk thrashings to something grander, with music to match the mopey melodrama of Havok's words.

Love 2 is not a make-out album in the traditional sense. It's about the love of silence, stillness, of being a conscious human being and watching the world float by.

He filches from a variety of genres--Brazilian Tropicalia, glam rock, lounge jazz, Zeppelin-like psychedelia--but it never sounds awkward. He loosens the stitches on each to fashion his own unique costume.

The 10 songs course through the highs and lows with equanimity, from the pride and hope in Charlotte she expresses to the kindheartedness she displays for those acquaintances who've moved on.

At times Iyer and his charges exhibit so much virtuosity and skill it's almost overwhelming how quickly ideas rise and fall through a given track, but attempting to parse all this trio is trying to say is well worth the effort.

It's music that balances with uncommon elegance the desire to observe with the need to engage.

Johnston's best songs remind us that every mirror, like every voice, is always in danger of cracking. But that doesn't take anything away from the beauty of our illusions.

Transference has the act experimenting more with textures and mood. The result is a collection of melodic fragments and unexpectedly welcome left turns.

Throughout the follow-up to her 2006 album, "5:55," Gainsbourg never sounds out of her element, no matter how the music shifts underneath her feet.

Odd Blood ultimately reveals that beneath all the weird sounds, tribal harmonies and otherworldly textures, Yeasayer are still a bunch of indie-rock sentimentalists.

There is no instant hit of the "Living Dead Girl" variety, but across 11 songs, "Hellbilly Deluxe 2" is Zombie's most consistently tuneful record to date, without sacrificing the noise and industrial beats of the past.

"Soldier of Love" is unique in its confrontational tone, but it connects to the other best tracks on this album, which employ minimalism and the rules of cool to carefully reconstruct various musical styles.

Mercer's knack for twisting and turning melodies is impeccably served by Burton, who tempers and fulfills those melodies with laid-back but elaborate scores of synth, piano, organ and sometimes a full string section, the only instruments not played by Burton or Mercer.

This 11-track album--the second collection of collaborations by Touré and the Malian kora player Toumani Diabeté--doesn't sound like death. Rather, it's an early contender for the warmest, most life-affirming listen of 2010.

Whether the specifics involve being needed or wanting to fly away, lusting for someone or letting go, "New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh" is a velvety, but still appealingly odd, exploration that feels more like a casual counterweight than a heady sequel.

This bluesy, heartland-soaked musical excursion features meaty support from guitarist Doug Lancio, bassist Patrick O' Hearn and drummer Kenneth Blevins, wittily informed nods to such influences as Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones and Willie Dixon and plenty of the rock soulfulness that's integral to the sound he's been honing for decades.

Hutz has said that Rubin encouraged him to focus on his songwriting as opposed to the band's frantic live show, and "Hustle" bears out that claim with catchier melodies and more slogan-ready lyrics.

The group's debut oozed with chemistry, and that musical empathy has just grown stronger and tighter here. And both in songwriting and musical execution--the operative word throughout here--the Dead Weather has crafted the equivalent of a taut, expertly directed movie thriller.

The pleasure is in listening to how often the National scrapes up close to maudlin, only to retreat in the nick of time.

At times, the fumes of ambition are so thick off "The ArchAndroid," it's hard to absorb in one sitting. All the same, it's a star-making debut.

Tasty cuts abound here, but Sir Lucious is most enjoyable as a complete listening experience.

In its 12 tracks, M.I.A. explores both what it means to serve as a sexual/romantic ideal in the Beyonce way, and what happens when a self-consciously political artist like herself confronts the sentimental streak deep within.

One of the best summer blockbusters in recent memory, Teflon Don proves how thin the line is between a flight of fancy and something fantastic.

The Suburbs is an accomplished love letter that radiates affection as much as bitterness.

The songs are so good they can disarm any skeptics.

For much of the record, Mellencamp is eyeing death and laughing at the devil or, as in the back-porch-folk of "Easter Eve," bonding with his son by brawling with strangers. A little cranky, but far more carefree Mellencamp slips into a rocking chair groove on the lost-lover lament of "Don't Forget About Me" and concedes that he's "spotty at best." Over the course of his 30-plus-year career, sure, but not here.

God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise has a natural feel, comfortably ranging from bar-band rave-ups to contemplative acoustic numbers, with master pedal steel player Greg Leisz leading several tracks into the expertly unfussy territory of blue-chip Nashville country rock.

As this accomplished one-two punch attests, Gibbs boasts the rare ability to be both crude and refined.

I'm Having Fun Now distinguishes itself from Lewis and Rice's solo efforts, or hers with band-on-hiatus Rilo Kiley, by going for a very specific tone.

Thirty-four years after the band's debut, Heart's dreamboat sails on.

Cave's skill at crafting work drenched with the blood and tears of human flaws remains unparalleled, and makes Grinderman 2 an essential rock and roll document.

Le Noise is not an epic -– if it were a book, you could read it in an afternoon -– but it's statement enough from a man who's already said so much.

Clapton and Bramhall also have pulled off a minor miracle in assembling an ad hoc group that manages to sound like a blues band whose members have been absorbing one another's abilities to the point of musical osmosis.

For all its stylistic variety, though, Sinners hangs together thanks to Malo's consistently remarkable vocals. Listening to this guy sing--listening to him sing anything--is an act of pure pleasure.

Stevens ventures widely on this 85-minute disc to find the best way to express what turn out to be basic home truths.

Though it might sound like a cold place, Eno's primordial milk sea is often choppy and warm, the kind of rough and imperfect environment where ideas ignite.

Most songs here emphasize Lynn's signature feistiness, but Williams zeroes in on the deep heartache she's also adept at, choosing her 1976 hit "Somebody Somewhere (Don't Know What He's Missin' Tonight)," one of 16 singles Lynn took to No. 1. There's a full record of this soul-scorching facet of Lynn's music lurking somewhere, for somebody.

L.A.'s veteran indie rocker is on a tear in his third outing with the up-for-anything Miracle 3 - guitarist Jason Victor, drummer Linda Pitmon and bassist Dave DeCastro - fusing Wynn's penchant for Americana rock, psychedelia, brutal punk and extended jams into an intriguingly seductive blend.

On Love Letter, he does away with the freakiness and lays down a full record of slow-simmered, grown-man emoting. And it feels like a wayward husband who's finally come home for good.

Apollo Kids shows that one of rap's company drivers is still on the speedway--zooming slightly slower than before, but with better pacing and control of the wheel.

It's haunting, often harrowing stuff, but Allman knows this territory well, growling, yearning, pleading for some sense of peace that seems as if it will ever elude him--and maybe anyone who walks the eart

Now with his fifth album, Beam may not have abandoned his roots, but he's certainly stretched far beyond them.

Kaputt is hallucinatory and unstructured, grabbing for whatever it likes in the moment -- it's the radio of Bejar's mind, floating off to sleep.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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