Though the songs are new, the album is hardly a departure. Each is immediately recognizable to anyone who knows the Feelies.

For American Slang, they dig even deeper into their source material - Otis, Elvis, Replacements. It's to dutiful and evocative effect, but a little bit at the expense of the punky pluck that leavened their highway-wide serious streak.

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.

Traditionals such as 'False Hearted Lover Blues' and 'Poor Old Dirt Farmer' go right to the core of music as expression of primal human experience.

Even when the emotions don't run especially deep, Jackson always sounds as though he means every word and gives those words his utmost respect. [5 Sep 2004]

At times this surprisingly strong album feels like a move away from country toward the kind of vaguely rootsy blue-eyed soul in which John Mayer specializes.

The world is undeniably richer for his guided tour through the trove of songs that helped lay the foundation for American music.

For every swanky old-school touch, there's a glassy modernity that makes the album a sexy sonic adventure of loving and leaving.

Iceage still thrills here, hurtling through tangled, fuzzed-out hard-core jams that rarely stretch past the three-minute mark.

Here, he and Johns are working with a faultless batch of songs.

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

[A] wild new album. ... Complicated time signatures abound, but rather than extended jams, Thundercat keeps his songs short.

Her walk down the dark side of life and love is often heartbreakingly upfront. [10 Apr 2005]

The group often sounds more derivative than it does inspired, and clumsy lyrics don't help.

Whether buried deep in the mix, as on "Dusted," or relatively up high, as on the wonderful "Valley Hum," untethered words and ideas drift through but minus the necessary vocal heft. This absence is frustrating, because it stands in stark contrast to the music that surrounds it, which is varied, colorful and consistently surprising.

Genre jumping aside, it's the patterns as much as the riffs that are beguiling here.

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.

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

Never so flatly confessional as to be artless, her plaintive sentiments are still nakedly honest, strangely restrained yet unfettered. Still, Marshall's singing occasionally feels distant, negating the intimacy. [22 Jan 2006]

Line by line, her lyrics deliver a staggering blend of the profound and the vernacular. ... At 77 minutes in length, “Ocean Blvd” risks tiring the listener’s ear, which is why Del Rey and her co-producers — Antonoff along with Drew Erickson, Zach Dawes and Mike Hermosa — keep folding unexpected sounds and textures into the album’s largely piano-based arrangements.

This record should do the trick for everyone.

A tidy eight tracks defined by restraint and intention. ... The back half of the record parts the clouds for some of the band’s more refined, savvy and uplifting pop yet.

On Everything Is Love the two flex their muscles like it’s an Olympic sport. ... The inside references and the happy proximity to current rap also work in service of a larger point, which is thinking about black achievement in the context of a cultural and political system designed to hinder it. ... Mainstream art makes too little room for stories like that, especially when the grown-ups in question are people of color. But the Carters won’t be denied on Everything Is Love. For them, this hard-won encore is also a beginning.

It’s a warm, appealingly ragged collection suffused with wisdom and reassurance.

As on her earlier records, Halsey can feel like something of a phantom on “Manic,” even when her writing is as vivid as it is in “Graveyard,” which deploys an appealingly creepy metaphor about following a lover way too deep. But her singing, with its pleading tone and its slightly raspy edges, is growing more expressive.

Vernon’s comments are crucial to divining his meaning in lyrics that can still tend toward the almost comically opaque. ... But the music on “i,i” bolsters this newly outward-looking sense; it’s far more spacious than the hushed acoustic laments of “For Emma, Forever Ago” or the cloistered electro-folk sound of the group’s last album, 2016’s “22, A Million.”

Sounds too clean and constrained.

Named after a New Orleans street food, "Ya-Ka-May" mixes a whole variety of ingredients that shouldn't hold together but do. While no record could truly capture the sound of New Orleans in 2010, Galactic sure has a great time trying.