Though never flaccid or soft, Into the Light possesses a lightness of touch, a deft empathy, a dreamlike aura.

Even when the subject matter starts out a little more sober, their unflagging wit isn’t far away.

A record that not only tops any solo offering that the late James Yancey released during his lifetime, but also rivals Slum Village’s “Fantastic Part 2” and his own “Donuts” as his finest full-length effort.

Tyler explores the boundless opportunities within a few great riffs, while drifting from time to time to explore odd structural detours.

Barbara, the duo's first album of original material together in five years, often stacks up with their best work and suggests that the ideas they pioneered in the '90s aren't just back en vogue--they've held up amid decades of fast-moving techno.

Haggard's writing occasionally lapses into anonymous honky-tonk hokum, and the playing sometimes feels cheap and dashed off. (Haggard's voice sounds much more weathered than Nelson's does, as well.) Yet because it's made up of originals, not covers, it's also more idiosyncratic.

The band’s fifth album both honors the ideals of classic country rock and rages against it with a freewheeling reflex to push at the genre’s edges.

These 14 tracks merge synthetic funk, hip-hop, indie soul and a love of life. Songs including “Weird Part of the Night,” “Freaky Times” and “After the Load is Blown” possess chops and wit.

What a beautiful record. Truly gorgeous, the kind that wins both hearts and awards--perfect for a dinner party, a drive along Pacific Coast Highway, or a good, healthy cry.

Perhacs sings of universal truths and natural wonders, pondering sad winds and spiritual growth through lush, layered vocals and gusts of sound. “Eclipse of All Love” swirls with folk guitar and a sung duet between Perhacs and Sansone. Best are the Holter collaborations.

And though a few of the tracks are downright painful... the end product is certainly something to chew on. [24 Jul 2005]

Every song on this exhilarating debut... is almost as good as its first hit, "Crazy." That's saying a lot. [6 May 2006]

For an album so indebted to artists he inspired, Rebirth still feels thoroughly and essentially Cliff's.

This might be the most inviting pop record of 2013, with a bubbly ebullience that makes even its most familiar moves feel fresh.

At 18 tracks, though, Embryonic includes an awful lot of filler, much of it of the meandering-soundscape variety. That stuff isn't depressing--it's just boring.

The debut solo record from half of the duo the Clipse and member of Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music collective is hard and minimal, filled with state-of-the-art beats that pop with bravado.

It’s an excellent indie starter kit for the kids just plucking “Loveless” out of the bin.

The songs are structured firmly in the classic tradition, evoking Dylan, the Band, Hendrix and Beatles. They're enriched by a bottomless well of melodic invention and find an emotional core in Tweedy's shy, plaintive vocals. [20 Jun 2004]

It’s a vivid account of a woman’s unwanted confrontation with a powerful tormentor--“a bogeyman under my bed putting crazy thoughts inside my head,” as she puts it in “Learn to Let Go”--as well as her determination to leave the resulting damage behind.

Like avowed influences Van Morrison and Neil Young, Friedberger on New View travels in fluid, seamless melodies, and uses them in service of lyrics that revel in poeticism.

The songs are shiny and catchy of course. ... Yet there’s an uncommon sense of self-possession to this album--a kind of ecstatic calm--that sets it apart from everything else on Top 40 radio right now.

In moving away from the band's stultifying idea of beauty, Kveikur gets at something livelier--and far more lifelike.

It's this mix of little quirks and big beats that makes "Hissing Fauna" so much fun. But it's the way Barnes pushes himself, both to tell the truth and to try new things, that lends these songs a heavier, more compelling edge than most contemporary baroque-pop.

The result confronts old age without giving in to self-pity. It earns its title.

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

Jackson and album producers Keith Stegall and Adam Wright infuse a back-porch feel in original numbers here and savvy selections from other writers, including Jackson's new spin on John Anderson's 1982 hit "Wild and Blue" and Adam Wright's sharply witty "Ain't Got Trouble Now."

These are striking, expertly crafted songs containing left-field bridges and curious diversions, and the result is a memorable record from start to finish.

As music, it's simply exquisite--more controlled and considered than anything Antony and the Johnsons have done and sure to linger in the minds of listeners for more than a season.

Shamir's marriage of club-pop and dance music is striking, if hardly revolutionary on the surface. But the devil-may-care ease with which he plays with his sexuality and dances through the drama pushes the record into the sublime.

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

There's a bit of Broadway, a touch of Motown and a tang of choir nerd to them, but Local Natives avoid the preciousness of Grizzly Bear or the gang-chorus rapture of Arcade Fire. It's a rare band that can use its chemistry as its own instrument.

Taken together, the 11 tracks on Kenny Dennis feel like chapters, and combine to create a work as accomplished--and entertaining--as a well-imagined graphic novel or confidently told short story.

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.

It's entirely contrary to conventional CD construction and all the more appealing for being so. [2 Oct 2005]

Silver Age is an exclamation point to those [Sugar] reissues, a nod to the past but with clear direction forward.

Aquarius heralds an essential new voice, one that coheres 100 current ideas about women, sex, sadness and musical restlessness in one excellent album.

The song selection suggests a band that had internalized a heck of a lot of country ideas at a young age.... Overshadowing all, though, is McKee, whose voice sounds like that of a young Dolly Parton fueled by Exene Cervenka's passion.

As this standout collection of songs shows, with its astounding lyrical acumen and stellar beats, De La Soul surely ranks among the best rap groups of all time. [24 Oct 2004]

Yes Lawd! maneuvers through its 18 tracks with a gleeful sense of abandon. Like the work of the late producer J Dilla, Knxwledge’s rhythms take a few measures to lock into place, but when they do, weird patterns emerge.

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

If [the cover of Dennis Linde’s “Burning Love”] the first reason to check in on this collection, which went largely unnoticed when Warner Bros. released it, the reason to stay with it is the exquisite melancholy the Alabama-reared musician invests in just about everything he sings.

A confident, brash, inventive collection featuring songs that lock into the psyche after only a few listens, the White-produced creation is lyrically and musically challenging and filled with many fresh avenues of exploration, even as it nods to key tones and ideas from throughout the history of pre-rap American music.

Dirty Projectors still get itchy at the prospect of sleek surfaces, and their uneasiness is a thrill to behold.

Accompanying himself on a guitar that probably cost 10 quid, Bugg holds two fingers up to yesterday and moans about being stuck in Speed Bump City in scrappy early-rock ditties as full of Buddy Holly as they are of Bob Dylan.

Its well-trodden themes might not break much new ground, but Made succeeds thanks to Scarface's keen storytelling ability, unimpeachable authority and subtle lyrical complexity.

Overall, Rising Down doesn't replicate the balanced charm of last year's "Game Theory," but in other ways, it's the more provocative effort.

Disco with a vengeance, a whomping, unapologetically airheaded engine of stroboscopic beats and succulent textures that exhumes dance music's time-honored values of celebration and affirmation. [13 Nov 2005]

With Big Baby D.R.A.M. he comes into his own, rapping with verve and sensitivity while fully capturing 2016’s loopy, soulful moment in hip-hop. No wonder he’s smiling.

The band works too hard to seem mysterious. [10 Oct 2004]

Prophet mines Fuller’s energy in the pounding title track, which features the refrain, “I hear the record crackle/ The needle skips and jumps/ Bobby Fuller died for your sins.” Prophet described “Bad Year for Rock and Roll,” another album highlight, in an essay for Talkhouse as “an anthem for anyone who’s ever had a bad year and battles late-night bouts of loss of faith.”

LaFarge backs it up with the joyful noise he and his bandmates bring to all 10 tracks

What's best, despite its New York-centric vibe, those locals looking for a beat-heavy record to crank at full volume while stuck in Los Angeles traffic need look no further.

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.

Lyrically, Drake embraces some of his pet topics on More Life. ... Yet Drake is also flashing signs of emotional growth--glimmers he might feel more confident displaying on a happily jumbled playlist than working into a cohesive album-length statement with its own internal logic.

He captures the otherworldly more often than not. Occasionally, though, the songs overreach or miss some central point.

Some bands use studio trickery like an instrument, but Isis' straightforward tools avoid baroqueness even when the band is throwing deep.

Rich with echoed effects and a rolling momentum that hits heavy on the first beat, the 14 tracks showcase an inspired artist who has yet to make a commercial impact equal to his skills.

Beast is his most instantly inviting album by far and vividly underscores his skills as a producer.

The nostalgia in the production — a blend of crisp digital synth textures and ringing grooves drawn directly from '90s house music — further bolsters the shadowed euphoria of a song like "Sour Candy," in which Gaga is joined by the K-pop girl group Blackpink; "Sine from Above," featuring Elton John, gets a similar friction from the interplay between their voices.

What emerges yet again is his deceptively downhome way of dropping pearls of wisdom into seemingly mundane scenarios, with plainspoken humor, with poignancy, with uncommon insight, and sometimes all three at once.

In the 1980s, artists such as Bronski Beat and David Sylvian used a similar sonic palette. But there's a distance to Greenspan's perfectly constructed grooves and well-modulated lyrics that falls somewhere between ironic and mournful.

She offers grown-up R&B-soul at its finest.

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

Rather than exerting an effort to advance a conversation or craft unique circumstances in which to present notions on love, most of the lyrics on Coexist are one-dimensional planes floating through the group's oft-glorious 3-D spaces.

An eminently dependable outing that's strong on solidly crafted, confidently delivered songs but nearly devoid of surprises or revelations about his artistry.

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

Banhart's pleas for peace and harmony have a guileless charm, and in "When They Come" they assume an epic urgency. But his whimsy is often slight and indulgent. [9 Oct 2005]

The lightness and dexterity of the playing throughout Backspacer, and of Vedder's hard-driving, often playful vocals, come from Pearl Jam's members taking this music seriously, honing in and nailing it.

Like many of his previous efforts, lyrically and conceptually, it's second-to-none. But musically and in terms of execution, it doesn't always hit the mark.

What arrives is an accomplished roots-music album that serves as a reminder of the band’s legacy.

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