Her most direct, distorted disc since she did Helium's The Dirt of Luck a decade ago.

Jurassic 5 deliver on this, their major-label debut.

She selects songs that are somehow special, and presents them with great playing and singing, in a way that clearly means something to her. My bet is that they'll mean something to you, too.

A set doing less of the poker-faced electro revivalism and more of the palette-diversifying pop-song penning.

In stark contrast to most Nashville and alt.country products, even when the words let it down, Barricades & Brickwalls is carried by its classic sound.

Where The Blackened Air sounded haunting, Run to Ruin sounds downright haunted, and, indeed, it's got moments filled with menace and chords written to make you feel uncomfortable.

Amber Headlights fails, when it does, because it's trying to be two things at once: a personal reflection on life and death and a commercially acceptable rock record. But when the album ditches the tricks and conventions that define mainstream rock and focuses on Dulli's songs, it is very powerful indeed.

Me First is a Sunday record, a rainy-day record, a home-alone record, a lying-on-the-floor, staring-at-the-ceiling record.

Seemingly taking its cue from Congleton's willfully bizarre screaming, the band favors atonalism and discordance in its cobbled-together brand of mighty-uptighty protest rock.

With all four members taking the mic, cohesion should hardly be expected. Yet, for all the different styles the band employs on this album, all but the closing number seem indelibly stamped as this band's work, uniquely The Wrens.

This record finds a band scaling the heights of their precise craft in a way that gives upward mobility a good name.

Her most skillful and soulful work thus far.

If there's one misstep on 100th Window, it's that [Sinead O'Connor's] talent and her range are underused.

[The songs] are just similar enough to blend together in a close listen, but they also work as a diverse soundtrack behind whatever it is you're doing.

Strung with just the right amounts of room-filling tearjerkers (lilting keys and strings), the record is likely to raise a lump in your throat, or at least make you feel fuzzy inside and go "awww" at its prettiness.

It's a relaxed and ambitious collection that confirms Ryan Adams' reputation as a top-notch singer and songwriter who easily jumps styles and evokes comfortable sadness with every turn.

It's the conviction and passion within the singing -- both male and female -- that wins me over in the end.

Like a night taxi ride along a broad, lighted, skyscraper-lined city street, Happyness, the band's latest, feels wondrous, daring and slightly dangerous.

The Bay Area punk-rockers mix early Ramones with '80s metal.

Yes, the overall sound is more uniform. Uniformity, however, is not necessarily a bad thing.

The band is never so consumed by brainy showmanship that they forget to rock -- this album kicks harder in places than Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath ever did, or The Strokes ever will.

His guffawing voice makes him sound like every rhyme he delivers is a punchline.

Too much of Half Smiles of the Decomposed, however, does not rock.

Zedek is still shrouded in her aesthetic darkness, is still hungry, still driven; her music is still driven by the same ghosts that've haunted her throughout her career.

More life-affirming than life-changing, on Up the Bracket the Libertines deliver a stellar set of songs that -- both musically and lyrically -- neatly synthesizes the past 40 years of English rock.

This album more than any other swiftly dispels the notion that the trio are condemned to register wary introspection through brooding atmospheres.

What easily could have been a tired retread of rock snob classics instead makes use of the past to provide a recognizable framework in which to deal with the emotional rescue necessary after a damaged romantic relationship.

Swings like a pendulum from playful dance beats, cutesy female vocals and spacey synth effects to feedback-drenched, guitar-heavy rock fronted by a raspy male singer. And it does so with such affection that the unique power of their contagious, inventive sounds cannot be denied.