Fans of Anne Briggs and Vashti Bunyan will find a lot to love here.

The record revels in the band’s enjoyable madness.

If you still have a stomach for violent, vulgar content, this is recommended.

Their lush and vivid sounds feel like a reaction to change--and the self-reckoning required to move forward.

The Mississippi native leads a spartan group that includes the Felice brothers’ Ian Felice and Greg Farley through 10 woodsy cuts that convey warmth, loneliness and the rural South’s sinister underbelly.

The songs on Elaenia sound closer to psychedelic jazz and post-rock, and feel more like improvised jam sessions than carefully sequenced electronic music. It's a risky strategy, but the gamble pays off big.

The singalong choruses are brilliant, but some of the sillier material might be best experienced live.

Frances McKee and Eugene Kelly had randy sides to them back in the 80s, and that hasn't abated.

Cam’ron has evolved on this no-frills release, and it is disarmingly effective.

While it's clear that Last Train's combination of electro and house with hip-hop and R&B is Combs's baby, it's the group format that makes it work as an album.

The rollicking and densely layered samples send Muldrow--whose vocal style draws from jazz, soul and gospel--in an unabashedly funky direction, resulting in some of her most emotionally satisfying vocal arrangements and full-throttle rock 'n' roll dramatics to date.

A couple of songs, like How To Forget, are well written but not quite interesting enough musically. Still, this album proves that Isbell is still one of the best songwriters in his genre.

By dispensing with typical pop structure in favour of improvisation and repetition, the pair achieve and maintain an openness and momentum that Someday World lacked. It feels alive.

It's a bold, intense and confrontational album that uplifts through catharsis.

Though the tunes themselves seem unassuming, based on conventional chord progressions and strumming patterns, that simplicity draws attention to Darnielle's fine songwriting.

Written and recorded on the road during a long North American tour supporting his recent full-length, The Wild Hunt, the five tracks maintain a consistently downtrodden tone.

Gravez is a unified listen whose influences serve Hooded Fang’s greatest strength: infectious hooks.

It's a mellow album, but definitely quirky, and with enough rawness to offset her soft, pretty vocals.

The album mines go-to country clichés like driving and women (“Put your sugar down on my front seat, cuz you truly know what’s good for me,” Wilson implores in the opening track, North), but for the most part the songwriting is diverse and mature.

These three suites get under your skin in a good way, none more so than the final track, a haunting gothic tale of sororicide sung by fellow Vermonter Sam Amidon.

As overwrought as the lyrics are, the songs have an attractive, dreamy, atmospheric quality that helps the London band avoid embarrassing teen melancholy. It's also surprisingly hypnotic.

Touch doesn't live up to the wild standards of the local group's ballistic live shows, but its focus on connection elevates it to more than just riff-blasting fun (although that's in good supply, too).

It uses funk, jazz and simple loops that blend elements of rap’s spiritual origins with more recent sounds in a way that allows Rapsody’s throwback lyrics and casually complex bars to shine.

The result is a collection of upbeat indie rock songs that brings out the very best in both players.

It’s his excellently loose band (featuring M. Ward and Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley), intimate vocals and fondness for chimes that keep the disintegrating threads woven together.

The result is pragmatic but also quite creative and surprisingly catchy.

While their spacious, mostly instrumental music makes good use of dynamics (and reaches ear-bleeding volumes during live shows), they mark their label switch from Matador to Sub Pop with a lightness (as in absence of darkness, not bereft of weight) that's refreshing.

A perfect balancing act.