This time around, though, female backing vocals add interest and drama to what is essentially a rich batch of breakup songs that somehow leave you feeling good.

It’s distancing stuff, though also hookier than earlier LPs. But it’s the humanity and levity of the lyrics that’ll really get you on board.

It's easily his most personal work yet, and even though the story of his mother's difficult life is hardly universal, the results are deeply moving and richly evocative.

Turkey is erratic, disjointed and full of loose garage swagger--in other words, classic Krol.

Despite the somewhat pessimistic prognosis, Davies is a sharp enough tunesmith to keep his darkly droll song cycle upbeat and rockin’ throughout.

Her best album in more than a decade.

it’s unfair to expect him to suddenly modernize now. He does, however, explore some unexpectedly psychedelic terrain here, which he handles impressively.

XXXX is more than just pastiche, however. Songs like "Lonely’s Lunch," "She’s Spoken For" and "Glory," a callback to their earlier sound, reveal a chemistry that is entirely this band’s own.

With production duties primarily hot potatoed between Hagler and Kenny Beats, the beats and feel are consistent and strong while not getting in the way of Staples’ flow, which is elastic and modern without losing an inch of his clarity and bluntness.

Once you get past the placid bit at the beginning, it's straight into the relentlessly pummelling assault we've come to love and expect from the mighty Japanese trio, and Pink's wallop-per-second rate puts it in a class with Heavy Rocks at the top of the Boris heap.

They put their cloudy heads together and came up with the power-chord-slashing and hobbitty keyboard werping goods but wisely didn’t lose all the dirty distortion and strummy acoustic bits.

The Hungry Saw may make Leonard Cohen’s stuff sound positively giddy, but it’s a positive turn for the Tindersticks.

He still sounds like Hayden, but he’s stripped down the production to better approximate the sound of a band in a room. That bare-bones intimacy works perfectly with his delicate voice and melancholic songs.

Even if they’re generally delivered with an easier flow and more laid-back vibe, sharp production and catchy hooks increase each track’s impact.

Tell Me How You Really Feel is her most inward-looking album but also one that pulls back to engage with bigger political and cultural conversations more directly than we’re used to from her.

The production does justice to the 80s-underground-evoking mix of surf, punk, industrial and shoegaze.

All the tracks on her eighth studio album, Our Bright Future, are as clear as her voice, and the lyrics are simple and honest.

For all its glossy, soul-searching schmaltz, the band’s full-length debut is a polished record full of consistently catchy hooks.

Rihanna is at her most adventurous, and while we're not completely convinced that all the wailing hard rock guitars suit her, the aggression makes sense within the context of the album.

It falls short of the band’s more certified classics like Death Is This Communion and Blessed Black Wings, but Electric Messiah feels basically satisfying--like a meal ordered from your favourite restaurant. A heavy, greasy, gut-ballasting meal.

The 10-year-old band should be able to get a dance floor moving more than ever with these songs.

Definitely on the arty end of the post-rock gradient, No Age manage to channel elements of other great bands who have woken up drunk on the lo-fi line between pretty and noisy.

This means there are fewer musical surprises, though one comes when Martin Doherty takes over lead vocals for a song, seemingly out of nowhere. It makes Mayberry’s return to the mic even sweeter.

No One Is Lost is the best kind of pop music: the universal made intimate (and vice-versa), one note at a time.

Although the album revels in its sonic clutter (it’s remarkable how they can make percussive rhythms sound both primitive and absurdly futuristic), there are tracks scattered throughout to catch your breath.

It's Cut Copy's most textured and rhythmically complex record, and also irresistible in its emotional simplicity.

It's Collett's ability to lyrically and aurally crystallize moments in time that makes this album such a delight.

Regardless of Tatum’s ever-shifting musical obsessions or emotional moods, an enjoyable lightness and subtlety to the arrangements and overlapping textures draw your ear in closer.