The record sounds lush and epic, with a variety of genres and sounds all peeking their heads through the band’s established heavy-melodic-rock sound. There are mellow, intimate tunes and amps-to-11 anthems alike, and plenty that split the difference.

The album illustrates Veirs’ recovery across its 14 tracks with a deft and assured hand.

The band's third and possibly best full-length leans in a bit harder than usual, and dazzles throughout.

These damaged siren songs are a harsh counterpoint to the organic flow of "The Tipping Point," but nonetheless deliver an honest and abrasive diatribe within The Roots’ legacy of civil commentary and inspired musicianship.

Tha Carter III hearkens to when rap meant rapp: Isaac Hayes talking for days about some girl he broke with, or Bobby Womack signifying while strumming a blues guitar.

The most sublime moments on Pang match the all-cylinders feeling of falling into new love, each neuron so stimulated by the feeling that they threaten to overload and collapse entirely.

Lost in the Trees rethink of the music of grief and catharsis, turning this album into a loving and lively wake without neglecting either the precariousness of life or the horrors of death.

Overall, Gold Motel stands out as a non-guilty pop pleasure that will leave hip listeners singing, dancing and apologizing, "Sorry, I'm not sorry."

Wennerstrom has said that this is the most cohesive that they have been as a band when recording an album, and the evidence couldn't be more abundant.

Known for his skills on the keys and a voice that retains a lovely purity, even in falsetto territory, Legend does indeed evolve with this record.

Mulcahy’s least predictable album: there’s something memorable and unexpected lurking around every corner.

A brand new bag of impossible shapes, rumbaing in esoteric formation. [#13, p.121]

While the emotional payoff of the album proves more satisfying than anything she’s done so far, the individual tracks don’t stand alone as well.

Occasionally his voice gets lost in the cathedral of sound, but Personality remains a joyful noise. [Sep 2006, p.78]

Maserati have made a space rock record that’s both challenging and accessible, and their sound is completely dialed in.

These songs are like shit-eating grins from ear to ear, and you can simply feel that they're played with such happiness.

Takes some weird chances. [Jun/Jul 2006, p.123]

The source of Swing Lo Magellan's charm, for it truly is a charming collection, is that it's a record that doesn't try be anything other than exactly what it is.

St. Vincent reaches, and while she doesn't quite find it throughout, listening to the reach is certainly more interesting than listening to an album that answers just one of the questions again and again and again.

On Be Set Free, Langhorne Slim perfectly captures the lyrical simplicity of bygone times with straightforward lines like, “I don’t want to break your heart, but I probably will.”

Excitement Plan--like its author--is full of hope, realism, humor and just enough crazy to weather the storm.

A synthetic/organic melting pot where experimental electronics meet birdsong and wind, Tracks and Traces is a Krautrock classic with a heavily mediated release history that renders it ultimately mysterious--the more music we hear, the further we get from what actually happened in that room.

In Colour's palette trades the silver hues of frosty Stockholm for the quivering bronze of cornfields in July. [Apr/May 2006, p.110]

[Cryptograms] occasionally surprises with its accessibility. [Apr 2007, p.58]

Though Swearin’ are emotionally fully-grown on Fall into the Sun, there’s still ample youthful energy, making it one of the brightest, ruddiest albums you’ll hear this year.

Raw and revealing.

Whether it’s the start of a beautiful musical friendship or just a flash in the cast-iron pan, Crutchfield and Williamson’s I Walked with You a Ways is roomy, real and charming, and it’s one of the best Americana albums of the year and a powerful display of songwriting skills.

Adore Life builds on that sound [on 2013's Silence Yourself], and frames it in a contemporary context that is less throwback than thrilling.

This very quick, very pretty album is a good new look for TV on the Radio, and longtime fans will also feel at home with Seeds.

Like every Pissed Jeans album before it, Honeys is a unique balancing act of dumb and smart, as nimble as it is brash.

On Ritual In Repeat, Tennis discovers new capabilities well, and it shows that a record doesn’t necessarily need to have a central theme for it to be an ambitious collection of songs.

This lush, lustful record contains some of Sivan’s most adventurous work to date, with its global influences and club-ready beats vividly evoking the catharsis of being in touch with yourself and your community.

Weekends captures the ambivalent mélange of feelings that makes it damn hard to leave the couch after a crushing break-up.

On Let’s Be Still, the warm vocal tandem of Josiah Johnson and Jonathan Russell is pared down to its core vibrancy, as two soul-sapped, lovelorn bellowers more casually croon their wishes and woes.

Years to Burn distills the qualities that distinguish Calexico and Iron & Wine as individual artists. If it’s another 14 until we get to hear them play once more, it’ll be a sin against their talents.

Like its predecessors No Time for Dreaming and Victim of Love, Changes is a strong entry into the canon of modern soul with a vintage heart. Even better is what the album represents for Bradley: after decades of struggle, the Screaming Eagle of Soul has come fully into his own.

A dream-pop icon teaming up with a protégé on an album of western(-ish) songs is probably not a collaboration anyone was looking for, but if Dean Wareham vs. Cheval Sombre was unexpected, it also turns out to be unexpectedly satisfying. They sing well together, they picked interesting songs to interpret and they perform them in a way that is reverent without feeling too earnest.

While it occasionally loses itself in the past, Old Flowers doesn’t rely solely on nostalgia for its power. Andrews never wallows. She is somehow able to be both full of regret and gratitude at the same time. At its very best, Old Flowers recalls the melancholy piano sing-song of Tapestry and the forlorn love songs of country greats like Emmylou Harris and Linda Rondstadt.

Daydream is a lot of fun, and even though it does what it does really at a high level, it ultimately can’t distance itself from the source style and succumbs to playing the part too well.

The collection sounds like a deep dive into the ominous shuffling of Color’s outlier titular track, an ideal musical direction given the subject matter.

For every near-perfect slab of garage-pop, such as 2009's Help, there's a tougher-to-sit-through, psych-folk influenced effort like 2010's Warm Slime. Castlemania splits the difference, but mostly for the good.

In the past, Solange dabbled with genres and moods like finger-paints; with True, she's made some bold, inventive brushstrokes.

The Hold Steady’s most musically adventurous collection of songs so far, pairing singer Craig Finn’s vivid storytelling with arrangements that go in some unexpected directions.

It’s as lively a rock album as you’ll hear this year.

Effortlessly blending rock, blues, country and soul, Atkins has delivered on Mondo Amore with a collection of songs that invites you into her world.

Both bold and refreshing, Rhine Gold's dreamy approach to its dark arrangements delivers a unique take on orchestral pop.

Loss and the possibility of redemption represent the twin themes of pain and glory fueling the Celtic-punk band’s ninth album, a collection of songs by turns bleak and triumphant--and sometimes both at once.

It’s all danger and gangsters and loving the ladies when there’s a spare minute. Meanwhile, amidst the hootin’ and hollerin’, the soul will be sated, and saved.

Despite the different focus on Walks for Motorists, it’s less a reinvention for White Hills than an evolution from a prolific band with a restless streak.

With their first two LPs, they proved themselves to be self-aware witnesses to their own histories and heartbreaks. With the third, however, The Beths solidify themselves as expert observers of the joy and anxiety that define our time.

It is both quintessentially Sleater-Kinney and entirely unlike any record they’ve made before—which makes it a thrilling listen even during the rare moments that don’t quite gel.

Soccer Mommy mirrors the melancholic joy of Death Cab For Cutie with the emotive songwriting of Now, Now, reworking some older demos into mournful indie-pop that are introspective, yet intensely relatable.

Siberia seems to have satisfied a need in Ideskog to break from production conformity, and while there are weak spots lyrically, its shadowy memories and hazy snapshots of the Russian railway emit a steady warmth you can return to.

The whole project is kept above water by the spirit that Donahue and Grasshopper, and their other guests, bring to the sessions.

It typically takes young musicians quite a long time to find their unique sound, but we’re lucky to hear Julien Chang searching for his in real time.

Nuance, detail and careful construction make the songs live and breathe. When all those elements come together, the home in Porterfield’s songs can feel pretty universal.

His third solo album is a subdued sonic adventure compared to some of his more frenzied output.

In other words, it’s a David Byrne album: cerebral, but with an irresistible beat; and exuberant, but in a way that is self-contained. And if America right now is something less than a utopia, Byrne is a force for positivity, exhorting us all to do better.

The bottom-line is that these guys do what they do very, very well.

They don’t have to be angry all the time to get their point across, and the vulnerability they show throughout these six new songs showcases a band having a bit more fun than they’d like to let on.

Packed with simple, poignant lyrics, the record keeps things awesome without falling prey to its own overindulgent qualities.

Dr. John shows us the scope of Satchmo’s influence, how the early American music that he pioneered has blossomed into a multi-faceted music that still has his soul at its center.

Boman more than makes good on her potential with Dream On. At once intimate and intense, her first LP is the work of an artist stepping fully into her own.

It’s a subtle album, built around gentle, dream-like musical arrangements that belie the tougher sentiments underpinning these songs.

Through a unified blend of graceful melodies and powerful vocals, William Elliott Whitmore generates a sincere message-to reap a sweet harvest of happiness, listeners must work through the fields of pain.

Anaïs Mitchell is a grownup album. It’s the first great folk album of the year, but more crucially, it’s a quiet personal triumph for Mitchell herself. Disclosing one’s own truths rarely sounds this graceful.

No other Nine Inch Nails record has been so mindful of dance and electronic trends from outside its own bubble, or the resurgence of many of these sounds recently. It’s a nice surprise from a radio-rock band returning to the majors without a guilty conscience for wanting to sell his art for $10.

Throughout much of the album, Xeno and Dust sound stuck between pop and avant garde. Here, the commit to the latter, with promising results. That’s Xenoula in a nutshell: Often weird. Oddly pretty. Always full of promise.

They’re not doing anything new (as they said themselves with the title of their debut What Did You Expect From The Vaccines?), but there’s something about infectious melodies, sticky guitar riffs and relationship observations being made by an aloof Englishman that never gets old either.

In lesser hands, what makes Holland such a distinctive vocalist might also limit her range, yet she inhabits these songs confidently and dexterously.

Dream Wife have tapped into that certain je ne sais quoi that makes for a compelling emotional outlet, even if their energy is slightly dampened on So When You Gonna…. Their vulnerability shows strength and playfulness are the best weapons against malaise on their new record, proving themselves to be a much-needed balm in 2020.

The lyrics explode with angst, music fills the scenes with detail, and the answers all raise questions.

Mother is a good, at times even great, start to a solo recording identity for Natalie Maines, but lacks only in the listener’s greatest desire, to learn more about Maines.

The songs are fast and short; the energy throughout the album is infectious and continuous--which helps to not overwhelm with its cranked-to-11 setting and should have most eager and willing to keep coming back.

For as much as Oceania felt like a heavy return to form, Monuments is familiar in the sense that Corgan’s taking a thoughtful swing in a new direction.

There is a deeply embedded sense of travel in that certain melodies or musical sounds will never repeat, thus the arrangements feel exploratory or impulsive.

On Country Squire, his best release yet, he grapples with masculinity, family and the South in ways that feel entirely new, despite sounding really traditional. I’ll listen to his rocking chair tales any time.

At 21 tracks, Cruel Country is, unsurprisingly, a bit too long. ... As it is, it’s an album that gets back to basics and shines a spotlight on a particularly uncluttered version of Wilco that offers a little something for everyone.

Every once in a while, the album offers a flash of something ancient, mysterious--a foreboding glimpse behind the curtain of the human psyche at some truth so cavernous, frightening and hard-to-grasp that we can’t normally focus our eyes long enough to see it.

The charts are starved for something real and down-to-earth, and her songs, while heavily produced in comparison to some of her folksier beginnings, have an earnestness to them that can’t be fabricated. Rogers’ career may have first sparked on the internet, but now it’s a fire burning IRL.

What Webb has created is so rich, so delightfully off-kilter, that an auxiliary listen is necessary the same way another sip of pickleback is necessary.

Uniform Distortion, while not quite living up to its title in sound or substance, finds James pulling back on the atmospheric embellishment that characterized his earlier solo work and revving up the energy and intensity. Nearly every offering boasts an elevated level of drive and determination, a fervent exuberance that makes no apologies for lack of restraint.

All in all, Chubby and The Gang are so much more than the average shouty, loutish band. For one thing, they’re wonderfully out of step with the speak-sing post-punk that has engulfed London recently. Chubby and The Gang play the kind of plug-and-chug, throwback punk and pub rock that never exactly left, but doesn’t feel especially fashionable in 2020.

The lack of universality to much of it keeps it from being the great album it wants to be, and some of the fascination seems to stem from 2013 celebrity culture obsession and speaks to the need to disappear from our own lives and become so wrapped up in the world of the rich and famous.

The tracks on these EPs were not gathered from the cutting-room floor; they were every bit as strong as those found on the aforementioned albums [Tigermilk, If You’re Feeling Sinister and The Boy With the Arab Strap].

The complexity of the album is minimal, but McCombs manages to craft eight songs that explore a lighthearted lyrical tone and dynamic view of life.

There’s a warmth to this symbiosis that’s new for Patton, and while it may not be as explosive a revelation as Black Origami was, it makes for a record that feels like a vital new step in Jlin’s evolution as an artist.

Scandalous isn't a throwback, it's a throw forward.

This interplay between extremes has always been Cloud Cult's strong suit; the snaking tempos and sudden rave-ups and ear-jarring bangs have been necessary to balance out the self-serious personal lyrics. Here, the band does well to incorporate tension and volume--you just wish for more of both.

[There] are minor blemishes on what otherwise is a strong comeback album for Snow Patrol that proves Lightbody’s still got it. Now, though, his hooks are weathered a bit by life and loss and struggle.

Aytche is a deeply accessible, detail-rich drift that, like most great music in this vein, captivates with delicate layers that unfold further with repeated, careful listens.

His latest effort is in many ways subtler and even more subdued than much of his work, but it’s an album that sticks.

For all the ugliness, all the bitterness, all the fear and regret, Death Dreams can be devastatingly beautiful.

As a debut album, The Fool is certainly an impressive first outing.

The trio has consistently blended their Nashville roots with classic rock and a stoner rock outlook in their previous albums without ever tripping over themselves and falling into a rut.

It’s Beam and Hoop who manage to remain the focus of the proceedings, giving the album its low-key lustre. We can only hope that there will be another volume of similarly cerebral hymns to follow.

After forays into other sounds over the past decade, The Men have come back to their old digs, kicked in the door and cranked up the amplifiers. It’s as if they had never been away.

It may be overstating things to say Duterte and Kempner belong together, but their musical union sure is satisfying. Written and recorded during a pre-pandemic, two-week-long creative outburst in a rented California house, the songs on Doomin’ Sun bring together the two artists’ best qualities.