It seems Gogol Bordello is still stubbornly clutching for the inventiveness of earlier records like Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike and Super Taranta! without truly progressing, leaving us with a Rick Rubin-adorned imitation of their visionary past work.

Ready for Confetti creates that bridge between the romance of gone and the reality of knowing what one does well.

Downhome but polished, Parton and producer Kent Wells create an often pop-country gem that empowers as it punches country radio's cliches with a freshness that says "real country is more engaging than warmed over AC and AOR with fiddles on it."

Despite a few major lulls, Get Gone, for the better part of its run time, is a sharp, unique, and enjoyable record brought to you by a band that has all the energy and musicianship required to ensure each listen is going to be a good time that gleans something new.

This latest song cycle reflects the maturing work of an act determinedly young at heart yet gathering their powers nonetheless to confront encroaching terrors.

Kidsticks feels genuinely special--it’s an exciting reboot and a tantalizing hint that new strategies may be on the horizon, never a bad thing when an artist has been on the job more than two decades.

The album is filled with two-minute romps that systematically tout both their influences and their contemporaries.

The album is at its sweetest with love-laced tracks like 'Water Spider' and 'Summer Morning Rain,' but it truly shines when it tackles deeper issues.

This is music that is nearly impossible to dislike and is a fair recommendation for almost anyone seeking tranquility or quiet music for contemplation. Still, we should expect more from the Eno brothers, who are both iconic musicians in their own right and have left their impression on both the mainstream and experimental worlds forever.

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.

In what very well could be a transitional album for an evolving band, Urata's achingly expressive voice is the unbreakable thread keeping these two somewhat disparate mini albums safely tethered.

It's not that terribly accomplished, it's not terribly coherent, it's not very linear, mature, or even sober-sounding. But that's rock 'n' roll, innit? [#16, p.145]

Music that's radio-ready, but never boring or insipid. [Dec 2005, p.108]

For all its efforts to dazzle, Rogue Wave's music rarely engages the emotions the way it ought to. [Dec 2005, p.124]

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.

In the end, Culture of Fear is a good album, but it doesn't push any boundaries or claim any new ground.

The record is good as background noise, with a few tracks strong enough to stand alone. As a complete story, though, it doesn't exactly deliver.

Like most Banhart albums, Mala is often easier to admire fondly than truly love, particularly when the maestro leans closest to his freak-folk roots.

Jubilee is their best album yet, and may very well be remembered as the most sincere release of 2013.

It wouldn’t hurt Bear’s Den to frolic among the monsters and get a little wild.

Whatever is dealt him, he scrapes the roots, boils the marrow and gives up songs that rabbit punch with delicious truth.

Frontman Taylor Goldsmith experiments with R&B-style falsetto on songs like the title track, and the plaintive piano songs of yore now lean more heavily on keyboard synths and textural effects.

Ultimately, while some might complain about the lack of original material offered in deference to so many concert inclusions, Fairport fans can cheer the fact that 50:50@50 is the band’s best effort in at least two decades.

Listening to Automat from start to finish, you could make a case that Edkins and Menzies were wrong. And as the track sequence arrives at more recent material (skipping-over the band’s 2012 cover of Sparklehorse’s “Pig,” for some reason), you can’t help but wonder what would have been had the band continued to explore freer song structures.

If this album is a misstep, it’s a minor one with more than a few ?moments of redemption--the latest missive from a talented group of musicians likely to find their way back to the path before long.

This batch is as tuneful and accessible as anything Ounsworth has written so far.

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.

Whether exposing light or dark, or some blank hue in the middle, Barnes has all but bulls-eyed his status as a brilliantly daring artist on Lousy.

What's left then is a large number of effective, tightly constructed tracks that are sure to please a wide range of indie/synth pop fans, regardless of the language they speak.

As good as they are stepping into that spotlight, it’s hard not to wish they’d plumb the darkness even further.

Ultimately Enter The Slasher House excellently parallels the campy horror flicks and haunted houses that inspired the band’s name.

And Those Who Were Seen Dancing certainly isn’t the first album to put a fresh spin on the psych aesthetic, but by shrugging off its constraints, Parks has left her own definitive mark on it.

The Magnetic Fields’ eighth album, provides yet another example of why Merritt belongs on the shortlist of America’s greatest songsmiths.

Mid-album burners aside, Brightest Darkest Day is a strong debut, especially coming from artists with established musical pasts.

Lynne has always been a commanding vocalist, and age has only sharpened her delivery and given her more to sing about.

Grohl and company could have continued to make mundane arena rock. That they’ve managed to hunker down and create a collection that proves that they aren’t ready crawl fade away just yet.

She makes daring moves on A New Reality Mind, but with a stronger push, the whole album could be a daring statement, too.

Cowbells and organ chords set the frenetic pace for this crazed and eerie take on surf music that namechecks the godfather of ambient in its punkest track.

At only 43 minutes, the album can take a few listens for adjustment. Like no other rock in 2016, Jessica Rabbit is rife with worthwhile whiplash, with some of Derek Miller’s best riffs no longer taking center stage in front the songwriting.

Granted, Brass doesn’t exactly qualify as real rock, indie or otherwise. Still, there’s passion that’s gleaned from British Sea Power’s attempt at something bolder, a sweeping sound that literally echoes from the rafters.

Lyrically, Buckingham-McVie isn’t nearly as caustic or wistful as the band’s ’70s material, but the songcraft is still there all these years later.

On balance, No Line on the Horizon represents what "October" did all those years ago: a decent step forward that nevertheless recalls the past more clearly than it spells out the future.

Nothing's Gonna Change... is ultimately the kind of album you can curl up into, let the warm tones surround you and rest easy.

The Recession's singles are exceptional, but the filler suffers from a detached and dispirited sound.

It’s apparent even now, though, that the group is still growing and refusing to choose any one path. An inventive, varied record made in this way can succeed, but there needs to be something holding it all together, and Forgiveness is void of any such spine

On Home Again, the young Kiwanuka proves that youth and wisdom are not mutually exclusive and his insights and talents, albeit still a bit raw, suggest great things to come.

An elongated, spacey drone of acidic riffage and flickering psych-rock ambience. [Apr/May 2005, p.135]

On Chemical Chords, there’s nothing in the 14 pleasant-sounding tracks that we haven’t heard them sing about--in breathy, jazz-cat-inflected French--several dozen times before.

An uneven album that encapsulates much of what's gone flat in the scene he helped ferment, along with the few flourishes that make him a vital creative force.

Given Eno’s quarter-century of Bono-fides, this isn’t surprising. Martin’s interests are frequently vague--on 'Lovers in Japan/Reign of Love' he sings about soldiers who must soldier on and runners who must run until the race is won. Seriously?

The riffs still explode with the same epic weight, and Saulnier’s cracked tenor still recalls a jittery Tom Verlaine.

Dormarion should leave returning fans satisfied and new listeners hooked as Lerner continues to refine his skills and churn out strong albums.

Born To Sing is absolutely not all bad, but by the end of the album and rolling tally of excuses, the slack stack measures tall.

Building on a well-received debut, and taking a bold step in a new direction. It’s an impressive feat that Glaspy manages to do both at once.

Say What You Like delivers more of the same qualities that made Paisley your Riding A Bike Friend.

The new versions amp up the bass and echo, often sounding like the original album when heard from a particularly foreboding shower stall.

Not everything has to be pure pop, but nothing else on Brutalism even comes close to sounding like a complete song the way [“Body Chemistry”] does.

Throughout the record, the songs' emotional undercurrent hinges on the subject and content.

Ultimately, this new take on The Psychedelic Swamp mainly serves as a means of sharing Dr. Dog’s backstory and really nothing more.

Between them, Stenborg and Yttling ensure that Our Ill Wills doesn’t sink under the weight of Olenius’ unremitting melancholy or monochromatic tonalities.

Each song feels like its own powerful, strange dream—the worlds described are vague yet familiar, tugging at something in your gut that instinctively pulls towards the characters and loves described.

If Skygreen Leopards still sounds like its surrounding environs--and it does, kinda--the group works to summon a Bay from times past, rather than portraying its current digitized state.

Ellis broadens his musical reach beyond deadly accurate classic country to often austere arrangements that reflect his small etchings of real life without aggressive genre-coding.

So instantly pleasing, the trickery is transparent, a hook to keep listening until the content of Toby Leaman and Scott McMicken’s songs makes itself known.

The album has its moments but suffers from fussy production.

Moving forward, Turn to Crime will probably find more success with continuity and more complete assimilation of its influences.

From start to finish, Information Retrieved sounds confident and deliberate, a consummate release from two deft musicians who've made every note count.

The basic ingredients here--a sexy, intelligent singer and songwriter, a guy who wants to be a guitar god and a drummer who socks the hell out of his kit--come fairly close to defining my notion of perfect music. Together they make a triple-layer torch-song/New Wave/power-pop confection.

Retaking the reins and returning to their indie roots, Cake delivers after the lengthy hiatus. New, old, different or not, Cake fans will have plenty to appreciate.

At their best, the Allah-Las still conjure the tones and attitudes of bygone decades, but at its weakest, Worship The Sun degenerates to mono-tempo drone.

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.

The sound quality is iffy, the track list is scattered and someone has a really annoying laugh, but there’s a sense of magic underpinning this inadvertent live album that captures Alex Chilton performing an acoustic set at the Knitting Factory in New York in 1997.

This is the best Americana album of the year. It reminds us all the way out here in 2016 that Blind Willie Johnson’s songs are still alive, and there is no better way to pay tribute to one of the finest American artists who ever lived.

As The Love Language, Stuart McLamb strengths have always been his knack for production and penchant for heartache—mixing and matching genres for his grand, indie-pop arrangements. An album of reflection, Baby Grand is no different, with McLamb using a breakup and a move west as the jumping off points for his latest offering of songs.

Visitations is a return to Internal Wrangler's more straightforward form. It's not as revelatory the second time around, but it plays to Clinic's main strength. [Feb 2007, p.57]

Even while it seems like Back to Land bubbles in those familiar pools of repetition, their playing more often coaxes the groove to take flight rather than be run into the ground.

To be sure, Planetarium is not perfect. That it hangs together as well as it does is a testament to the considerable talents of the people who created it.

It's a sea change, in terms of the band's sound; their previous albums' hyper-political, sturm und drang punk fury is almost entirely gone, replaced by easygoing power-pop more akin to fellow Pacific Northwesterners Built to Spill. And this pump-the-brakes approach to songwriting yields some of their strongest, most emotionally resonant work yet.

Everything about this record is a shame: it explores new creative territory, the rhyming is solid and syntactically delightful (Big Boi's pronunciations are always more quotable than his lines), and it's a deserving outcast trying to make good as one-record-every-two-years lifer. And it simply does not work.

As an album, Pink Graffiti is a little schizophrenic, but it's a rousing handful of songs.

The album may be the loosest of his career, an unfussy, shuffle-mode assortment of blues-infused jams and steel guitar-haunted ballads that abandon the structural perfection that shaped his canon.

The record sounds, appropriately so, as if it were made by a band experimenting, rather than by one man alone, heartbroken, in his so-often-talked-about Wisconsin cabin.

It’s when the band has something more to say than “Let’s All Go to the Bar” that the poetry becomes worth anything at all.

The tone is certainly slow dances at twilight, but given a shimmer by the understated elegance of Moore’s voice, something that has always sound fragile but defiant at the same time.

While the tribute’s best moments reveal new and rewarding dimensions to his immortal songs nearly seven years after his death at age 74, the collection doesn’t move the needle when it comes to building more awareness around the visionary’s innumerable contributions to pop music.

At its peaks, it is capacious, melancholy and beautifully indicative of the human desire for connection and meaning. It is also, at times, simpering and molasses-y, when Savage has proven he knows how to succeed without shackling himself to those tropes. When it burns low, its ashes are suffocating—but when it flares, it blazes high.

Lyrically, The First Lady offers plenty of revelations.

Maybe it's the presence of guitarist Marc Ribot, maybe it's the arrangements, or maybe it's Dylan's vocal register and choice of themes, but the vibe often recalls a more laid-back Tom Waits or Joe Henry. That's not bad company to keep, though Dylan's delivery lacks any edge or emotional undertow that make the lyrics speak more pointedly than Ribot's stinging guitar.

This album will please fans of the vintage stylings of Adele, Duffy and the late Amy Winehouse.

Dawson's melodic palette's improved, but her stories are mostly told.

There’s plenty of violent syncopation and propeller double kick on ...Of The Dark Light, but it’s the meaty, crawling half time grooves that really make the album crushing.

It takes several listens to realize that the tracks on The Third Chimpanzee each function on an interior logic that’s quite satisfying to climb into, like being inside a video demonstration of a Rubik’s Cube getting solved over and over.

For the most part, Jacksonville City Nights is well paced, with enough uptempo songs spread throughout to balance the sluggish, pensive balladry that bogged down the too-long Cold Roses.

Plumbs current indie folk and country, with varying degrees of success.

It’s not a few hits padded out with rote genre exercises--it’s thematically consistent and maintains a high level of craftsmanship throughout. Dads and grads can both dig it.

[An] expansive and impressive sixth album.

A whisper, sigh, prayer and somehow catharsis, Roses balms life’s harshness.

While it might not be for those looking for something ultra modern or cutting edge, these songs ultimately feel immediate and engaging and worth multiple listens.