Fans of the Everly’s can appreciate the new approach to the songs, and followers of Oldham and McCarthy who aren’t familiar with the band they pay tribute to can also enjoy the album.

The Divine Comedy's abandonment of their precious, nose-thumbing snobbery is abandoning what made them so great in the first place.

In the Kronos Quartet’s 40-year career of melting faces chamber music style, it’s doubtful that Bryce Dessner: Aheym will ever rank as one of the group’s top recordings. It will, however, chronicle the rise the compositional talents of one Bryce Dessner.

Field Music is a classic case of an album that sounds so good that it takes a while before you realize that there really isn't much going on beneath the surface.

W.A.R. is not necessarily a death knell for Monch, he's simply too talented for that. But it's definitely not an album that feels like it took four years to make, either.

It's not that there is anything abrasive or unpleasant or wrong with these songs, it's just that they all feel cut from the same pattern.

Much of the material ends up sounding similar with no one track standing out from the pack.

Born Like This is still a damn fine record, but it’s too inconsistent to do more than simply satisfy your DOOM craving.

There should be little doubt as to whether or not the Depreciation Guild have managed to refine their sound here--the question is if, in so doing, they’ve managed to obfuscate those qualities that made them stand out in the first place.

Pretty much par for the course with the Gourds.

You often get the feeling that something's just a bit off.

If you care passionately about music, you need to hear these songs. Meanwhile, the back half of the album doesn't quite scale the heights of the first two tracks.

Roberts is then left essentially targeting an audience obsessed with novelty, but his ammunition is weak.

Here they sound confident on the solid ground they've built over their previous albums and avoid feeling too comfortable, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.

The fury of emotion in these songs may not always come across as clearly as it could, but you can always feel it simmering underneath, and that goes a long way towards the success of Under the Pale Moon. It's got its flaws, and lays a little too close to influences in spots... but it's also a promising debut.

Haven’t Got The Blues (Yet) is best taken in small, doctor-recommended doses so as to avoid any adverse side effects brought on by the broader, more observational-minded humor on display here.

Franz Ferdinand’s potential is repeatedly hinted at rather than fully realized. If this career shortcut can give us any consolation, it’s that it’s better to show potential than to have none at all.

While there are many indisputable highlights to be found on Ashes Grammar, it can be a chore to find them.

At this point in time, Volcano Choir has made it clear that despite what the scattershot structure of Unmap may have indicated upon its release, this project is for real. Whether it remains on the musical radar for years to come remains to be seen.

The Art of Pretending to Swim is never less than pleasant, and there are no bad songs here. But it's only intermittently interesting because O'Brien's vocals and melodies are mostly just okay.

The surface boldness of the art cannot make up for how exhausting this record is to consume. Lamp Lit Prose is not for the faint of heart.

he two albums fail to cohere both sonically and conceptually. Throughout, Butler’s approach begins to wear a bit thin.

The overall structure of the album as a sound bouncing through the city is excellent, though song-to-song, the album can feel uniform in a more expected way. But that said, this is still a tight 35 minutes of pure punk rock from a band making a welcome return and refusing to go back to where they were.

So while the songs here bang in all the ways you want, they rarely catch you off guard and they rarely tell you where they’re going.

Yes, Hate for Sale is unbalanced. However, the Pretenders maintain an unapologetic devotion to the sound, which defined their success. Hate for Sale maintains a formidability that rejects compromise.

The album does nothing in the last 32 minutes that it doesn’t do in the first two, but the whole runtime is so fundamentally satisfying that getting hung up on its orthodox formula feels joyless and dumb.

Confounding, yet worthy of recognition, Everybody Down is a sound release, with Tempest possessing potential to be truly great, once the logistics are shored up.

Cheatahs bring enough winners to the table to make their debut a worthwhile listen and promise a bright future.

Taken individually, each of Love and Its Opposite’s songs is impressive and affecting. Strung together as an album, though, their sulky nature becomes oppressive.

Intellectually and musically, it's more like a rose bush in winter: thorny, twisty, and hinting at tantalizing beauty. The more time you spend with this album, the easier it is to get caught.

They aren't working out new muscles so much as they're toning and flexing the ones they have. That doesn't make these songs bad, or even boilerplate. Mogwai is good enough at what they do to keep it fresh enough, but when they're not exploring as much on record, we get less to listen for in the bargain.

Celebration have made the type of record about which it can be said that when it's good, it's very good, but when it misses the mark, it misses it by a lot.

The second half here sounds far more solitary, far less shaped by the sound of others and, as a result, murky in their intention and execution rather than their emotions.

It’s another batch of seemingly uninspired grunge rockers lacking the sinewy venom that was the hallmark of early Mudhoney.

Sometimes I wish that the puree were a little less smooth, a little less like wallpaper, and that’s the case with Big Sur. But it’s still a lovely experience, made by one of the masters we have with us in this age.

Accented vocals, softened, clipped consonants and misshapen vowels help to make the familiar sound in some ways new, but ultimately proves to be little more than an exercise in revisionist revivalism of the emo varietal.

Death Lust is an exorcism of youth's most dramatic rehearsals, as well as, musically, an exercise in a concise adaptation of sharp '90s alt-rock between the harder side of Smashing Pumpkins, the softer side of Deftones, and the melodic end of post-hardcore.

The most familiar stuff here is ultimately the least successful.

If nothing else, Rae is to be commended for branching out and trying new styles, but it's that final song that really makes this record worthwhile.

There's a compelling musician under all these layers--of sound and worry--we just need a few more peeled away for us to see him fully.

The slight inconsistency of The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues is enough to convince listeners that if this were a proper album and not merely a stopgap release to satiate the fans, the overall quality of the material would be stepped up considerably.

An album as ultimately disappointing as it is initially thrilling.

Sadly, more than stomping around old ground was hoped for from this tinnitus-inducing power trio.

Every song is a piano recital, a punk rock concert, a tone poem, an art project, a dizzying expanse of white noise, a beautiful mess. But over Gallowbird's Bark, you begin to wonder the appeal of it all.

Daniel’s “brand-new old-fashioned” version of Real Estate is totally workable but is also a reminder that the old-fashioned stuff was better.

Allez Allez doesn’t lack for energy, but the moments we expect--i.e. the bluesy shuffle of “2 Guitars Sing”, the sheer speed of “Loud Dumb and Mean”--while they may sound good individually, create some ear fatigue as they pile up one after another.

They end up sounding sort of like Against Me! home demos where a really good bassist just happened to be on hand.

There seems to be some sort of attempt at fusion here, a line being drawn between modern times and the Civil War era. Maybe it's supposed to be some sort of political message, a statement on the divided times we live in. But if it is, that's never clear.

You're Not Alone takes the gruff, untamed I Get Wet and smoothes those edges out, and not even an ultra-high energy level and walls of guitar distortion can mask the fact that this party is loud, but not that fun.

Efterklang could create an expansive rock album on par with the work of Arcade Fire. But they’re not interested in anything as patent as that; instead, let’s welcome this modest, complex work for its intricate charm and soft beauty.

Kiss Each Other Clean might have a sexy title, but it's just a little too effete to be the great pop record that it really should be.

I like this, but I have a hard time recommending it to others, unless they are more interested in righteous political discourse than in actual songcraft, and unless they are huge fans of unsubtle screeds.

An album that’s a little uneven but manages to work more often than not.

Even when the songs run together, the blur’s pleasant and comforting.

Hills and Valleys is exactly what a fan of the Flatlanders will expect. The songwriting is solid, but not always remarkable. The musicianship is tasteful and flawless.

More varied in its offerings, but also more disjointed than her previous work, Red sounds like a transitional album for Swift.

The overall feeling that this album struggles to slip free of new found influences to resonate in its own right, will not fade.

The group successfully takes the distinguishable drums and textures from traditional Kenyan music and put a new and exhilarating spin on it.

Lesser Evil is not without its merits, and there’s something here for those willing to wade through the murk and warped, fractured imagination of Woodhead, and you may come to realize that he’s doing something truly challenging.

Flawlessly rendered and unoffending to a fault, the perfection of All These Dreams is its greatest shortcoming.

E·MO·TION is still a very pleasing album if not just a shade overambitious, clearly trying too hard to make the same genius pop moments that Kiss churned them out with effortless flair.

There are enough highlights to make And the Anonymous Nobody worth revisiting, but as a whole, the album is just barely above average. A valiant effort, De La Soul, but no dice on this one.

Taste of Love is a good album, but it’s too “good” and not enough “wow” for its own good. TWICE can do better.

Furfour is packed with widescreen synthpop ballads like this [“Acid Ali Khan”], which is either a misstep or an admirable commitment to aesthetic consistency, depending on your taste.

While Day Breaks can be relaxing at times, it also borders on being sloppy on rare occasions such as these.

Geraldines is still rife with the inevitable “bad” Tori songs that seem to be a mainstay for Tori records lately.... The bright spot is that there are only four of these songs, one of which is still fairly salvageable, making the number of great tracks far outweigh the bad ones.

Not all of the compositions here strike gold.

For longtime fans, it will likely be a welcomed batch of new material. The uninitiated, however, might wonder what all the fuss is about.

Creatures is by no means a bad record. It's just not very imaginative, especially from a band that has staked a career on the endless scope of druggy, quasi-psychedelic imagination.

Plainly put, there's something missing in Have You Fed The Fish -- something fresh and whimsical, a tie that binds the songs together, and that endearing twinge that made The Hour such a masterpiece.

For better or worse, it seems like Mice Parade would rather not do things the easy way.

Neither an audio-verité release or a fully-fledged, star-studded duets album. It's quite interesting, but that's all. Now, with this out of her system, she can move on.

These songs all sound like they’re going to turn into something special, but only one or two actually do.

As fun and pleasurable as many of Paisley’s big-screen pop melodies, sharp guitar hooks and detail-filled songscapes on Wheelhouse can be, those two supposedly challenging songs ["Those Crazy Christians" and "Accidental Racist"] point out again how intellectually limited Paisley’s wheelhouse is.

Where The Wild Things Are has much to offer fans of wide-eyed, unpretentious indie-pop, but I can’t help but wish that sentiment could be applied to the soundtrack as a whole.

Taken individually, the album is full of moments of tiny decadence, and though it never really coheres as a whole, there’s a sense of being taken aback by this album.

Despite its open orchestration and more experimental bent, it is Modern Nature’s least interesting release.

With all that early potential, the rest of the album sometimes can’t keep up. The record, though, never loses its way, remaining a convincing and mysterious sonic space throughout, one often worth getting lost in.

It’s a fairly dark record overall, musically and lyrically.

One of the satisfying attributes of Strychnine Dandelion is that the production is raw, yet nuanced enough to perfectly evoke the original feel of the sounds the assembled musicians are immersing themselves in. However, that also means that the Parting Gifts constantly straddle the line that divides homage and pastiche.

Ambulance finds the Amazing pushing forward, trying new angles at their established sound. But these later songs make the band seem uncomfortable in new, spare settings.

Isn’t It Now? summarizes some of their best attributes. It also shines a harsh light on their self-circumscribed limits.

No doubt, The Route to the Harmonium is an impressive artistic statement. Too often, and especially when compared with Yorkston's previous work, it is something less than enjoyable.

Essentially what the Juan MacLean have here is a straightforward pop album, but as with the worst pop albums, the amount of filler overwhelms the killer.

There’s not a whole lot here that really distinguishes itself from similar material. However, the Lovely Bad Things do their shtick fairly well, and there are some outstanding moments as outlined above.

For major label singer-songwriter stuff, not bad. Moore knows her way around hooks.

It could use a bit more dynamism, but its sophistication almost makes up for that.

Unraveling may not be the best We Were Promised Jetpacks record, which still goes to These Four Walls, but it is the album that demarcates a clear if ultimately less certain direction.

While they're far from the first band to overdo it on that element, it's very noticeable after a few listens to the album. But the trio has an attitude that manages to be both aggressive and charming.

Barring a couple solid songs that fit their catalog fairly nicely, What Went Down offers nothing that their previous albums don’t deliver in a much more satisfying and ample way.

Growing pains and all, Tarot Classics does keep things interesting enough by working with and building on the qualities that helped Surfer Blood make a big splash with Astro Coast.

As a primer, a first Sage Francis purchase, it’s fine; in light of his previous achievements, less so.

There are many hits and many misses, but again, the pure energy of the whole thing can't be denied.

The pure prettiness of the melodies tends to blur the songs together into one super-catchy super-song; gone is the texture, the songs are polished to transparency. The album is good but lacking something central to make it stick out in any way: everything is rounded off.

On Tomboy, he seems about half-awake, caught between the haziness of sleep and the defensiveness of waking life.

Serpentine Prison may not be perfect, but it allows us a new look at a very familiar voice, and for Berninger to achieve that two decades into his career is no small feat.

There’s real talent here. However, these unflinchingly honest punks still have yet to figure out what to do with all the noise they channel.

There's little doubt that Sun and Shade could be a satisfying 30-minute indie-folk record with a bit of self-editing. Simply put, Woods would be wise to keep the psych-drone exercises in the live department, where they're more of a treat and less of a chore.