The Coathangers bring some good punk sensibility to the table but the majority of these tracks lack the velocity that would bring them into moshable territory.

This is a permed, big-hair monster of a record, and even if the band's name makes no sense and other critics seemed to have turned their nose up to it, I like the nostalgic blast that this record brings forth.

I found Spookyland to be at their best and most original at their extremes: haunting, bare ballads or big, proto-shoegaze anthems, where they create a soft, pillowy canvas for Gordon’s poetry, rather than jam its sensitivity into a noisy, pub band format. And yet, Spookyland succeeds throughout to create their own twisted universe of youthful feeling, using their moody rock ‘n’ roll to process a mad world.

Often lighter-than-air, Does You Inspire You? at times threatens to float away.

There's not a song here that feels useful outside the context of another chapter in Kasher's discography, and thus ultimately doesn't seem likely to inspire much emotion outside of the core Saddle Creek crowd.

All that studio thaumaturgy is still present on The Sun and the Neon Light, but as Booka Shade’s bid that they’re human after all, the calculations here come off with a less-than-wholly organic equation that feels flat, not taking into account the wild variation that comes with raw human contact.

The Church of Rock and Roll is a transitional album from a band looking where to go next.

The Bardo Story is an appealing shot of homespun psychedelia.

The ten tracks on Born Again might comfort those who feel the same but would not inspire one to take action.

At the end of the day, you really can't blame the duo for impressing the hell out of a generation of hipsters too young and/or musically ignorant to know their Zapp from their Roger.

Electronic Projects is ideal both for new listeners--as it offers a good representation of the Apples in Stereo sound--and for seasoned Apples fans who desire tracks they may not have heard before.

Origin Vol. 1 lives up to its title in the sense that it shows TSOOL fully immersing its music in its classic rock influences. On the other hand, the disc doesn't have the same epic scope of Behind the Music, and as a result it's still something of a letdown.

Unabashedly grand, deliriously enjoyable.

These slightly warped combinations -- resentment and frustration, yearning and insight, naïveté and fascination -- aren't so different from the simple-seeming sentiments on most pop records, even if the instrumentation, vocals, and programming are unusually layered and carefully produced.

His pop smarts are sharp and bright, but never too flashy.... A very impressive debut.

A bit of streamlining and editing would help DeGraw on future releases, but with songs like “Empty Vases” DeGraw proves that he’s a solo artist to watch.

Metal is supposed to be larger than life, especially in Slipknot’s case, and on this record, their attempt to sound more musically varied has them coming off as tired, apathetic, and above all, weak.

Skiptracing is the journey we get to take with Brettin and it’s a fine one overall . The tones are warm, the sequencing is great, and the songs are mostly solid.

Rodriguez-Lopez’s work is excellent across Que Dios Te Maldiga De Corazon, making exciting and rewarding arrangement choices. It’s not like The Mars Volta needed freshening up only seven months later, but it’s a worthwhile project.

Bleachers takes steps, stuttering though they may be, towards a more cohesive identity as a band. This record feels less bogged down than its predecessors by glaringly forced attempts at stadium-swelling pop hits better suited for collaborators like Swift.

At its core, In the Wild lacks any sort of substance.

It's a return to the band's classic sound, before they went all gooey on Turbo, and sounds like the album fans had originally hoped they would release in 1986, instead of the overproduced party rock record they ended up putting out. This is old school to the core.

It’s absorbing and fascinating, but for as much as it would seem to be the polar opposite of Surrounded by Silence, it actually suffers from a remarkably similar affliction, that being that we, as listeners, are offered no insight into what Herren is trying to say.

It seems a bit piecemeal, unaware of its own strengths. But those strengths, represented in the album’s best tracks, give the Moondoggies an easy edge over upstart ubran-rustic folk-rock acts such as Treetop Flyers.

Endless Wonder sounds almost sure of itself. Like Elbogen’s stumbling, bumbling, imperfect characters who learn lessons along the way, he’s getting better at it all the time.

Into the Future ultimately stands as a middling Bad Brains effort.

All the pieces are there, and many fit together quite well, but the sum of the parts is not delivering what was promised.

The energy of the instrumental arrangements here are enough to carry the bulk of Come Into My House‘s twelve cuts to satisfactory ends, even if they are lacking in emotional handlebars to grip on to.

Their music is fun and exciting, if not earth-shattering or deep.

So LP4 may seem like a glorified mess but it has all the coherence and sensorial vigor of one of those Ed Hardy ink designs: unabashedly gaudy with a hard-assed physique; its Byzantium details revealing a mid-to-late century decadence that may still only appeal to a select audience.

Bramwell strings together fine, grabbing lyrics, but he's become too enamored of his literary bent, trying to pack together poetic devices that head off to nowhere.

They might only be re-shaping the wheel with March Forth, but they do it a damn fine job of it.

Overall The Phenomenal Handclap Band, despite its talented cast and ambitious reach, can't quite pull all threads together. Next time, maybe, with more hand claps.

Page shows that he still has the ability to write a great pop song here and there on this album, and most of the tracks are at least decent. But his collaborators here, longtime friend Steven Duffy and Craig Northey of The Odds, seem all too willing to go along with Page's indulgences.

Franco Blanco, Black Frank, or whatever he wants to call himself doesn't make bad albums, whether with the Pixies, solo, or semi-solo, but the fact that The Golem Rock Album is merely decent is a letdown on its own.

The music is ... okay. It’s okay. Probably the most conventional of Taylor’s 13 albums, My World Is Gone is usually at its best when driven by electric guitarist Mato Nanji, who gives a fine sense of the distance to and from the grand lost landscape that the words evoke.

Often, maybe too often, the band’s zeal to call bullshit makes for metaphors and images that push too far.

Though it is steeped in a subgenre that often can seem tapped out, Moaning is a strikingly accomplished debut.

This time out, Carey sheds the vital to prioritize the simple, and simple melodies aren't substantial enough to fill A Hundred Acres.

Though it’s got one clunker, The Roadside bodes well for his future.

Gravity The Seducer finds its place as Ladytron's most hypnotic record to date--one that has no resident bangers, yet doesn't seem to care.

Slow Dance is a winning collection of songs, calling to mind Stephin Merritt minus about 20 recording tracks or Sparks in a reflective groove.

All of the composite aspects that make this band so compelling are present on Then Came the Morning. Unfortunately, they’re misallocated in pretty obvious ways.

Sonic Highways doesn’t break new ground, but for those accustomed to these five guys’ wares, it’ll suffice when they desire a concise reaffirmation of what makes them appealing in the first place.

For the most part, though, he’s more disciplined than he’s ever sounded throughout the entire disc, not allowing his personality distract from the richness of the musical arrangements.

It demonstrates that simplicity is a viable option for accomplished songwriters.

While Shotter’s Nations contains some of the brightest spots we have seen from Doherty in several years, there remains a few songs with wasted potential.

Jetlag is a lot of interchangeable tunes that rests on the shoulders of Milosh’s undeniably pretty voice, seemingly released as soon as possible to capitalize on his success with Rhye after laboring in obscurity for the greater part of the decade.

Everything else on the album acquits itself with varying degrees of resonance.

Whatever culminations take place seem stressed, not natural and much less "earned."

It's all appropriately spooky, though Cowgill's tendency to "sing" like Mark Lanegan doing an impression of Tom Waits suffering from laryngitis can be a bit of a distraction, obscuring some of the gothic weirdness of his songs.

What remains are a few fleeting moments of quiet beauty, and they do not appear often enough, nor are they substantial for an album of this length.

Sky Full of Holes finds Fountains of Wayne back at the top of their game.

Every song seems to run at roughly the same tempo, and any shifts in mood are too subtle to mark the passing of one track to the next. Ultimately, though, the album’s greatest deficit is its lack of strong and memorable melodic ideas.

Good stuff, and it sounds raw as hell.

As an Alan Jackson album, Freight Train is so consistently likable that it makes me imagine that he might keep getting better over time, as well.

It tops a fine collection that reveals the kind of production and songwriting progress that every band which treads water should aspire to.

Dracula is the sort of successful experiment that comes along too infrequently in modern pop music.

Spend the Night With... feels somewhat empty, and even though that might be the point, Cheena’s music can sometimes feel like a vapid novelty: fun while it lasts but short on ideas that would give you a desire to revisit.

In the Rainbow Rain is unapologetic and adventurous; through it, Sheff and Co. don't ask us to ignore the world's problems, just to keep dancing in spite of them.

These are collaborations worth hearing, but in no way at all do they add up to an end product that is particularly memorable or consistently engaging.

For this particular moment, though, Oh Fortune reveals that Mangan is still a lightweight.

The gimmickry of Moon’s music does prevent his debut from ever being labeled as great art, but it certainly doesn’t prevent it from being one of 2013’s most ecstatic, all-out fun albums.

Sigh No More inspires evangelism through sheer force of will. Between Mumford's gripping wail and the Sons' whirlwind revelries, it's a revival hard to resist.

Midwinter Graces is 12 tracks long, a perfect length, and most of the production is spot-on.

With his melodic knack and thrift-shop-debonair retro charm, Jones posits himself as a promising understudy to the similarly-inclined Britpop group Pulp.

Dr. Dog is a band that can write a hell of a great song. But on Critical Equation, they're mostly treading water.

As Baba Yaga moves on, the band vacillates between self-indulgence and self-consciousness, sometimes unsure what they’re doing with so many big sounds, other times desperately trying to sound like the next big southern-rock band.

Stupendously packaged, the music robustly mixed and often achieving new levels of bleak beauty, 10,000 Days is too strong a work to call a disappointment, but the constant need to fill out a CD to 75-80 minutes is threatening to become the band’s undoing.

The sonic template, all the same, keeps this album less intense, and far less thundering. It shimmers in a light rain interspersed with sunshine. Still, haziness persists.

On the new record, much to our surprise, the majority of the vocal lines sound half-baked at best, and with the odd exception, not for a second memorable.

Iif you’re looking for some pop perfection, this album displays it in droves.... However, things take a huge tumble when Years & Years try not to stick to their confessional-electronic niche.

In the end, For All I Care isn’t a bad album. It’s just a very unremarkable effort from a band that we’ve grown to expect so much more from.

On A Reality Tour, Bowie proves that love is well-earned.

Foster has proven her mettle enough times to excuse a slight misstep, which in comparison to previous recordings and some of the works of her contemporaries, isn’t so much a misstep as a slightly less imaginative showcase of her talents.

This won’t be the album that turns on a legion of new fans, but that’s exactly the point: Def Leppard is fan service for the hordes of glam metal acolytes that have stuck by the band throughout their ill-fated transgressions and experimentation.

And It's Still Alright is a Rateliff record, and although he is joined by violinist Tom Hagerman, bassist Elijah Thomson, keyboardist Daniel Creamer, steel guitarist Eric Swanson, and guitarist Luke Mossman (and two drummers), the music sounds intimate as if it is just Rateliff speaking one to one with the listeners.

At its best, Time to Melt is a promising collection of seductive post-indie grooves. At its worst, it’s a goldmine of vlog-ready background music to soundtrack a West London influencer’s Bali sojourn. Either way, this is but a checkpoint in Sam Evian’s career, a coalescence of several years’ experimentation that he will undoubtedly proceed far from with his next release.

Right About Now is a pleasure when it's taken for what it is: not a big statement or a fully polished work of art, but a collection of what could have been and might be.

These words deserve better than the music that has been made to accompany them.

It's a grown-up album for grown-up fans; rest assured, Vedder isn't finished raging, but he does also have to sing his kids to sleep.

Overall, Animal Heart plays as a gentle wisp of an album: a warm summer breeze in early spring; enjoyed in the moment, yet largely forgotten after having passed.

In general, you can tell that a lot of thought has gone into Delusions of Grand Fur. This is true of the well-crafted songs themselves, but also of the fluid trajectory of the album and the powerful lyrical subject matter.

Some progression and distinction from "Passover" to Directions to See a Ghost is discernable over the unremitting low-end vibrations, some tweaks to the combustive chemistry as it was previously established.

A very worthwhile listen, especially if you're a Melvins fan, but, apart from "Inner Ear Rupture" and "Tommy Goes Beserk", nothing all that new.

Despite several hackneyed moments on his debut, Hughes has crafted a solid set of songs that causes feelings as it explores them.

There are indeed a few singles here that, in a just world, would put Love back on the charts, but, as far as late-career comeback albums go, Love deserves so much better.

The overall impression the album leaves in its gossamer and steel wake is one of fearless, feminine selfhood. The Anchoress creates a series of love narratives for her listeners to peruse, asking us to think critically about them rather than passively listening.

It’s mainly miss. The limp steel guitar backing “Cold in the Summer” is too low-key to maintain any interest whatsoever; same with the forgettable strummed final track “Wind in My Blood”.

Gold Dust as a whole is also split right down the middle, with half of it being interesting and a pleasure to listen to with nice reworkings of old classics or new favourites, while the other half is in many ways an offensive and superfluous mess with lazy production techniques and baffling song choices.

Not so much a step in the wrong direction as a step in far too many different directions at once.

Deep Down & Dirty adds a few twists to the old formula, but there's something constricted about the record -- it's as if the decibel levels have been lopped off on the top and bottom, eliminating the high treble and low bass.

Whether it was the influence of Steve Martin's style, or the chance to escape from it, with Nobody Knows You, the Steep Canyon Rangers have given their listeners yet another reason to keep listening.

Lloyd Maines’ production helps these 14 songs pass by with the ease of a cold pitcher of beer on a hot day.

Liam, whose solo work has always been more eccentric, is a natural collaborator, then, but too often the two Finns sound like they are doing little more than noodling around in the studio with longtime co-producer Tchad Blake.

Disjointed ending or not, Empire of the Sun has delivered a well-blended mix of disco, electropop and just plain fun that evokes the greats without copying them outright.

Even at their most tragic and at their angriest, most of the tracks on the album are calls to empathy in unexpected scenarios, feeling pain as a means of catharsis and in turn acknowledging the pain in others after turning inward. The results are amazingly beautiful.

This is wall-shaking club music for screaming crowds and vast towers of sub-bass. It’s hard to imagine listening to the whole thing end to end unless you were also working a case of beer at the same pace.