Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire is another record that hones and refines what it means to be Eels. Mark Oliver Everett continues his daring and heart-baring, and we continue to be the better for it.

The conceit of The Dirtbombs covering dance music is genius.

If you don’t mind the lack of edge or grunginess--which is to say, if you like your danger safe--bring extra artillery. You could spend serious time deconstructing this album.

Their sound doesn’t deconstruct or reconstruct anything; it just kicks some tail.

Rockwell is a promising debut, and she’ll be wise to stick to the road less traveled on future excursions.

We can quibble about intent and expression, but in the end you will have to succumb to the heart, body and soul, and your brain might be left behind.

Even in a crowded field this summer, chockfull of musical juggernaunts releasing albums, Pigeons will likely catch people's attention. And those people will be glad it did.

Parish is having fun on this album, and the musicians he’s bonded with enjoy the ride as well.

You can't knock the songs, but it's hard to swallow whole.

Immaculate production and carefully conceived themes are sure to make your nerd-tent a lot bigger, but is the space worth it if you push out even one well-penned ditty?

Dance Mother leaves many unanswered questions. But a safe bet is that Telepathe have more tricks up their sleeves.

If the sound of being eaten alive is something you would like to hear, by all means, shake a leg to Burned Mind.

Theirs is music brimming over with passion first explored, then exploded.

Invitation Songs is as compelling and likeable as their combined past projects were hard and edgy, as if they've been doing Nick Drake covers all along. That's no small feat.

In others' hands, this could be maudlin or self-indulgent, but Hauschka's attention to detail is his strongest characteristic.

Sure, the albums is filled with grand, sweeping sonic statements, but they seem to come from a place in extremely close proximity to the art-rock icon's heart. That's why it works.

The best tracks here still feature his distinct blend of surrealist poetry, but the music does not even meet it halfway.

Buck the World doesn't quite match his 2004 debut.

These original songs have been influenced in many ways by what's come before (what isn't?), but they're inventive, catchy, and kick-ass enough to stand on their own.

Kelis is one of the mainstream's most exciting artists right now, and she continues to defy expectations with Kelis Was Here.

More than their previous efforts, this album exhibits the depth and experience that they have gained from such collaborations.

Dissolver is easily Iran’s most cohesive album-length statement, and it proves that there is more to the band than idle four-track trickery.

Another collection of songs that can be stamped with the compliment of being incomparable.

When it all comes together, as it does on the amazing singles "I Could Fall in Love with You" and "Sunday Girl," the effect is intoxicating. Music like this makes you happy to be alive. When it doesn't come together, as on "How My Eyes Adore You", the result isn't unpleasant so much as tedious.

War unfolds less like a cohesive concept album (though a rock-opera would be a likely future addition to the group's discography) as much as a series of telenovela vignettes.

The songs are better, the guest performers more exciting and enthused, and the production varied enough to highlight the differences between each track (which wasn’t always the case on the previous album).

Kind of like Brooklyn, which wants you to think it doesn't care what you think, The Babies are impressively adept at making it look easy, at making it look like they're not trying too hard. The truth is that there's as much skill and passion going into this slumming side-project than most full-time bands could hope for.

For those readers familiar with Whitman, rest assured that this record only strengthens his hold on the contemporary experimental electronic scene.

What got lost in the record’s cacophonic crash was, again, what mattered--the songs--and in Berlin: Live, stripped of Reed and Ezrin’s overproduction, the bleakly radiant song cycle about doomed junkie love is allowed to flourish.

The rock was catchy, but it’s the slow stuff that flips you on your axis with its depth.

The album certainly has its moments, but on the whole it's bogged down by too much middling material.

By the time the country twang of “Ain’t No Easy Way” hits with a massive drum-and-harmonica stomp, thoughts of Howl being a “Hey, let’s try this” album vanish, and the music becomes the entrancing jaunt of a band not necessarily finding itself, per se, but at least writing the best songs of its career.

One of the most likeable albums of the year.

Widow City is a fascinating album. Unfortunately, sometimes it's more fascinating than it is listenable.

Timberlake's second solo record is dark and dirty to begin and smooth and sexy to finish. With only a few awkward cameo tracks to damage its reputation, this is going to be the soundtrack of the next few months.

In the hands of a lesser band, Six could be depressive and trudging. But Jenkins and Nathaniel build this hellish world only to fill it with sweat-soaked fight songs against all those demons and devils. And in the end, they sound like they just might have survived.

This is an album that proves that Stars are fully themselves, confident in their genre experimentation and fearless in the emotions they express.

B'Day is a joyous uptempo album full of vibrant vocals, fierce production, and boundless energy. The only complaint is that it's over too soon.

The hooks often lack a singular focus, and there's a significant amount of fun to be had while working in a studio that's better off left on the cutting room floor.

The Orchard is the sound of Ra Ra Riot hitting for the middle, delivering 10 tracks of deliberate orchestral-tinged indie-pop that'll hit you in your 2007-era blog-rock pleasure center.

One Nation may not demand repeated spins, but its lack of form and formality is refreshing.

It's difficult to generalize about an album like Manifest!. For every flat moment or forgettable song there soars an incredibly high peak, the kind of song you keep on repeat for a solid hour. And even this binary critical formula fails; some songs succeed and stumble at the same time.

Beal's lyrics proves to be the major sticking point for an album that is quite successful. Most of these tracks follow the kind of topsy turvy logic of a Kaufman film.

Snoop sounds exceptionally comfortable, perhaps even reinvigorated.

Atlantis is a shining example of pop music in the 21st century should be.

Unfortunately, there are moments on Busting Visions where Zeus succumb to the weight of their considerable forefathers.

Kid Sis has elected to keep things simple--so when the album works, it becomes clear that it really works.

This Addiction is interesting and ultimately noteworthy because it finds a way to continue on with the band’s winning schematics while tweaking the blueprints in such a way that it's almost hard to notice that you’ve been duped by all the seeming predictability.

The Joe Budden on Padded Room, however, is focused and hungry, spinning dense, psychological yarns that build for dozens and dozens of bars. Budden scratched and clawed for his second chance, and he hasn’t squandered it.

Despite the somewhat dubious timing of Heavy Rocks' release, there are still some awesome songs to be found here, and the album as a whole acts a great sampler platter of all of Boris' strengths.

The album has no song that truly feels like a single, and thus no particularly strong cuts ground the album.

Grand Archives ought to be more than a library of dusty riffs and Beach Boys records; Brooke's work succeeds where it adds fresh material to the shelves.

Thankfully, their lovable debut has more of the former than the latter. They know the importance of consistency and pacing and are only left with the task of fine-tuning their band on the road.

But no matter, because the tracks that Universal has okayed are the kind of ballsy primal rock that conjures up images of a glorious multicolor three-way between Bikini Kill, the Ramones, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Young Hunger is a solidly crafted album that manages to give hints at what Chad Valley does best while musically supporting a bunch of his buddies.

Enough bending guitar licks to satisfy the yuppiest of thirtysomething businessmen and enough mellow ballads to satisfy your Dixie Chicks-loving mom.

Still, for all the sophisticated, melodic pleasure to be found on Here and Now, a comfy old shoe of an album, one could be forgiven for occasionally wondering whether things might achieve just a touch more frisson if Holsapple and Stamey surrendered just a little to the temptations of that sharp-edged sound of yore.

Finn's best songs are the ones when he's fully in the present, in tune with every emotion and every detail his protagonists might experience during a particular moment.

Although it's firmly in the commercial-R&B camp, it's got much more energy than those slickly produced records, and at times, the record's production verges on dirty.

The album is so cleanly produced that it sounds like they can't afford a flaw. And ironically, it's this seeming aversion to being perceived as imperfect that holds them back.

Something to Tell You is so impossibly infectious that they can just about get away with more of the same this time around.

On Intimacy his ambition often outpaces the execution.

Even as Joyner drifts out into that snow, he remembers to bring some warmth along with him, which is what makes Out Into the Snow the comforting mess that it is.

The songs are too determinedly distinctive to gainsay. But that mental sonic world that the music creates would be less intense, less encompassing, and listening would be less a transportive experience in the Tom Fec Dimension. Thankfully, this is Tobacco's world, and you can't trust your brain to determine mystery from madness.

For all its questing, though, the album's--and the band's--heart and soul are the simple arrangements which, layered upon one another like a stack of firewood, often signify something greater than their sum.

Liver! Lung! FR! is a solid album--it was just better six months ago.

The songs toward the latter half of the nine-song, 50-minute album begin to blur, but overall the album introduces a good, anachronistic headspace to enter into.

This buckshot spray of quick pop tunes is another wild success in his constantly twisting variations on a theme.

Their change between 2007 and now may be incremental, but it's enough to qualify as a definite improvement on their debut.

Longtime Companion feels like the first cracked smile after the tears have stopped, somewhere between dusk and the gloom of night.

That their kitchen-sink approach yielded as many wins as it did on Strapped bodes very well for The Soft Pack, oddly enough presenting a band that has proven it's more than its record collection, and possesses a heretofore unseen amount of creative restlessness.

As far as listening experiences go, you can certainly do a lot worse than sitting back in your chair, being consistently affected by Asobi Seksu's sunlit wandering. Unfortunately, it would probably be better for Hush if the band stepped into the shadows every once in a while.

The fact that this debut hews closer to the Noel we know certainly shouldn't be a disappointment.

It's quiet but it gets your attention, surrounds you, and makes you feel a part of it all the way through.

12 Desperate Straight Lines is Lerner's second LP under the Telekinesis moniker, and it finds his introspection all the more labyrinthine, but his chops as a genuine architect nothing if not totally satisfying.

Traces of other San Diego bands like Pinback and LaValle's own Tristeza and the Black Heart Procession are distinctly here, culminating in mellow harmonies, relaxed bass lines and subtle ambient effects.

So while High Places have neatly avoided getting stuck in a rut on Original Colors, daring to reinvent themselves into a more motion-friendly group, fans of their first couple of albums should still find the overall mood sufficiently low-key to provide easy access.

CAMP is an imperfect album, to be sure, one that both succeeds on its incongruities and occasionally stumbles on them.

Nothing new.

Mojave 3's new material isn't an abandonment of any strengths; it's an embrace of the simple pleasures of the classic '60s garage-pop style of songwriting.

The only major drawback with Come Back to the Five and Dime, Bobby Dee Bobby Dee is that Ferree throws so much of his energy into writing about Driscoll that the songs don’t work nearly as well outside of the collection.

This is a heavy-metal record in the classic style, stealing bones from the open graves of Black Sabbath.

The results are beautifully solemn.

Some of the better songs on Dreams and Nightmares--"In God We Trust" and "Believe It" being prominent examples--are the ones that let Meek hit the track hard and tear it apart.... But ultimately songs like these are in the minority on Dreams and Nightmares. There are many notable stylistic missteps.

Smokey Rolls down Thunder Canyon may be his best so far.

Sunday at Devil Dirt, for all the dark imagery and surgically perfect string arrangements, works best when Lanegan and Campbell involve themselves with simpler sentiments.

They could have retread the same musical territory, but instead they deliver a record that’s remarkable in its maturity and--most of all--its ability to be replayed again and again.

They tend to stay in their most comfortable wheelhouse -- bluesy roots rock -- but, as before, their incredible vocal harmonies carry the day.

Though heavy-handed lyrics and ominous proclamations can be tiresome and often too taxing on the arms of music that bears them, the sheer artistry of SMZ makes the band’s messages endurable.

It’s tighter, and incredibly, more intimate and intense than the first, this is a band that functions as a whole, not merely a threadbare net of musicians straining to support the singer.

With Not Yet, Monotonix delivers a tight half hour of intensely likable scuzz rock that gives a solid kick to the lizard part of the brain.

It remains to be seen if the loose, congenial vibe of Sun Bronzed Greek Gods can be sustained for more than this EP's 19 minutes, but betting against Dom might be foolhardy.

Banhart clearly gets bogged down in that freedom, as the amount of sheer hokiness on some of his albums can attest to. But with What Will We Be, Banhart gets back to earning that right for total creative freedom.

It may play a little too closely to everyone's strengths, but in the moments here where those strengths are at full tilt, that's not a bad thing.

As of right now, the main emotional component of this music is the whiplash thrill of hearing rock music played on the edge of sanity, but if we can be nudged into feeling something in our hearts more affecting or cerebral, something more powerful than an echoing warstomp, then we've got a landmark album on our hands.

For the most part, Tomorrow Today is a pleasing addition to the ranks of retro-futurist pop records, it just lacks the rough edges that make the best Broadcast, Pram and Stereolab songs resonate so strongly.

Everything Last Winter may be the most accomplished debut of 2007, and it will invariably be one of the best.

Although Cold Roses can get messy in the way of a quickly made album, it marks a notable improvement on Adams's most recent LP.