Though no new ground is broken, the classically trained pianist and Berklee alumna shows her confidence and talent with this strong break-up record right after the quirky cool of last year's Taller Children.

The continuous hitmaking of Present the Paisley Reich might be gone forever, but Dancer Equired offers up enough catchy pop jams to warrant a listen.

...The Ever Expanding Universe provides a nice excuse to put on the headphones and look up at the stars. There's nothing wrong with having one's head in the clouds, but this band could stand to make the occasional contact with earth.

Comfortably normal, the War on Drugs make for a nice tonic to the sometimes overly weird attitudes of modern indie-psych bands.

It's more like the album we should all discover after they've broken through with their second or third long-player, when we'll all be a lot more forgiving.

1,000 Years--the record Sleater-Kinney might have made at the very beginning if they'd been ambivalent about whether to turn up the volume and the attitude--is a meditation on age, timelessness, and nostalgia that could elicit a glass-half-full/half-empty decision from fans.

At this stage, Small Black are a charming but undeveloped outfit. Moving from an aquarium to a sea (or even a pond) would be an intriguing next step.

What still holds up is the low-end garage-rock throb of Mick Taylor and Keith's guitars with bassist Bill Wyman, and the idiosyncratic bite of Jagger's diction. But even Mick's attempts to offend (like changing the age of that stray cat from 15 to 13) make this special four-disc 40th-anniversary "deluxe" edition more historic document (and collectible!) than satisfying listen.

Light on laughs and riffage, the title/cover entendre makes it hard to tell if it is supposed to be so terrible or a joke about being so terrible... But the long-available cover of Radiohead's "Street Spirit" is inspired, and first single "Nothin's Gonna Stop Us" grafts one candy rope hook after another into one of the year's finest melodies.

Good Time is old-school in the sense that he’s bypassed Nashville’s army of songwriters to pen all 17 songs himself, and modern in the sense that at least half of the 17 slide by your ears without making much of an impression.

The album's listlessness - when compared to the blisteringly restless heartbreak/firecracker of Dreams - is kind of a bummer.

The album stutters heavily in the middle. Hercules are a 12-inch outfit, and "Boy Blue" and "Blue Song" are failed attempts at varying the mood with some despondency. As if they wanted to make Blue Songs more than a collection of singles, which it isn't.

The real weak link is Hawk's airy falsetto, which is too underwhelming for its own good. But give him a hairbrush, a mirror, and another couple of years and we'll see how it sounds then.

The bulk of Roses is like a spring day in the first week of May - not exactly shocking, but sunny and warm.

The songwriting isn’t BRMC’s most memorable, but Baby 81’s noise-roots fumes are pretty thick.

When Fish Ride Bicycles doesn't have the same old-school shine to it. Instead it feels caught between a few different directions, as personified by its guest list: Travis Barker, Asher Roth, Bun B, and the irreducible Ghostface Killah. But even with the help, none of the tracks stretch particularly far from the Cool Kids' limited palette.

In SOAD, Tankian’s vocal gymnastics and penchant for subversive lyrics are kept somewhat in check by the mix of muscle and subtlety guitarist Daron Malakian brings to the table. Here, there’s nothing to hold him back.

The dry vocal mix leaves her somewhat narrow range exposed. It adds up to an unsatisfying whole.

Yet even when relying less on atmospheric synths and playing with a full-band set up ("The Shakes"), Parallax misses early rock's tautness and grit.

Two-Way Mirror produces a handsome cacophony as is, but cutting away some of the gunk would have made it sweeter.

This time the throwbacks are so brazenly imitative, they might raise the copyright hackles of the earliest copyright infringers.

The Greatest Story would be a stronger statement if it werenâ??t for the conflicting cornerstones of conscientious-rapper soapboxing and standard-issue gangsta themes heâ??s laid at its foundation.

The Ohio trio took their time with Feel Anything, arriving at this more focused, albeit less celestial, effort.

Too often on Radio Wars, velvet-voiced singer Juanita Stein seems content to hover around a handful of notes, and that makes it hard to distinguish this stuff from similarly styled fare by the Duke Spirit or Doves.

A showcase for some undervalued compositional chops.

As Blur, Morrissey, and even Oasis learned the hard way, engaging in parochial social criticism — as much of Yours Truly does with its references to youth clubs and housing estates — doesn’t connect with more than a cult of Anglophiles here in the US.

The group’s second album continues in the same vein as the generally winning debut--only now the arrangements are lusher and more ornate and, in a few unfortunate cases, the songs are longer.

Merriweather Post Pavilion further smoothes out their sound, and though it's full of cool, orchestrated beauty, it lacks the playfulness and spontaneity that endeared so many to this group.