At a certain point, the xx need to turn off that reverb pedal and learn to sing above a whisper - but I'll be damned if they haven't worked their magic again.

A no-frills, consistently engaging album with heart - and hooks - to spare.

This may be the most uncharacteristic of his albums, but by venturing outside his comfort zone, Hawley has in turn made his best.

In This Moment are up to some weird, wild, wonderful stuff.

Silver Age is the best album Mould has released since his days in Sugar.

Stripped down to a bare, live-band essence, and with the old-school touch of Roth/Daptone, Antibalas go places by simply playing it safe.

Mature Themes is paced with brilliance.

With your headphones strapped, the album's dirty optimism will brighten even the darkest, stalest airport-layover experience (true story).

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.

It's the album's more subdued tail end, particularly "Ahead of Myself" and "Temptation," that shows a songwriter rising above his comfort zone to deliver a career-defining transition.

It's perhaps overly long (53 minutes) and hard to penetrate, but Animal Collective's creativity glows brighter than Ric Flair's hair.

Gira's career has been one of violations and risks; there are plenty here. However, his trademark brand of post-rock/ambient alienation may finally leave listeners indifferent.

Sometimes it gets too cheerful.

America is a beguiling, remarkable work, a deep, carefully measured, completely idiosyncratic breath released on the dawn of a promising day.

Ascent is stuffed with psychedelic guitar virtuosity, moments where Chasny leaves this plane and enters one of those transcendental, mind-freaked, head-tipped-back, eyelid-fluttering states that few are capable of.

Cooder, like a Keith Richards/Woody Guthrie hybrid, observes [the current political scene] all as a damn shame, with little condescension and oodles of wit.

Crafted with worn elements of the electronic cannon, his third LP as Shed doesn't offer much that's fresh. Rather, it's nostalgia and recontextualization that drive this effort.... [Yet songs, I Come By Night, You Got the Look, and Follow the Leader] are all indicative of mastery.

Yeasayer remain the new-millennium kings of studio manipulation, and it's downright jaw-dropping that they're able to experiment so wildly in the context of such catchiness. Fragrant World feels like a victory lap.

Embracing those basics of simplistic pop, the kind that doesn't need to be over thought, works nearly all of the time, and though a little bit of depth to the proceedings would have been nice here and there, a robust hook will do just as well.

[Their] strange blend of influences can be fascinating... but Instinct - clocking in at a bloated 14 tracks and 56 total minutes - runs out of gas way before reaching the finish line.

On Life Is Good, he's lyrically and musically rich as he's been for years now.

On C.A.R., Cohn finds a loophole to get one of those rad concepts out of just that: a depressive who longs for suburban utopia.

Idea of Happiness never tries to re-imagine the concept of the summer album or, at the very least, the genre of synthpop.

Ocean brings substance with style, rather than style demanding to be considered substance.

Teeming with B-sides, live tracks, and demos, much of it previously unreleased, 21 is both exhaustive and indispensable.

The many-splendored guitar blitz of Major rings in the return of good old-fashioned butt rock, but played to the squarely measured rhythms of '90s emo and Northwest indie stuff like Built To Spill.

The writing is as crisp as the playing, ornate but without added contrivance, a credit to producer Joe Henry. A tuneful 10-song novel.

The British duo's second full-length in as many years mashes ghostly electro-pop tendencies with live instrumentation, empathetic orchestration, and tape-machine snippets, creating a world that is both compulsively listenable and eerily foreign.