Any rock album that tackles such a wide spectrum without compromising the music deserves respect.

Perfect in vision, voice, harmony – not to mention timing – Treasure of Love delivers quintessential Flatlanders.

If you haven't heard the plaintive and curiously uplifting songs of longing and loss from this rising phenom, you're missing the emergence of one of the most affecting new talents of the past five years.

It's an album of brainy rock songs that state their claims then defiantly step out from beneath the ethereal haze.

Not a lot of sky over NYC, but Kevin Morby capitalizes on any glimpse of it.

Much of Play sounds like it was beamed directly from planet Sad Guy, but it's far and away Moby's most cohesive and affecting work to date.

All in all, though, Medúlla is far too busy. Even when you're experimenting, the less-is-more rule still applies.

Metallic hardcore still gallops in short, sharp, steely blasts on a pair of two-minute openers, but Nineties grunge-dripping Seaweed now coats Ryan Patterson's punk heroes.

Free from the constraints of perfunctory pop structure, Dee funnels seemingly dissonant patterns into pulsing tides of harmonious congruence.

It's the Ting Tings amplified past 11, and the two never stray far from the formula.

Constant Bop lights up a whole lot like his main band's 2011 breakout album D by the second song.

The National reveled in self-effacing jokes between the heaviness of their songs, and Trouble finally finds that balance on disc.

Distilling others' heartaches ("Always on My Mind") comes Full Circle.

The accompanying DVD offers only a higher fidelity version of the audio performance, but Sugar Mountain remains a magical and rare portrait of a budding genius.

On Veni Vidi Vicious, the band plays like rascals on their way to jail, with the prospect of conjugal visits depending on the music's extroverted energy.

Freed from slick production, Clark plays to his many strengths.

Like Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot into A Ghost Is Born, Spoon's fifth full-length finds further symbiosis between Britt Daniel's emotional obfuscation and the band's spare, uptown backbeat, then looses drummer Jim Eno to metronome the rest.

What Alpha Mike Foxtrot lacks is equally significant: meandering guitar solos from recent recordings and zero footholds for "dad-rock" puns. Rather, AMF communicates Wilco's career innovation, maintained while increasing popularity--the rarest of feats.

The real prize here is Waters' demo excerpts, 22 recordings chopped into a dizzying 14-minute medley of delusional grandeur. The bassist sounds not like a jaded rock star, but like an outsider folk artist – sheltered and off-kilter – finding escape in lo-fi pop oddities full of echo, warm synths, and cross-faded effects.

Willie Nelson, 85, keeps going from strength-to-strength, and Last Man Standing is the strongest yet.

While megaproducer Brendan O'Brien sharpens the overall sound, especially the guitar interplay between Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, he does so by removing the grit that helped define Pearl Jam.

Thirty-six minutes of a detailed, agonizing shot in the arm, a veritable buffet of musical stylings, each song bettering the one before, from a band that just as easily could've released a new version of "Gimme Fiction."

The MC locates and provides new polish on the lost sex-positivity found in yesteryear.

The Black Album stands up alongside Reasonable Doubt and The Blueprint as Z's most ambitious work.

Nomad is more than a beautiful offering for the world music crowd. It's the defining work of a guitar hero.

Boasting enough insidious imagination to evolve beyond easy metallic labels, Agalloch transports The Serpent and the Sphere into its own phantasmagoric astral plane.

Challenging, enigmatic, and melodic don't always go together, but coupled with Case's sleek vocals, they make The Worse Things Get ... a marvel.

Olsen transcends ephemeral charm at every turn.