This collection of unreleased material is uneven, tossing in undercooked instrumentals alongside tracks with MCs like Black Thought.

Cox's second solo disc as the Atlas Sound brilliantly channels spaced-out folk balladry through hazy chamber pop à la Panda Bear or Stereolab.

With his new LP, Kentucky's Sturgill Simpson is taking it metamodern.

Ode To Joy shows off some of Wilco’s prettiest and most comforting songs, Tweedy’s enlarged heart transplanted back into a band — its lineup now unchanged for roughly half of its 25-year history — that’s never sounded more empathic.

Many of the songs on Sore feel like they're about adolescence, and the ways we endure or conquer its trials.

It's the hard-boiled stuff that really brings a lump to the throat--when it's not cracking you up.

His voice sounds gravelly--two decades of constant touring will do that--and substitutes tonal nuance for raw power, like a horn player blowing his lungs out.

Ultimately, despite its divine themes, the pleasures of Oh My God are pleasantly transitory, less a reckoning with the Almighty than the religious experience of casually browsing a well-stocked used record sale in a church basement.

Building on their prior LP, Sheer Mag broaden their scope just a little more on A Distant Call while retaining the DIY grit and edgy concision that made them so arresting in the first place. This might technically be a concept album, but at 35 minutes, it’s still a punk rager at heart.

At its best, Fake It Flowers is right up there with the first Veruca Salt record or That Dog’s Totally Crushed Out in its ability to fuse pensive elation, sugary guitar charge, and sweet pop melodies.

Beneath the plushness of her terrific second album there are drolleries, black humor, a cosmopolitan's jaundiced take on romance.

Her lyrics are often uncomfortably revealing, as she peels apart her feelings about love, sex, sin, femininity, masculinity, Catholic guilt, and violence and how they all define her — often on the same song. She’s a rare artist who thrives on overthinking everything (hey, she is French) and the album’s general grandiosity never feels obnoxious.

If only the lyrics were as articulate as the melodies and playing. [Jul - Aug 22, p.120]

Screen Violence represents an enhanced version of Chvrches and although it might not be the most radical evolution, the album marks an intriguing step forward nonetheless.

The only downside, if there is one, is that with so much happening at once, She Walks in Beauty is best taken in small doses to appreciate its majesty.

It lacks the focused grace of his country experiments, but this much is true: It's Plant's hardest-rocking set in a decade.

With acts like Florida Georgia Line re-integrating today’s country, it’s a timely flashback.

High-impact scuzz-blues that aims for prime Hendrix and almost gets there. [30 Sep 2004, p.186]

A welcome return to form.

These artisanal songs of love and doubt wear their homeliness proudly; the effect is like finding a bountiful farm stand in the middle of nowhere.

Metals has nothing with the instant appeal of the 2007 hit-cum-iPod-jingle "1234." But it's her best album, a mood piece that tosses in everything from folk to Malian-style desert blues.

On Can Our Love..., Tindersticks get heavily into Seventies soul, which expands their sound with more depth than ever before.

Musing, eerie and oddly lovely, It's a Wonderful Life is almost minimalist - it captures fleeting moments in a few chords and peculiarly evocative phrases.

Epic? Extremely. Awesome? Monstrously.

A tidy EP under 32 minutes, but it still manages to cover plenty of ground.

Clicks and clacks of the robotic processes add an extra textural layer for music that’s part Conlon Nancarrow’s 20th Century player piano compositions, part Aphex Twin Satie-and-skitter. A gentle mix of the stiff, sad and soothing.

It's an album that creeps you out even as it sucks you in.

The first (of hopefully more) efforts from Gilmore and Alvin is, indeed, a love letter to their theoretically distinct musical upbringings that ultimately celebrates just how many deep musical roots the two singers ultimately share.

The avant-rockers’ follow-up is even more unnerving and gloriously surreal — like gazing into hell through a kaleidoscope.

Sounding mainstream but thinking indie, Anniemal comes packed with both instant surface fizz and quirky finesse that sustains repeated listenings.

Soulful, synth-colored Americana.

While potent, his voice is a limited instrument, and the best songs here push past his debut's piano-student minimalism into full-on girl-group drama.

There's a creeping dementia to all of St. Elsewhere. [4 May 2006, p.56]

Twenty-one years later, they're keeping both themselves and their listeners on edge.

Most of the originals are strong enough to pass as covers of classic jams. The actual covers, meanwhile, are spot on.

The L.A. soul explorer's fourth album creates a space where psych-funk splendor coexists with deep anxiety.

Blur have returned with inspiration to spare.

The band's dynamic stales over the course of an LP, but Speedy still manage a feat most peers in the recycling business don't: Make an old style a new concern.

Rouse... comes on like a happier and wittier Elliott Smith. [30 Oct 2003, p.93]

While we await her next album of new material, due next winter, The Covers Record provides a stopgap fix of her unnerving, coldblooded voice and shaky acoustic guitar.

Live at Shea Stadium has its flaws: Devotees will rightly quibble with the set list, which is light on rarities and cuts from the Clash's brilliant debut. But the album captures a rousing, crystalline-sounding Clash show.

Both charming and danceable.

Yuck channel their college-rock jones with skill and charm, balancing in-the-red guitar fuzz with melodic sweetness.

While SM1 was ineffable and mystic, Savage Mode II spells out its influences and its place in the canon of Southern rap.

The Lips have always been able to subvert pie-eyed whimsy with a sense of homespun beauty, and there's plenty of that here too.

Set in the more commercial contexts of Kelly Rowland features and the-Dream's fluorescent R&B, he can sound like a fish out of some pretty expensive water.

While their long, drawn-out, circling dark clouds remain potent, ultimately The Glowing Man is the weakest of the three powerful epics they've released since 2012. It can be muted and jammy, the build-ups are not as dramatic and it brings little in new ideas for Gira's dead-eyed yowl.

What makes these multilevel pastiches more than cheeky cutups is a genuine musicality.

It’s lean music for lean times.

An album full of characters struggling against dead-end jobs, drug addiction and depression doesn't exactly sound inviting, but in the hands of John Darnielle, it's magic.

With echoes of the Fall and Throbbing Gristle, the stark tracks fittingly recall an era that demanded engaged art.

Coherence has never really been a hallmark of the Gorillaz aesthetic anyway, but this set of songs isn’t a mess, either; several moments offer interesting cross-generational riffs on U.K. music history. ... As always, Albarn’s ability to create dubby, drifting synthetic beauty — a kind of futurist pastoralism — remains a key ingredient to his music’s distracted wonder.

Delightfully glitzed-out collection of arena space rock. [Jul/Aug 2021, p.133]

Check the track by Sobanza Mimanisa, who add guitar and more melody to the mix, as well as the accompanying DVD, which beautifully documents the recording of the CD.

Listening to On All Fours is like wandering in a cool thrift shop. [Feb 2021, p.73]

On the group's third album, the usually extroverted singer, known for sporting dresses onstage, seems to be withdrawing, embracing a more delicate, acid-dipped sound. Microcastle has only one rave-up, but it's a killer: 'Nothing Ever Happened.'

Staples isn't just a survivor. She's a great singer who is best when she gets to press onward.

Where Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sounded dense and surreal, the bulk of Ghost is spare and earthy, with streaks of Crazy Horse, the Band, the Beatles and the Replacements.

They've upped their prog ambitions--tracks wash together, song titles abound with opaque punctuation, and the sweeping melodies often wander into moody places, away from the safety of the campfire.

Adam Granduciel achieves full-on sonic rapture with his band's latest LP, an abstract-expressionist mural of synth-pop and heartland rock colored by bruised optimism and some of his most generous, incandescent guitar ever.

Instead of emotive kids turning the radio dials, Trench has more of a cohesive sound and feel.

Rose's ace narrative writing occasionally takes a back seat to her neon keyboards and dance beats, but when she stumbles upon a fine groove, it's irresistible. [Mar 2020, p.91]

Much of Lamb of God contains the sort of piledriving guitar riffs and Olympic-medal-worthy drumming the band has perfected over the last 20 years, making it easy for their less political fans to get in on the fun. That said, the group sounds best when they take musical risks.

On I Am Easy to Find, another standard-bearing indie dude brand has reconfigured itself with multiple women’s voices at the LP’s core, a portion of the roughly 77 musicians that temporarily explode the band’s quintet. ... They pull it off without diluting their National-ness.

On her excellent comeback record, Rainbow, Kesha channels that drama into the best music of her career--finding common ground between the honky-tonks she loves (her mom is Nashville songwriter Pebe Sebert) and the dance clubs she ruled with hits like "Tik Tok" and "Die Young," between glossy beats, epic ballads and grimy guitar riffs. In the process, she also finds her own voice: a freshly empowered, fearlessly feminist Top 40 rebel.

Mercy, Cale’s first in a decade, is one of his most compelling.

The Chicago-bred singer-guitarist works one of rock's finest faux-British accents, sounding like an early-Seventies prog-folkie. It's a perfect vocal vibe for music that can recall the very late Beatles and New Morning-era Dylan.

The Boston Irish-punk septet never met a shout-along chorus they didn't want to crash into, with a bagpipe tooting along for an extra shot of old-world poignancy.

The songs are spacious with gentle buzzing, humming, and exhaling drones that slowly evolve, complementing often pretty piano music.

That light Grande promised has helped lead her down the path toward her best album yet, and one of 2018’s strongest pop releases to date.

On songs like the acid-funk "I Am What I Am," co-written with Dr. John, he shows he can scale back with equal power, making lush sounds for lean times.

No Queens record has prioritized groove like this, and it reboots their brand nicely.

It's Bradley's voice that seals the deal.

A narrative-driven, graceful debut album.

Thompson's taut, literary folk pop is as odd and pleasing as ever.

Memorable tunes seldom emerge from the murk.

Their selling point is an eclecticism that evades Oasis-style overkill with compact songs that hop all over the place.

Kveikur has structure and, hello, grit like never before.

Caprisongs is her most buoyant, she doesn’t sacrifice her creative nonconformity or intimacy. She strikes a careful balance, akin to perfecting an arabesque on a razor blade, as she revels in production that’s carefree, cathartic, and completely life-giving.

An intermittently pleasurable record from a talented songwriter with an overstuffed brain. [8 Feb 2007, p.70]

He's at home testifying over coolly throbbing beats.

It's a semiconcept record, using work by the artist Royal Robertson as a springboard for music that evokes a visionary psyche.

"Sad One Comin' On (Song for George Jones)"--a note-perfect honky-tonk weeper about the king of honky-tonk weepers. That’s the odd-card highlight of a set that focuses on smooth Eighties-style country-pop and ballad schmaltz.

Vibras, Balvin's fifth studio LP, happens to be a pan-Latin masterstroke of its own, a set of primo Spanish-language pop with vibe deep enough to make it universal.

The album is full of moments like this, where the lyrical conventions of a hand-me-down genre are enlivened with genuinely personal urgency.

Whether contemplatively highbrow (the symphonic meditation "Hole in the Ocean Floor") or forlornly down-to-earth (the alt-country of "Fatal Shore"), his angst studies feel cathartic without seeming mean-spirited.

There are times when this stuff can feel like precious melodrama. But if it hits you in the right mood of pillowy existential bumfuzzlement, its power to distract and even transport is pretty undeniable.

It's an admirably ambitious mix, often a bit too unruly.

The result is an object lesson in collaborative activism, with Staples tilting away from Sixties R&B formalism but doubling down on topicality.

She remains hard to categorize, refracting country alongside rock, folk, and other elements befitting a longtime resident of New York City’s melting pot. And her most beautiful work can lean into the abstract.

While it can often go dark, the vibe is empathic; Shake’s said the record was designed to comfort, and counter hate.

Deerhoof offset the cutesiness with fuzzed-out riffs and brawny beats that even AC/DC fans could dig.

Howard's lyrics tend to dodge specifics, and at times they feel disappointingly vague. But the ache, frustration, hunger, wonder and bliss in her idiosyncratic hurricane of a voice--magnified by music of new imagination and detail--stand out more clearly than ever.

Gemini Rights is a 10-song tight collection of rock and R&B, funk and jazz, psych and hip-hop that’s as warm and airy as the cusp of summer, when Geminis are born.

The results won't please every Dream Theater partisan, nor will they convert the skeptical. But it would take a hard heart to deny Petrucci, co-composer and keyboardist Jordan Rudess and their mates credit for the boldness of their aspirations and the assurance with which they achieve them.

It seems to reflect what the 28-year-old singer-songwriter is most interested in at this very moment, which appears to be a blend of Nineties alt-rock and turn-of-the-century shopping-mall pop. [Jul - Aug 2022, p.117]

[A] dark, magnetic opus. [24 Aug 2006, p.90]

Their most precise work yet - it's both musically decorous and lyrically savage... But high-pitched repetition of the music and the inaccessibility of the lyrics means that all but the most seriously baked listener has to work to meet the band on their shifting, obscure landscape.