The Breeders' Last Splash turns 20 and gets the deluxe edition treatment. Is it worth it? It comes down to how much of a fan you are.

Black Pudding is a souvenir record for Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood fans, an album full of theme songs for gunslingers, bluesman and desert-wandering derelicts.

Joshua Redman's album of ballads definitely has more to it than meets the ear.

Smart, restrained disco pop to put a smile on your face.

A hazy, unfocused, occasionally diverting collection of tracks from Mac DeMarco's former collaborator.

Whitechapel hope to introduce recent fans to its remastered, remixed debut.

For Talib Kweli, protest songs, love songs, dance tracks, bragging and boasting and rhyming for rhyming’s sake are all part of the same action, an emotional engagement with the world through music.

Eclectic producer Stephen Wilkinson's seventh studio album is a richly textured, often pretty, but strangely detached effort.

Just a year after its last studio LP, pacificUV ups its game in an impressive way, giving some real bite to its dreamy sound.

Patty Griffin's songs reveal multiple sides of a complicated, conflicted man.

Young audiences will love it, free and ignorant maybe, of the influences so apparent in Peace’s music, whilst others, those a bit more long in the tooth, will fail to understand the fuss and hype and will be tempted to dismiss the album and the band as a one off, devoid of originality.

If you didn't know a thing about Rotting Christ, you'd be forgiven for presuming it indulged in lo-fidelity, blasphemous nastiness--which is only partly true.

R.E.M.'s major label debut found the group confronting the realization that it was becoming kind of a big deal, and the impulses to either carry on like normal or address the situation head-on proved to be equally enticing.

What they might lose in flair, they gain in severity, perspective, focus and the strength of their connection to the well of deep sadness at the center of the country-music tradition.

Vilké may well be a conceptual work, but there's nothing theoretical about Daniel Menche's latest album. Its impact and resonance evoke a primal and deep-set response.

Albuquerque Europhiles A Hawk and a Hacksaw have recorded an imagined soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov's classic film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, with intoxicating and challenging results.

A massive live set from one of the 1990s' most successful rock acts chronicles a band that might be unparalleled in its resiliency.

Youngblood Hawke's first full length shows promise -- uneven in parts, but a sign of [possibly] good things to come.

The New York-based indie juggernaut Vampire Weekend hits a masterful peak with its third LP, Modern Vampires of the City. It’s the kind of album that indie bands aim at but so often miss as it captures an old soul sporting new clothes.

Sadly the 'Rapture' isn't the only thing that's 'Secondhand' on MS MR's début.

A pair of indie rockers set out to make a pop/R&B album. Jenn Wasner's vocals are strong, but a lack of hooks and a lack of bass hold Dungeonesse back.

Airborne Toxic Event get lost in a search for love on a bloated third LP, Such Hot Blood.

Clutch may well have been seeking to shed some of its veneer on Earth Rocker, but that leanness only emphasizes what we already knew: that Clutch craft addictive and contagious songs, no matter their density.

Musgraves knows we live at the corner of Is that Right Avenue and Strange Days Boulevard. It’s funny until it ain’t.

If the band wanted to shoot out the lights on XTRMNTR, More Light just turns them back on again.

This Austin trio's debut was a pitch-perfect evocation of early 4AD LPs of yore. With a bigger budget and more professional sheen, the group explores more textures but fails to create many songs to compliment their atmospheric prowess.

This is simply a great album wall to wall, one that updates a classic sound for those of us who were raised on "Head Like a Hole".

Jazz drummer Mike Pride has two new albums. Stylistically speaking, they're completely different. On a broader artistic level, their dilemmas have a bit more in common.

Tim and Susan Bauer Lee are songwriters who can celebrate the good times while giving a nod to the hard times, because they make the good times all the better.

Solar bears turn in an interesting album of ambient pop that wears the group's influences proudly on its sleeve. Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad.