Andrew Bird is not one of those performers who makes the audience feel as though they’re part of the experience. Instead, the audience feels as though they’re lucky enough to be allowed to watch a very personal, private show.

After a bevy of 7-inch releases, incendiary live shows, and blog hype that’s gradually built to a fever pitch, DIIV have at last delivered their debut LP, Oshin. Upon first exposure, it doesn’t seem highly dissimilar to frontman Zachary Cole Smith’s other band and Captured Tracks labelmates Beach Fossils, with whom Smith plays guitar.

One of the better things about Martin Eden’s Spandex: Fast and Hard is that it indulges in its conceit of being an all-gay superteam without that conceit ever becoming burdensome.

From Joy Division through The Cure, to Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, and The Mission, there was a time when 2:54’s variety of forlorn music was in perpetual supply. These days, a gloomily-inclined music fan must either settle into genre blends or explore the deeper indie fringes for a more traditional goth-rock fix.

The world’s going to end in 21 days, and what are you going to do? Neighbors Dodge (Steve Carell) and Penny (Keira Knightley) use the impending Armageddon as a reason to reconnect with loved ones, embarking on a road trip to track down Dodge’s high school sweetheart and find Penny a flight across the pond to visit her British parents.

Since her 1996 debut Tidal, Fiona Apple has split her time between playing the little girl lost and the woman scorned—alternately struggling for freedom from lousy lovers and childhood horrors. On the epically titled The Idler Wheel is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw, and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, her first album in seven years, Apple is back to fighting the enemy within, expelling the tangled cacophony of her demons into song.

Nineteen-eighties jangle lost its godfather with the retirement of R.E.M. in 2011, but it regained a venerable distant cousin to the Athens, GA greats with the reunion of The dB’s. Falling Off the Sky, the act’s sixth LP and their first in nearly 20 years, is astonishingly the first to feature co-frontman Chris Stamey alongside ex-R.E.M. sideman Peter Holsapple since the former’s acrimonious departure subsequent to 1982’s Repercussion.

Surely Neil Young must be off his rocker. For his first album in nearly 9 years with Crazy Horse, the band that began its association with Young with epic, career-defining tracks like “Down By the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” and cemented its legacy in albums like Rust Never Sleeps and 1990’s Ragged Glory, Young has decided to record an album of classic American compositions.

For this colossal 14-DVD visual anthology of The Grateful Dead, perhaps the best place to start is with a figure who came into the Dead’s orbit relatively late. In a new interview featured on the set’s Bonus Disc, you can’t help but get swept up in band archivist David Lemieux’s enthusiasm.