After causing a stir with her debut EP, the magnificently titled Thrush Metal, the much-lauded Australian singer/songwriter rocks up with her debut full-length, with only one song (more on that later) making the transition from said EP to debut proper.

When Rivers Cuomo’s Californian crew rode the post-grunge wave to glory on their debut Blue Album and heart-worn classic follow-up Pinkerton in 1994 and 1996 respectively, we never could have imagined just how saddening and crushingly disappointing Weezer’s career would be over the next 20+ years.

It’s a slog, sometimes, picking through the generic to find the specific, more so to find the specifically good. It’s not that there’s anything truly awful about Said The Whale or this, their sixth album and first since the departure of their longtime rhythm section, but there’s also little to be said in favor of them either.

Some albums articulate themselves like finely chiseled sculptures. They depict the diverse panoply of sensation through a shared sensibility that elevates the disparate snapshots into a common aesthetic approach that holds them all together.

The title for Helado Negro‘s spectral and triumphant seventh studio album—This Is How You Smile—derives from a Jamaica Kincaid story titled “Girl” that is narrated from the perspective of a mother giving her daughter advice on how to survive in the world.

It’s been 19 years since the profoundly fucked up Washington, D.C. duo dropped their last studio album, Pound For Pound, and 21 years since their last great record, Accelerator.

Run It Again is fairly fantastic Replacements rock ‘n’ roll from the LA scene stalwarts Criminal Hygiene. This, their second full-length, is a classic-indie-rock referencing bar-room beauty.

With a Grammy award under his belt, Gary Clark Jr. has been heralded by the bigwigs. Out of the gate, following his 2012-released major label debut album, Blak and Blu, Rolling Stone headlined Clark Jr. as “The Chosen One” of blues.

Meg Duffy’s work under the moniker Hand Habits extracts the most precise and aesthetically pleasing attributes of her guitar work contributions to the likes of Kevin Morby (who Duffy has spent the last three years with as supporting lead guitarist) and The War on Drugs—this is where the similarities stop, though.