Perhaps a near-miss breakup is exactly what Garbage needed. Bleed Like Me plays like a distillation of the group’s strengths: The riffs arrive skillet-fried and huge, and the ballads burn with a soulfulness that sounds like the best Motown covers the Runaways never did. “Bad Boyfriend” has a mudslide density…

Andrew Broder, aka Fog, started off turntabling in the vein of DJ Shadow before taking the Anticon cue and rippling out from hip-hop into musical free-for-all. But experimentalism shouldn’t be synonymous with using pretension as an excuse for not trying. Here, Fog is less Spiritualized and Wilco by way of…

On his third full-length, young German troubadour Maximilian Hecker sheds nearly all of the down-tempo, Thievery Corporation filigree of his first two albums, aiming instead for a record held together by spare piano chords, gravity-free vocals, and keyboards that sound like Eno on an ice floe. Think Rufus Wainwright pried…

For many people, funk revivalists deserve only scorn for disturbing a genre that’s been sacredly entombed — unless their efforts are filtered through contemporary visionaries like Prince or the Roots. And it’s irrational and confining that certain musical-history threads, such as Motown, dead-end, while others, like ’80s synthpop, get tragically…

I’d say that the Go-Go’s must be rolling in their graves, but since they’re still alive, I’d have to say that they’re probably wondering if one can sue for breach of cliche. With the ’80s-rock revival quickly reaching a point of pure regurgitation, it’s not surprising that this kind of…

The Cars Are the Stars is what the Postal Service would be with a spookier undertow and song structures as loose as ball bearings dropped on slick marble. Fragments has lofty ceilings and oceanic depths, songs that sound like underwater caverns populated with analog synths. The Cars Are the Stars,…

Since all reviews are pigeonholing crosshairs, would it help you if the Futureheads were described as barbershop, post-punk, off-Broadway rock? Probably not. The Futureheads love slipped harmonies and jagged riffs that lurch like tennis shoes tied together, ensconced in playfully soot-boxed production. “Alms” has all the rigid diagonals of a…