In other words, Wild Belle is a breath of fresh air in what usually feels like a sea of mediocrity.

Their sophomore album is, by all accounts, not a slump in any way. It feels like an experiment: the duo’s style continues to morph from one song to the next, with one track feeling jazzy (like the opener Mississippi River) and the next taking clear inspiration from reggae (Losing You).

The album’s best tracks are the ones that are the most blatantly focused on the hook. There’s a lot of great moments here, and it’s easy to miss some: every track is peppered with great ideas. The more immediately memorable tracks include Cannonball, which has a great riff and sax line, Giving Up On Your (which feels as garage rock as this record ever could), and The One That Got Away, which feels like a tremendous slow burn (and a couple great verses).

Wild Belle is willing to flirt with slower, more melancholic tracks too. The best of those is It Was You (Baby Come Back to Me), which is a multi-layered track that impresses with both its styling and its composition. The chorus is particularly captivating.

Much of Wild Belle’s success is clearly owed to Natalie, who handles the vocals throughout most of the record. Her voluptuous vocal style is both attractive and unique, making her instantly recognizable despite the pop genre’s more familiar trappings.

But moving beyond vocals, Elliot’s musical additions are everything. The best tracks on Dreamland are filled with musical ambition that feels unparalleled in pop, and I suspect much of these ideas are the saxophonist’s contribution. Tracks like Throw Down Your Guns could have drowned in predictable mediocrity if it wasn’t for some surprising musical twists outside of the chorus; it’s these fascinating hooks that often separate Dreamland from the rest of the pack.

In short: Dreamland is one of the best albums of the year, a real treasure and a breath of fresh air in a genre that people don’t always associate with originality.

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The album was put together by Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National for charity. Each sale of the record goes towards funding HIV and AIDs awareness and research. It’s a good cause, but as far as I’m concerned, any reason is a good reason to re-visit the Dead’s catalogue.

Some of the tracks deviate from the originals in significant ways. Vijay Iver’s version of King Solomon’s Marbles, for example, renders the song completely on piano instead of the band’s traditional guitar work. The result feels like a hybrid of old-time jazz with some of Rey’s theme from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which was surprising and wonderful.

Other tracks stick closer to the script. And We Bid You Goodnight feels as powerful as ever (save its final live performance, which is thankfully available on Youtube). It’s a tremendous track, and I’m glad that Sam Amidon knew he had a good thing.

Other tracks surprise, in both good and bad ways: Mumford & Sons strip Friend of the Devil of its usual controversy and make it mass-audience friendly (which is a typical Mumford move). Each track from The National feels like a taste of heaven. The War on Drugs turn in a performance on Touch of Grey that could be described as “expected,” but I’d rather call it “effective.”

The whole album reads like a “who’s who” of indie, and some of the genre’s less well-known artists put out the best tracks. In particular, I love Courtney Barnett’s take on New Speedway Boogie and Perfume Genius & Sharon Van Etten & Friends’ work on To Lay Me Down.

Not all of the album is perfect: there’s five and a half hours of music here, so your mileage may vary. A few tracks had me hovering over the skip button. But at least an hour of the album is impeccable, and at least three hours of it is very good. Those sound like bad batting odds, but the variety of genre work here is so huge that it would be impossible to satisfy with any other track.

That wide variety could be a turn off for some Grateful Dead fans, though. After all, the band was always a guitar group. Hearing other takes on these tracks can sometimes feel like sacrilege. Other times, the self-seriousness of the record drags it down like a weight.

But yet the album feels more powerful than not. How many rock artists could stand up to this level of scrutiny and re-interpretation? The only other artist I think you could pull this off with is Bob Dylan. Day of the Dead is this rare treat that’s a reminder of the past, like a thank-you letter for it. It’s also a look towards the future.

All that being said, I think Day of the Dead’s power lies entirely in the Dead’s work. Hearing these artists re-interpret these tracks and re-contextualize them for their own purposes is fascinating, and often rewarding, but its emotional power lies entirely in the reminder that music can bring us together so clearly. It’s a celebration of The Grateful Dead, but it feels like a celebration of the power of rock music. And it’s a complete and utter joy.

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My take is simple: Catfish and the Bottlemen, regardless of their genre trappings, make good music. The Ride continues in that tradition, with similar songs about relationships and bad decisions, as well as making amends and moving on. It’s all familiar territory for the band, and for pop punk in general.

I think The Ride is stronger than their debut, although gathering from the early reviews I might be one of the few who hold that opinion. The Balcony was a great record, but The Ride feels more self-assured. Listen to the first three tracks off the new record: they’re powerful anthems that are meant to be sung along to.

This all makes sense: the music they were making before always had elements of this, particularly in the choruses, but with The Ride they’re ditching many of the staccato-like verses that littered their debut.

Soundcheck in particular is a great example of this: the verse isn’t musically complicated, but the crux of the track hangs on vocalist Van McCann’s singing. The song is wholly memorable, and it doesn’t need a lot of instrumental complexity to be that way. These are crowd pleasers.

A lot of bands struggle with this “phase,” as they grow in fame from small clubs to giant stadiums. I find myself writing about this frequently, because it’s where a lot of bands get “stuck” as they struggle to capture the good parts of their sound and get bigger. Catfish and the Bottlemen manage to pull it off.

Tracks like Oxygen still hint at what was their before: a guitar lick dominates the verse, with a subdued drum kick, until the chorus kicks in and takes over the track. But now the band is much more self-assured about it, able to focus on their strengths. Years of live performance have taught them what works and doesn’t work.

If anything, The Ride feels like a record of streamlining and refinement. It’s a welcome sophomore attempt from Catfish and the Bottlemen that is, in my mind, an improvement over their already-excellent debut. The Ride is destined to become one of the albums of the summer — play this with the windows rolled down while you’re driving down the expressway.

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But still, at their best, Thrice was a band that you turned up louder than everybody else when they came up on shuffle in the car. They were the post-hardcore band whose lyrics you could gobble up in the liner notes (back when liner notes were still a thing). They had depth, musical integrity, and a seemingly endless ability to churn out monstrous riffs and beautifully sad slow tracks side by side, or often as contrasting moments in the same song.

Years later — it feels like forever — Thrice are finally back with To Be Everywhere Is to Be Nowhere, an album that won’t count as their best, but feels like one of their biggest. Loud anthems rage throughout the record. Hurricane has riffs that are simply gigantic in scope. Blood on the Sand feels like it’s been lifted from The Artist in the Ambulance. The Window, a particular favourite of mine, has all the dissonance and power of the band’s most inventive records.

Almost every track on this record is a complete rager: Black Honey captures the band at their most radio-friendly and anthemic. Whistleblower is as politically aware as always (although perhaps a little less cryptic than some of the band’s lyrics have been previously).

If the album has any weak points, it’s that Thrice seems overly eager to make a point that they’re returning “to their roots,” despite focusing rather heavily on anthemic tracks. Death From Above and Stay with Me’s verses feel like quiet respites from the rest of the record — not because they show the band at their best (they certainly don’t), but because they give the listener a bit of a break.

Death From Above particularly benefits from this, because the quiet moments make the track’s pummelling chorus all the better. It becomes one of the better songs on the record, even though the verse is trite. (On the other hand, Stay with Me is a sour track, one that’s commercial to the point of degrading the band’s talent.)

The album closes out on a quieter, more somber note — in typical Thrice style, gratefully. Salt and Shadow is an excellent finisher, a song that captures everything I loved about Thrice’s quieter side years ago. It’s a tease, of course, because I wish there was more like this, but maybe that will come on the next record.

For now, it seems the message is simple: Thrice is back. They know who they are and what they stand for. And while they may be experimenting less than ever, they want us to know they refuse to “phone in” the record. To Be Everywhere is to Be Nowhere isn’t as good as Vheissu or The Alchemy Index, but I’d happily take it over much of the rest of their catalogue. It’s a welcome comeback.

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Baby Darling Dollface Honey does something few bands can do: it carves out an original niche in the blues rock genre that the band easily squeezes into. With big guitar riffs and blues-influenced guitar licks, the album feels as inspired by the riffage of The White Stripes as it does the guitar licks of Buddy Guy.

Death by Diamonds and Pearls is a great example of the band’s agility, as they construct a verse that feels jurassic in scope and slowly bring the song to an explosive bridge that’s so clearly influenced by the mayhem of The White Stripes that it could be called a cover track if it weren’t for the guitar solo that follows.

Light of the Morning, the album’s opener, is worth mentioning too: the opening, with nothing but vocal harmonies in tandem with a bluesy guitar lick, is more memorable than the best tracks from most bands. It’s at once Black Sabbath and Zeppelin rolled together all at once, but it has the levity of The Hives.

I Know What I Am has a trademark blues riff with some great call and response going on between the two vocalists. Despite its obvious influences, though, it never sounds anything less than fresh. It’d be a great live track too.

Almost every track on the record is worth listening to, and the band’s wide array of influences becomes more obvious as the album goes on. By the end of Bomb, some of their metal influences have become a little more obvious too. The song isn’t heavy in any traditionally “metal” way, but at the same time it’s experimenting with some of the genre’s guitar tricks.

When the band slows down, it becomes clear Band of Skulls can be very intimate too. Honest is a great track that would sit well on something like Led Zeppelin’s III. I love the guitar sound, but I’m also a big fan of those harmonies.

That intimacy is what made early Band of Skulls so good, though. It’s not just that they’re good songwriters (although they are). It’s that the band was able to carry that sense of intimacy even into its bigger, more explosive tracks. Blood is as emotionally raw and open as one could expect from a blues track (and it’s a particularly excellent track). It feels like the band is performing right in front of you. It’s not the production, but just the band playing a clear passion.

That sense of intimacy has been lost on their newest record, I think. It’s something I treasure, and something that makes the band’s debut stand out among the pack — even seven years later. Baby Darling Dollface Honey is one of the best debut albums in recent memory, and at this point, could be called a verifiable classic.

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