My Morning Jacket, The Offspring, Sam Phillips, The Interiors

Evil Urges is My Morning Jacket's first new studio album in three years and its first record since its double-live slab, Okonokos. It's already started to receive an avalanche of praise from all the usual suspects. The band also recently performed on Saturday Night Live. Its last two albums — the Lynyrd Skynyrd-inspired It Still Moves and the Flaming Lips-indebted Z — have certainly taken it to the precipice of mainstream success. But the question remains - will this be the record that truly breaks it into the mainstream? Evil Urges certainly resembles Z more than It Still Moves, and that might just work in the band's favor.

While many loved the guitar histrionics of It Still Moves, the reined-in and diverse sound of Z has, frankly, much broader appeal. And so does this record. There's a heavy '70s funk-rock vibe throughout, right from the opening notes of the album's title track. "Highly Suspicious" soon follows and features yet another plus for the band: lead singer Jim James' impossibly high falsetto. We're talking Prince-meets-Barry Gibb levels here. And for a white guy from the backwoods of Kentucky, that's no small feat. "I'm Amazed" is yet another straightforward rocker that's destined to be a single. "Thank You Too" is a ballad, but it's still got lots of soul. The backing orchestration doesn't hurt things, either. All told, Evil Urges is full of songs that deserve to be played in spacious places. Here's to more room for the reverb, boys. — Jeremy Willets

The Offspring
Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace (Columbia)

The Offspring didn't leave fans with high hopes for their future after 2003's disappointing Splinter, with which the California foursome achieved borderline ridiculousness with the single "Hit That." Now, five years later, the group is following that flop with a disc that actually shoots as high as it aims. The unfortunately titled disc harkens back to the band's earlier three-chord, fast-paced pop-punk songs that were always undeniable, even to those who weren't self-proclaimed fans.

Tracks like "Nothingtown" and "Trust in You" showcase the Offspring's ability to transform a simple speedy guitar riff and a few quick-fire beats into a catchy song, while others, like the obnoxious "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid" and "Stuff Is Messed Up," teeter on the line the band stepped too far over while writing "Hit That." What's good on this album is genuinely good, resounding with sincere fervor from musicians who clearly still want to be making and playing music, and that essentially makes up for the fact that singer Dexter Holland, at one point, rap-rocks the phrase "I don't know much/but I know this: shit is fucked up!" Perhaps, but this song isn't helping matters. — Emily Zemler

Various Artists
Body of War: Songs That Inspired an Iraq War Veteran (Sire)

Two days after the Twin Towers fell, Tomas Young enlisted in the Army to join in the search for Osama bin Laden. But he was never sent to Afghanistan; Iraq would be his battlefield. He was there just one week before a bullet sent him home to a paralyzed life. From then on, Young has fought publicly to heal while refuting the logic of that other war and lamenting the needless suffering in its wake. He forms the spine of a critically acclaimed documentary produced by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro about his sacrifices, Body of War, and hand-picked the 30 eclectic songs that lends its soundtrack, Body of War: Songs That Inspired an Iraq War Veteran, a stoic relevance. The songs he picked reveal a disdain for the deadly decisions made by the safely ensconced suits and carried out by his fellow soldiers, but they also illustrate just how much anger has accrued in the hearts of musicians from a variety of genres.

Eddie Vedder worked with Young to put together the double-disc affair, the proceeds of which go to support Iraq Veterans Against the War. Though lacking in continuity with all the genre-flipping, the first disc is a energized panoply that only sometimes suffers from incongruity. It's full of poetic anger from a variety of blocks: From rap (Lupe Fiasco's poetic "American Terrorist," Public Enemy's "Son of a Bush") and pop (Brendan James' "Hero's Song") to rock (Serj Tankian's holy onslaught "Empty Walls," his System of a Down's "BYOB," Rage Against the Machine's "Guerilla Radio") and reggae (RX Bandits' "Overcome"), the disc is all over the place, but ends on a solid note with Vedder and Ben Harper's original slow-strumming protest song "No More," recorded live at a recent Lollapalooza.

It's an apt cap to the first disc and a proper introduction to the mellow and meaningful splendor within the second, in which one heralded artist after the next nicks away at the status quo. It's hard to pick a standout here. Suffice it to say that Bruce Springsteen's "Devils and Dust," Vedder's reinforced version of Dylan's "Masters of War," Bright Eyes' bleating "When the President Talks to God," John Lennon's "Gimme Some Truth," Neil Young's "The Restless Consumer" and the Tom Morello-led Nightwatchman's "Battle Hymns" make up just the first half. At the end, listeners might feel a myriad of ways: Inspired. Rewarded, perhaps. And angry as hell. — Dan Harkins

Sam Phillips
Don't Do Anything (Nonesuch)

It's been 20 years since The Indescribable Wow, Sam Phillips' first record of dazzling, offbeat pop gems. Her latest continues the trend of her other releases from this decade with dark, shadowy instrumentation and timeless neo-Tin Pan Alley compositions. Although its relational subject matter is deep, sobering and affecting, Don't Do Anything doesn't quite match the focused emotional intensity of Phillips' 2004 masterpiece A Boot and a Shoe; but very few other records ever made match it either. Still, this album's biggest imperfection is that Phillips has outdone herself elsewhere, and its instrumentation is still refreshingly enigmatic and imaginative, its songwriting exceptionally rich with soulful substance.

The cool, unusual arranging and diverse, curious sounds in Don't Do Anything work wonderfully with its gorgeous, hummable melodies. "Shake It Down" is very raw and Tom Waits-sounding, yet also silky and feminine. "My Career in Chemistry" marks a return for Phillips to more rock 'n' roll territory. But the curious thing about that track is, although it has conventional songwriting structure and stock guitar/drums rock instrumentation, the distinctive way the instruments are played and mixed proves how much room is still left for innovation in rock formulas. Hopefully Phillips will explore such rock experimentation further in future releases. — Michael David Toth

Jaguar Love
Jaguar Love EP (Matador)

Jaguar Love's EP is the first attempt by former members of the Blood Brothers and Pretty Girls Make Graves to start anew. The one truly distinguished aspect of this band's sound is Johnny Whitney's whiney, almost feminine vocals, which at times can become unbearable and indecipherable. No song demonstrates the band's pop sensibilities better than the EP's first song, "Highways of Gold." The bouncy melody is unmatched on the rest of the EP.

With the exception of "Highways of Gold," Jaguar Love EP is far from gripping or compelling. Often, the band sounds like it's trying too hard to capture an emo sound. And while the Dinosaur Jr. comparisons will draw some fans to this project, Dino singer J. Mascis' vocals are much more palatable than Whitney's. His whiny vocals really make this EP unlistenable. — Ryan MacLennan

The Interiors
The Interiors (54°40' or Fight!)

Part of what made late '80s/early '90s indie rock so great was its seemingly limitless boundaries. Bands like Pavement, Built to Spill and the Pixies may not have sounded the same, but they were all willing to explore and experiment, which led to albums of varied and enticing songs. While indie rock has grown over the years — tugging sub-genre suffixes like "pop" and even "metal" under its umbrella — there are still bands like the Interiors with the same spirit as those early indie bands. The trio's self-titled debut shows a band willing to dabble in different areas of songwriting.

The Interiors cram songs like "A Crooked Line," with its clickity-clack tone somewhere between Fugazi and Johnny Cash, "Powerlines" with its rhythmically punchy jangle rock, and "Shooting Off," with its washed-out, crunchy garage fuzz into one cohesive package. Maybe they haven't yet reached the status of those archetypal indie bands mentioned above, but this is only the band's first full-length, so they've got room to improve. — Matt Whelihan

Larry Norman
Rebel Poet, Jukebox Balladeer: The Anthology (Arena Rock Recording Company)

At his finest, Larry Norman impressively possessed the snappy, bitingly satirical wit of Elvis Costello, the bizarre lyrical imagery of the Pixies, the charismatic rock swagger of Jagger, the articulate cultural and spiritual observations of Dylan, the melodic chamber-pop/psych elegance of the Zombies, and the recording-studio playfulness of mature Beatles. Seriously. Although Larry Norman's 1969 solo debut, Upon This Rock, is nowhere near "the first Christian rock album" (as it's often erroneously touted), it was certainly the first such album to make a significant cultural impact. In addition to self-releasing a zillion marginal live and demo records before he died this past February, Norman made five really fantastic LPs for labels like Capitol and MGM.

This compilation provides an exceptional overview of those five seminal discs and definitively adds "I Love You," a Zombies cover that was a hit single for People, Norman's mid-'60s band. Supported by a gorgeous 24-page lyric/photo booklet, The Anthology's song selection thoroughly captures the essence of this Jesus-hippie counter-cultural icon to a degree that few such artist-retrospective CDs ever achieve. Just prior to Norman's death, he collaborated on an EP with Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock and Pixie Frank Black (one of Norman's biggest fans). In anticipation of the EP's release later this year, this compilation is a perfect intro for the legions of rock fans who are unfamiliar with Norman's work. — MDT