Thirty Seconds to Mars

“Love Lust Faith + Dreams”Virgin EMI MusicAlternative rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars return with their fourth studio album, 2013s “Love Lust Faith + Dreams.” The band’s first album in four years, it follows 2009s “This is War.” Conceptual and ambitious, “Love Lust Faith + Dreams” has its finer moments as well as moments that are overwrought, overextended, and overproduced.

The best material graces the front of the album while the middle and back half are less triumphant. Sure, the synthesized ideas are thoughtful and enhancing things, but even the greatest enhancers can grow predictable after a spell.

Flawed yet with some redemption, “Love Lust Faith + Dreams” is a mixed effort.— Brent Faulkner, PopMatters.com

Majical Cloudz

“Impersonator”Matador Records“Impersonator” is an album of intriguing paradox. Its ingredients are so simple that it might have been made in a home or garage studio, but Majical Cloudz’ sound is so uniquely and deliberately crafted that it’s unlikely just anyone with ProTools could do the same.

Lead singer Devon Welsh’s simple sentence-centric lyrics are nothing a budding writer couldn’t imitate, but his delivery is more akin to the terse yet resonant style of Ernest Hemingway.

For whatever these songs may seem to be — remembrances of mourning, reflections on the underclass, or even a simple plea — there’s always a lingering sense of something else, an echo of a hidden power beneath the obvious.— Brice Ezell, PopMatters.com

Laura Marling

“Once I Was an Eagle”Ribbon MusicLaura Marling always had an epic in her. Even from her earliest teenage recordings, such as her 2008 debut, “Alas, I Cannot Swim,” her songs had the stuff of myths — suicide, revenge, impossible love. With “Once I Was an Eagle,” she’s finally made a record that matches the magnitude of her vision, and puts her well ahead of almost any twentysomething singer-songwriter peer working today.

The early word on “Eagle” is that Marling recorded the bulk of the album’s vocal and guitar parts in a single day. That’s a neat talking point, but all it really suggests is that these songs arrived so fully formed in her mind that it took only a few takes apiece to nail them. She’s drinking deep from Nick Drake’s and John Fahey’s open drop-tunings on openers “Take the Night Off” and “I Was an Eagle,” and summons just enough young audacity to borrow Bob Dylan’s poison-pen chorus from “It Ain’t Me, Babe” on “Master Hunter.”

Marling is probably bored of the comparison, but never before has a Joni Mitchell reference seemed so apt. Not just in her old-soul lyricism but also in the liquid acoustic drones and gentle exotica in her production. This record would have set a wildfire in Laurel Canyon in the ’70s. But it’s also very English in all the best ways — a mix of adventure and reserve, conservative in form but so generous in its honesty and imagery.— August Brown, Los Angeles Times

Daft Punk

“Random Access Memories”Columbia RecordsThe mysterious Frenchmen of Daft Punk — Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo — are rarely seen without their trusty robot helmets. But while they keep their faces hidden for the expertly marketed “Random Access Memories,” the Gallic duo believe the pendulum has swung too far toward the faceless in modern music-making.

“Technology has made music accessible in a really philosophically interesting way,” Bangalter told Pitchfork. “But when everybody has the ability to make magic, it’s like there’s no more magic.”

Which explains why this pair of EDM (electronic dance music) avatars has made a point of putting living, breathing musicians to work on “Random Access Memories.” On an album that in many ways plays out as a tribute to ’70s disco, that approach pays some dividends, as with the Nile Rodgers guitar licks that drive the single “Get Lucky.” It’s also to blame, however, for such misplayed moves as “Touch,” the gooey, seven-minute, big-band centerpiece that features 1970s songwriter Paul Williams’ ungainly aching for connection in a machine age.

For a blockbuster album, “Random Access Memories” is an oddity, an up-and-down effort that includes a (surprisingly good) collaboration with Julian Casablancas of the Strokes and a disappointing one with Panda Bear of Animal Collective. There’s an overly long homage to disco king Giorgio Moroder. Daft Punk gets points for creative restlessness, but a search for deeper meaning has stripped the French dance duo of a measure of electronic pizzazz. — Dan DeLuca, The Philadelphia Inquirer

The National

“TROUBLE WILL FIND ME”4AD RecordsSerenity isn’t all that serene for The National on the band’s sixth album, “Trouble Will Find Me.” It’s the plushest, most burnished album from a New York City band that has increasingly leaned toward the measured and stately. This time, The National utterly refuses to buttonhole listeners; the music calmly awaits attention, but amply repays it.

There has always been a deliberative, classical-tinged element in The National’s music. It tucked Minimalist patterns into its songs and got string and brass arrangements from composers like Nico Muhly and Padma Newsome as well as from its own guitarist Bryce Dessner, who has a master’s degree in music. But the band has also let guitars distort and drums kick into the foreground or pitted rock instruments versus orchestra.

“Trouble Will Find Me,” produced by the brothers (and guitarists and keyboardists) Bryce and Aaron Dessner, purrs smoothly all the way through; nothing protrudes or interrupts the luxurious melancholy of the songs. Guitars and keyboards are resonant, unhurried partners to durable melodies; the orchestrations nestle within the tracks, cozy and self-effacing. The music’s tensions arise elsewhere: in lyrics full of regrets and brushes with death, in the way Matt Berninger’s doleful baritone moves beyond its usual deadpan, in the gradual but eventually overpowering buildups.

The National has also added a subtle new device: odd and shifting meters that move the songs away from the subliminal comforts of 4/4. The opening song, “I Should Live in Salt,” works in sections of 9 beats and 8 beats, the extra beat jostling each time it occurs; the nervous undercurrent in “Demons” is its 7/4 meter.

“Demons” is a resigned portrait of chronic depression, with its glumness verging on shtick. In other songs, narrators watch themselves and others succumb to druggie temptations (“Sea of Love”), wonder if they’re dying (“Heavenfaced”) or drift toward separation and solitude; one of the least cryptic lyrics in Berninger’s catalog is “Fireproof,” with folky fingerpicking over a tolling piano, in which the singer tells a distant woman, “You keep a lot of secrets and I keep none.”

The music is poised, but it’s not hiding anything.— Jon Pareles, The New York Times