Of all of Brandon Flowers ' gifts — and there are many — the best, by far, is his fearlessness.

While Marcberg probably won't rescue Roc Mariano relative anonymity, it is still an alarming debut: focused, razor-sharp and singular, a contender for one of the year's best.

The new records from Florida punks Against Me! and Jersey blue-collar bar rockers Gaslight Anthem seem to have been composed, if not within miles of one another, at least within the same relative headspace.

If you need any further evidence of the irrelevance of genre tags, consider that there is now an album on the Bad Boy label that features an appearance by oddball cross-dressing indie-poppers Of Montreal.

Judging by This Is Happening, the third great LCD Soundsystem record in a row, the albums occupying most of James Murphy's time lately have been the ones David Bowie made in Berlin.

Badu doesn't do outright jubilation so much as prolonged, hazy-eyed ecstasy, and much of Ankh aims for a kind of mystic transcendence.

"A More Perfect Union" contains more references to New Jersey in its first verse than the last four Springsteen records combined.

In 2007, after complaining of headaches for weeks following a water-skiing mishap, Charlotte Gainsbourg was rushed to a Paris hospital where it was discovered that she'd suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Emergency surgery pulled her back from the brink, but the incident impacted her so deeply that it informs the entirety of her third record. The album is called IRM, an acronym for Imagerie par Résonnance Magnétique.

As source material goes, the work of Immanuel Velikovsky is a curious starting point for a metal band.

By now, even people who have never heard a note of Rihanna's music are familiar with the awful details of the last nine months of her life.