Five Letters From Far Away, the new album from Julia Massey and the Five Finger Discount, is a cosmic pop journey, space exploration through a dance-party sector of the universe.

Stripped of loud guitars and surface fluff, he maneuvered into the subtle rather than the over-stated.

Feeling like you’re in a funk? The Rubbish Zoo can take care of that.

It’s this honesty that shines through the entire album. Liz Rognes is a woman who is not afraid of her own self, her strengths and her flaws, and she sings her truth in a voice of redemption …

Sara spent a full seven months in the recording studio, and you can hear in the results the time and effort involved to fully process her music …

The album crosses realms of a less audacious Modest Mouse, a Decemberist without the pretension, or an Aqueduct beyond synth; the production, a crisp sheen on a bulging, morphous creature of pop-rock.

With some debt to post-rock, Martha! Mother isn’t afraid of crescendos, musical and emotional. What sets them apart is when they combine it with the intimacy and fuzziness of a 4-track recording. If this all sounds messy, in practice it isn’t because of a heaping dose of restraint.

Gone is the overcast, coffee simmered survival mechanistic humor; this is a sound not of salty skyscrapers but of a land left wilder, the sound of a handful of speeding cars on I-84 at midnight.

..the EP is an aural glimpse of a ghost, an Americana wanderer searching for a frontier that disappeared in the gaudy neon of the modern world.

This is a record that will make you want to take a long pull on a cigarette and stare, brooding, into the western horizon. It captures the messiness of life: love, pain, death, anger, and hunger but in such a way you’ll finish listening to the ten tracks and want more.