Russell's view of history may be romantic but it is also gritty as hell, and enduring. This is his masterpiece.

It's easy to sound hyperbolic when describing the impact of Quinlan's voice, but she really does prove herself to be among the most captivating rock singers of her generation on Painted Shut. That her vocals are very nearly equaled by the music and the subject matter makes this album a notable one.

Within the context of a playlist, any one of a dozen songs here could bridge '50s bop to '60s MPB, or '70s art rock to '80s boogie, or '90s neo-soul to 2000s dubstep. Equally remarkable is that none of it seems devised. It's like these musicians simply radiate the stuff.

Hairless Toys [is] a welcome return and Murphy's most satisfying album yet.

All Your Favorite Bands has a warm, organic texture that's at once raw and immediate, sophisticated and polished.

More Faithful is a masterpiece for headphones, and more enjoyable with every listen at high, open air volumes, easily offering the best songwriting and aural presentation the band has mustered yet.

What makes the record so terrific--and it is one of Stamey's best albums--is how it crackles with a vitality that makes the strong song and studio craft feel vibrant and alive, not a stale exercise in pining for the way things used to be.

Fleeting likenesses notwithstanding, Bilal is a one-off, and his hip-hop soul summit with Younge, tucked inside the art of Angelbert Metoyer, is one for the ages.

A diverse set of songs but the key to Monroe's appeal is that she seems neither showy nor calculating when she expands beyond her classic country roots. She rolls easy, luxuriating in that exquisite sound, her soft touch making the heartbreak and the humor seem equally alluring.

It is their most holistic, inventive recording to date and ups the ante for anyone trying to follow them.

Nearly 20 years on, Destroyer is still as surprising and inspired as ever.

The ten-percent of the album that isn't a sparkling slow jam or midtempo cut is a swift and uplifting jam that approximates a super session with Dâm-Funk, the-Dream, and 1984 Prince. It leads off--both a sly fake-out and a hell of a way to open one of 2015's most pleasurable debuts.

It doesn't cover the Isleys' brief '60s stints with Wand, United Artists, and Tamla, but it is remarkably generous with dozens of bonus tracks--mono versions, single edits, instrumentals, and so forth--and LP-replica sleeves for each album.

An album that embodies all the complex contradictions and unfettered optimism of modern country-pop in 2015.

Howard makes beautiful pop that rocks and that combination of momentum and craft turns John Howard & the Night Mail into one of his very best albums.

These aren't quite the track listings from 2008 but they're close enough and, more importantly, they offer a bunch of songs that were not on Five Guys.... That's good bang for the buck and a good enough reason for the die-hard fans to pony up for this music one more time.

Easily the band's finest work yet, Illegals' little quirks and huge emotions have what it takes to sweep listeners off their feet.

Alone & Unreal: The Best of the Clientele is a well-chosen, emotionally powerful selection of songs that works well as an introduction to any poor soul who may have missed out on the group the first time around, but it also works perfectly as a summation of one of the most enriching musical experiences of the guitar pop era.

While it's tempting to say Have You in My Wilderness is her most personal music yet, it might be more accurate to say that it's her most approachable: this time, her brilliance demands a lot from her listeners, but also meets them more than halfway.

Another spectacular audio document of an enormously creative period for underground music.

It's an album of longing and disquiet. To call any of the songs wistful seems inadequate; they are engulfed in saudade.

These are candy-coated rhythmic noise pop songs, and they're astounding.

Elaenia is fated to become one of those albums that inspires ritualistic listening parties held by small groups of audiophiles. That shouldn't be held against it.

Ork Records: New York, New York is a superb evocation of a vitally important time and place in American rock & roll, and it's fun, eclectic listening to boot.

Where The Outsiders was designed to dazzle, Mr. Misunderstood is built for the long haul: it settles into the soul, its pleasures immediate but also sustained.

The bulk and repetition of The Complete Matrix Tapes will scare away a few casual observers, but anyone who wants to know how this band sounded on-stage on two good nights will find this to be a revelation; it's the best and best-sounding VU live release to date.

Each of the five discs leads with a full-length in its entirety and is filled to capacity with an assortment of extras. What's missing is negligible, mostly forgotten remixes and redundant 7" edits.

While each disc stands on its own, it's the sum total that makes this a career-defining work.

Suede can still dwell on big issues of love and mortality, but now that the past is in perspective, it all means a little bit more and what lies ahead is a little more precious, and that wide view makes Night Thoughts all the more moving.

Coming in at just over 50 minutes, it's the band's most streamlined collection of music since 2008's career-defining Rook, and their most vital offering to date.

Never has TTB sounded so organic, relaxed, and free. Let Me Get By is the album this group has been striving for since their formation. You need this.

Her quick turns of phrase and penchant for punctuating moments of self-doubt with colorful bits of impressionistic flair and left-field melodic rejoinders invoke names like Kate Bush, Nick Drake, and Sandy Denny, but the truth is, she's been perfecting her particular brand of moody, bucolic baroque pop for over two decades now, and with the marvelous In Search of Harperfield, that work has finally paid off.

Compulsive in more than one sense, Big Black Coat contends with Last Exit as Junior Boys' deepest, most vibrant work.

We Are King is all about plush, impeccable grooves and spine-tingling harmonies. It's without fault.

The arrangements are exquisite, the textures multivalent, and the emotional resonances cavernous, intuitive, and expressive.

Rodriguez has been hinting at the ambition displayed on Lola for some time. What's surprising is how a record of such scope and imagination can be rendered so intimately and elegantly.

The album is a sharp, thrilling experience, and easily one of Funk's most focused works.

It's a resolutely lively and slightly dazed exploration of misshapen pop forms.

This isn't a collection of overlooked compositions, it's a bit of pop archeology, excavating records that feel right. Every one of these 19 cuts certainly does feel right, sounding sun-burned and blissed-out, embodying the hangover of the hippie dream.

[Cuomo's] eccentricities slip out from the cracks in his carefully constructed songs. Sinclair wisely decides to accentuate all these quirks, whether they derive from Cuomo or the band's interplay, so The White Album crackles underneath its tight presentation.

Even when the album drifts toward the traditional--as it does on "Hurtin' (On the Bottle)" or "Four Years of Chances"--Price's sensibility is modern, turning these old-fashioned tales of heartbreak, love, loss, and perseverance into something fresh and affecting.

Azel is essential, not just for Bombino's growing legion of fans or even those of music from the Sahara region. It is a remarkable example of 21st century popular music.

It's ambitious, for sure. That there isn't a single moment that's not compelling is the real victory.

Sorrow is a radical reinterpretation, but it should be accessible to many. Stetson delivers an acute, wider, deeper hearing of Górecki's symphony as a powerful, beautiful, musically diverse meditation on unspeakable loss.

All of the material contained in this set is essential listening, as it chronicles the most groundbreaking period of a group who consistently explored new terrain with each successive release.

Close to the Noise Floor: Formative UK Electronica 1975-1984 collects four discs of the alternately thrilling, grim, silly, and just plain bizarre stuff.

She and Greenspan refract techno-pop in their own way while binding additional forms of electronic post-disco that cross four decades, from boogie to juke.

Wild Pendulum makes a strong case that the Trash Can Sinatras may never lose the plot. It's also quite likely the best sophisticated guitar pop album anyone is likely to hear in 2016, made either by whippersnappers or old-timers.

Ultimately, with Turn to Gold, Diarrhea Planet, a group with arguably one of the best-worst band names in rock history, have crafted their first truly great album.

If Big Day in a Small Town occasionally feels like nothing more than a collection of great songs that don't quite gel into a larger picture, that's a minor complaint: songs rarely come much better than these.

A visceral work that shares the immediacy of classic punk and confessional singer/songwriter fare at once, Puberty 2 takes listeners behind closed doors with the kind of no-holds-barred lyrics that are likely to leave a lasting impression.

While the album is not as fluid as BLACKsummers'night and has a couple frayed ends, it includes a high quantity of open-hearted ballads and variable-tempo jams that sparkle with indisputable power. Each one is supremely sculpted. Their decreased vocal smoothness and increased rhythmic friction are major factors in the set's allure.

Taking Craig's already distinctive, powerful sound to extremes, Centres is another truly remarkable work.

It shocks by sounding as vital as Dinosaur Jr. ever has. Deciding to not to build upon the expansive textures of I Bet on Sky, the trio nevertheless sounds vividly oversaturated throughout Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not.

On the whole, the music on A Place Called Bad makes a strong case that the Scientists were one of the '80s best bands, especially during their swamp noise years. They had the look, they had the songs, they had the sound, and everything they did burned with the white hot fire that only the very best groups are able to harness.

While the show itself is clear about its influences, its soundtrack manages to do this too, while ultimately culminating as an in-depth and invigorating piece of atmospheric electronic music.

Here is a ruminative, inward-looking album of folk-inflected beauty.

Devastating yet optimistic, Splendor & Misery is a stunning leap forward for clipping., and one of the most impressive albums of the year.

The 2016 triple-disc set The Complete BBC Sessions adds those songs as a third disc to a remastered version of the original 1997 compilation, an addition that doesn't greatly alter the overall picture of Zeppelin's BBC Sessions but offers a whole lot of additional value. Without those sessions, the compilation remains a stellar showcase of Led Zeppelin in ascendancy but with them the portrait deepens.

With We're All Gonna Die, Dawes have crafted an album rife with riddles and musical poetry, whose meaning may take a few listens to completely grab you. However, when it does finally hit you, it's hard to shake the feeling that Dawes have opened a door into the cosmos.

Ultimately, by celebrating those life experiences on Big Mess, Grouplove have crafted an ecstatic, joyful album.

The distance between Diamond Dogs and Station to Station is vast, and the addition of the live albums accentuates how deeply he cared for strong, deeply etched funk to offset his art. Listening to all this music in a concentrated blast, such progression is a wonder to behold.

Atrocity Exhibition is Danny Brown at his least diluted, almost unrelentingly grim and completely engrossing.

Yellowcard never feels treacly or forced. It's emo for grownups and a proper close for a band that wanted to go out on its own terms.

Blue Mountain is very much an extension of his work with the Grateful Dead, particularly Workingman's Dead and American Beauty: he's tapping into legends, then spinning them for the present day.

A cathartic yet poised album, one that weighs a ton and levitates.

It's a fascinating work of words, for sure, but the weight of Carey's arrangements and the Tempest's surprisingly nimble touch as an emcee make for something distinctive and essential.

Dissociation is an impressive album and a perfect endpoint to a very noisy and varied body of work.

A striking beginning to this chapter of Barratt's career, Crooked Man bears the stamp of artistic confidence that takes years to develop.

The nifty thing about Cosmic Hallelujah is that it plays as if it's a passion project: Chesney is determined to connect with his times without abandoning himself, and the result is one of his best records.

All that's here, dark or bright, is vital.

"Charlie Brown" is a swirling circle of doom, "I'll Take It and Break It" punishes with its stomping riff, "Bums" races along, while "Nightcrawler" revels in its menacing depravity. All this makes The Deaner Album sound a little excessive but there are also moments of madcap pop ("Bundle of Joy," "You Were There"), twisted country ("Tammy"), and funk ("Mercedes Benz"), all parceled out with expert pacing, so the album plays like a drunken, giddy party.

This is no nostalgia trip or callous comeback. It's a giant exclamation point on the end of a brilliant career. It's also a tribute to the everyman genius of Phife, a widescreen look at the record-making skills of Q-Tip, and most importantly, it's a pure, undiluted, joyous thrill to have the Tribe back and still sounding this vital.

It's artistically satisfying because it's the Rolling Stones allowing themselves to simply lay back and play for sheer enjoyment. It's a rare thing that will likely seem all the more valuable over the years.

Arrival is a fantastic album and a great piece of film score work, delivering menacing, daunting cacophonies of noise that evoke all types of fear, wonder, and intrigue that are evident within the movie itself.

In short, RTJ3 is near perfect in its execution. They're so good at this that it seems almost unfair in its effortlessness.

Musgraves slyly waltzes right up to the edge of kitsch without ever crossing over into camp. It's a delicate balancing act that she performs with ease because there's a lightness to her delivery and also to her original tunes.

The hour-long album is a bit excessive with some nondescript or merely passable second-half pop ballads, but it nonetheless makes good on all the promise of the mixtapes. It's destined to become a 2010s classic.

C U L T U R E propels the Migos three into the mainstream with a collection of woozy trap gems that is a peak in their young careers thus far.

None of it is particularly light. Sampha's exquisite melodies and detailed productions nonetheless make all the references to longing, disturbed sleep, injurious heat, and shattered glass go down easy.

There's a palpable sense of real listening, of generously shared creativity. Ultimately, it's that synergistic spark that makes Thile and Mehldau's collaboration sound less like a one-off experiment and more like the start of a lasting partnership.

This music is as much fun to listen to as it is serious and vital.

At the outset, it seems austere, but by its conclusion it's a robust celebration of all the weird, wonderful parts of America.

Every single moment of Man vs. Sofa is suspenseful and exciting.

What could have been a nostalgia grab is instead the triumph of a band that chose to deliver on the initial promise of their seminal debut, not only to their faithful fans, but, more importantly, to themselves.

Robust and fearless, Spirit may end up being one of the earliest and best salvos of its political era.

Part of what makes Circa Waves so compelling is that they are able to match the sound of their influences while still believably making the results sound their own. They've grown into an assured rock entity, but they've retained their fundamental sense of working-class Liverpudlian blues.

A wild work of twisted genius and more fun than rabies, that's for sure.

It's the razor-sharp precision of his words that allows for effective interlocking with the rest of the band, so much so that they seem to move through each song as a combined force of nature, matching tight yet crunchy instruments to the poignancy of every syllable.

Sillion is all top-shelf and one of the strongest releases of his career.

Neither his music nor lyrics follow shopworn blues changes, but that's why they feel so vital: far from resting on clichés, Taylor recasts the blues and the history of Black America on Fantasizing About Being Black in a way that speaks to a new century, and the results are bracing.

For as good as the songs are, what's initially so absorbing about Americana is this limber musicality. What makes it last are the songs, which are wry, moving, and truthful, which wasn't always the case in his book.

It contains some of Lamar's best writing and performances, revealing his evolving complexity and versatility as a soul-baring lyricist and dynamic rapper.

The Search for Everything succeeds because he's not donning a new costume: instead, he's settling into a groove he can claim as his own, and it feels like he's at home.

She may emphasize her ties to the past but she's intent on expanding the tradition, turning country music into a bolder, more inclusive place, and that desire is what makes Wrangled such a compelling album.

While the lack of unreleased material might make it superfluous for serious fans, this remains a splendid summation of the work of a major artist who continues to create deeply personal, profoundly moving music.

This is not just ecstatic music, but cosmic soul music. If you buy one archival recording this year, let this be it.

Black Origami is a monumental achievement, yet it still seems like Jlin is just getting started.