Fiske's participation makes PSII even more compelling than its fine companion album. It is arguably Elephant9's finest live offering to date, and a guidepost to other bands showing how it's done.

Wanna Buy a Monkey? shows off Nakamura's ear for a great track as well as his deft turntablist skills.

Celebration Castle confirms what anyone who heard Laced With Romance suspected -- that the Ponys are growing into one of the best and most powerfully pleasurable rock bands of their generation.

Yes, Ys is a demanding listen, but it's also a rewarding and inspiring one.

Plastic Anniversary is both relevant to its time and another well-conceived, thought-provoking chapter in their long-running career.

Whatever hopes you held in the aftermath of "I Am a Bird Now," they have been exponentially exceeded in poetry, music, and honesty here.

Best of all, it all feels effortless, from the production to the songwriting.

Few bands of their day, and especially those of the post-punk '80s, are as consistent as the Church at writing songs that sound like more sophisticated and mature versions of their classic material.

One long angelic hymn for an insane world with the intimacy of a friend playing guitar in your living room and the grandeur of Sigur Rós.

While it's true that all this music is easy to find elsewhere, it's also true that Coltrane '58: The Prestige Recordings sounds sterling and is presented with thought and care, so anybody looking to dive into these classic recordings will find this a fine intro.

On Eternal Youth, Future Bible Heroes erase any idea of the band being a side-project and work together as a trio striving for the same artistic goals. In doing so, they may have created their masterpiece.

As good a record as any he's made, possibly his best.

Most of the successive leaks and singles continued the trend, and King of Hearts, in turn, is clearly the singer's best album yet.

The pervasive, blinding darkness that saturates this bleak, sublime music is driven by the band's collective desire to seek ecstasy in the very heart of the void.

Parts Daniel Johnston and avant-cabaret show, it demands attention from the opening clatter of a cassette recorder and ensuing dinked-out piano and spoke-sung rhymes of the one-minute "recognized."

This volume charts Jansch's development as a songwriter as well as an interpreter who remains devoted to his roots while restlessly expanding the reach of his oeuvre This music has aged exceptionally well.

I Love You, Honeybear, despite the occasional double entendre, is as powerful a statement about love in the vacuous, social media-obsessed early 21st century as it is a denouement of the detached hipster charlatan.

After factoring in the fictitious post-breakup duet with Ne-Yo (which is more like a verbal joust), the self-flagellating "Holding You Down (Goin' in Circles)" (a collision of oft-used samples and references that does not sound the least bit tired), and the nakedly ambitious "Famous" (where she yearns for girls to want to be like her), it becomes increasingly clear that Love Me Back sprawls and stuns in equal measure.

Ultimately, Love vs Money is Love/Hate's equal, stuffed with hooks, ceaselessly absorptive productions, and clever and often funny wordplay.

While Dabice and Mannequin Pussy might be worried that their destructive Dark Phoenix energy is too much to take, I Got Heaven is an album of apocalyptic rock & roll bliss.

With its loping, relaxed grooves and patina of sweetened strings, $10 Cowboy could be mistaken for a product of FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, not an album originating from a small studio in Austin, Texas.

This time out, Eitzel has built his arrangements around spare keyboard lines, atmospheric electronic samples, and percussion loops that blend with his voice and acoustic guitar to create an effect that suggest a more spare, organic version of Portishead, or a Jon Brion production that's stuck in a blue funk. But the new surroundings suit the songs quite well...

If anything, Freeman is a tighter record than McCartney--it's not homemade, it's all complete songs--but there's no denying it shares the same spirit; that it is the sound of breaking dawn of a new day.

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.

As tender as it is uncompromising, Wanderer is exactly the album Marshall needed to make at this point in her career and life. It's some of her most essential music, in both senses of the word.

ScHoolboy Q flexes just how easy his craft is for him throughout Blue Lips, switching his styles without blinking while telling some of his most difficult truths.

If many of Pollard's post-GBV albums have suggested a man tossing out whatever tunes he came up with this week, Let It Beard is an ambitious, clearly focused attempt to create something out of the ordinary, and it succeeds well enough to feel like a game changer for Pollard and his partners.

Somebody will really have to pull off a miracle to top Nashville as far as intelligent, honest and entertaining guitar pop goes in 2005. Or any other year.