An enchanting, rhapsodic album of uncommon depth.

The tones and the story told -- wordlessly throughout -- are exquisite.

Wincing the Night Away makes both [previous] albums sound like fragmented potential.

At its core, this constitutes a hearty glimpse of young Bob Dylan changing the music business, and the world, one note at a time.

Perfect.

Nomad is more than a beautiful offering for the world music crowd. It's the defining work of a guitar hero.

All told, Saltwater's the most refreshing indie pop LP since Sufjan Stevens' Illinois.

Sound System presents the complete Clash, lovingly remastered on six discs, comprising the five studio LPs the classic lineup released between 1977 and 1982, plus a 3-CD set featuring non-LP singles and B-sides. A DVD unspools archival footage, plus every video. The sonic upgrade sounds best on the earliest material.

This self-titled album, released on UK indie Rough Trade in 1988, began her journey to becoming a household name. In a newly remastered 2-disc edition, Lucinda Williams blossoms all over again.

Run the Jewels 2 gut-punches the competition into second place.

Nearly a half-century after the sometimes haphazard creation, this music retains every bit of its intimacy, mystery, and resonance, and The Basement Tapes Complete boxes it up with the respect and insight it demands.

Stepping upward into the macro, the album's landmark achievement lies in Kendrick Lamar's elevation of hip-hop into subtle invisibility, his blackness not exclusively tied to the rapper image.

There's effortless, unhurried groove as he slides from the disarming grit of Nineties hip-hop in "Without You" to Sixties soul on "The Bird" and honey-dripped R&B with "Am I Wrong."

The repetitiveness of Pool tires itself out by track 12, but there's an art to flawless cohesion.

Textured, ornate, and somehow seeping into the deepest parts of you. Notch it as the best Explosions in the Sky album since their previous high-water mark, 2003's The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place.

It's a rare occasion of art transcending influence, with Toledo sounding like he's coming apart while doing it.

Every classic, from "Blitzkrieg Bop" to "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World," bleeds fresh energy. The three CDs of stereo and mono mixes, demos, single versions, and two blistering live sets from 1976 L.A. are killer, but the new vinyl makes purchasing this box mandatory.

The era may have confounded fans, but Trouble No More harvests some of Dylan's most remarkable performances.

Master of Puppets realized the band's greatest strengths, coalescing hardcore punk with progressive metal.

While the title track's big-hearted buildup channels the crew's establishing alt-pop buoyancy, new ideas stagger the 11 tracks. Monolithic "MetaGoth" and smoky ballad "Walking With a Killer" work through internal frustrations, eloquently tracking out a new era for the Breeders.

The Monkeys' most anti-rock album, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino proves their most adventurous, pop accessibility be damned.

The percussive snap and enhanced reverb on "Yer Blues" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" make the songs all the more blistering, but overall, any flourishes are carefully considered. Better still, the true revelations occur after the familiar first 94 minutes are up.

Combative and hostile even 30 years later, ... And Justice For All delivers exactly what its title promises.

The 31-year-old bares herself and parlays stereotypical insecurities into liberating strengths, hurling bombs of empowerment.

A legendary liquor-soaked session with Tom Waits, two discs containing a ragged-but-right contemporary concert, and a booklet that takes an in-depth look at the making of DTAS crackle and pop, but in revisiting its creators' original intent, a formerly sneered at LP becomes essential.

Brighter compositions match the lyrical demands of more specified storytelling, most vividly on piano-led "Mr. Lee."

Perfect in vision, voice, harmony – not to mention timing – Treasure of Love delivers quintessential Flatlanders.

Eschewing categories entirely, let's just call this trippy l'il slice of vinyl a masterwork, combining elements of salsa, house, reggae, hip-hop, and ska into one remarkably cohesive whole.

Their four-way harmonies soar to meet that now-familiar, West Coast country jangle, tart pop songs blending into a deep, rich mulch out of which melodies grow like wildflowers.

Sea Change joins Weezer's Maladroit and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' By the Way on the list of beautiful-but-sad 2002 L.A. LPs.

While the album retains some of the lo-fi insularity of his earlier four-track work, the full band backing makes Supper more of a living-room album than a back bedroom one.

It almost goes without saying that the D4 kick the Vines, Hives, and White Stripes right square in their trendy asses.

If you haven't heard the plaintive and curiously uplifting songs of longing and loss from this rising phenom, you're missing the emergence of one of the most affecting new talents of the past five years.

An astonishing debut.

Every song but one falls fully developed in the five- to seven-minute ballpark, brimming with enough dissonant wizardry, smart vocal imagery, and tonal shades of rock to fly the freak flag like no aging rockers ever have.

This is the first absolutely essential UK disc of the year.

It sounds unfiltered, raw, and rough, and the quartet's mixture of guitar, organ, fiddle, percussion, and flute (Jethro Tull in the house) makes it all the more authentic.

A rare record from an extraordinary artist, and one of the year's best.

Grandaddy's third full-length is the band's Dark Side of the Moon, a musical snapshot of postmodern existence in which things are often not what they seem.

There's not a bad spot on the album, 12 tracks that taken as a whole make up the most exhilarating UK rock album in years.

The Bad Plus plies a refreshingly playful, forcefully dynamic, and knowingly irreverent sensibility that stretches the boundaries of the format without dislodging the music from its foundation.

If the Datsuns' retro sound is currently getting them Strokes/Stripes levels of hype, their blow-the-doors-off passion should allow them to leave their peers in the dust.

Their music is an amazing nexus where surgical precision, ace musicianship, and thrifty minimalism intertwine joyously.

Scarlet's Walk not only evinces Amos' musical maturation, it's also the singer's most ambitious lyrical work.

Marshall has a voice as distinctive and enchanting as Billie Holiday, capable of summoning the same emotions in the listener -- awe, lust, bewilderment, a burning desire to reach out and shelter the delicacy of it from all the crude harshness of the world.

The Love Is Hell discs are far more dense and dark, making the songs a fun challenge to crack open, though it isn't difficult to determine what a no-brainer it must have been for Lost Highway to favor the brilliant Roll over the more spotty Hell discs. [Review applies to both EPs and 'Rock N Roll']

An album that absolutely cannot be ignored.

One listen, and you'll be hooked.

In the years to come, Low will trudge onward across the vast tundra of gross underappreciation, but in retrospect, their canon will likely be seen as one of the most important and influential of our time, so you might want to start paying attention.

Giddy, confident, and instantly memorable, The Remote Part is great Brit pop and great rock & roll.

This is breathtaking, life-affirming music with the power to heal and restore. It's that beautiful.

Since I Left You is as much of a revelation now as Primal Scream's life-changing Screamadelica was a decade ago.

The dramatic, melancholy undercurrents of string-driven pop nuggets "The Drowning Years" and "Never Look at the Sun" showcase the Delgados as the smart, cutting-edge descendents of the Carpenters: everything Belle & Sebastian want to be, but are too damn precocious to pull off.

Let's just hope it doesn't take another near-death experience for their next album to be this good.

The Costello formula takes over: minimalist but experimental instrumentation, eternally durable vocals, and literate punk-wave bittersweetening.

The disc alternates between unsettling, exhilarating, and devastating in its emotional impact; it's also difficult not to get distracted by everything going on musically.

No chips or cracks in this debut's silly-grin inducing veneer, just one short, sharp jolt of postmodern skank.

By the Way is orchestral, taunting, sinister, beatific, rousing, jocular, nervy, ethereal, and dare I say it, mature.

"Black Dog" and "Over the Hills and Far Away" back-to-back are gonzo.

Great albums are great from the very first note, and the first 10 seconds of Walking With Thee will stop you dead in your tracks.

Much of Play sounds like it was beamed directly from planet Sad Guy, but it's far and away Moby's most cohesive and affecting work to date.

Any rock album that tackles such a wide spectrum without compromising the music deserves respect.

A deeply personal album that will resonate with anyone who's ever found their life's path leading them down a dead end.

After a while -- a familiarity period if you will -- it becomes clear that these songs are not only fully realized, they're damn near brilliant.

With Showtime, the very idea of diagramming a single line is enough to cause black wormholes to open in the listener's mind – quantum physics by way of South London slang.

Ultimately, it all plays out like a 60-minute calling card that illustrates hip-hop's most liberal producers aren't afraid to keep on keepin' on.

The Black Album stands up alongside Reasonable Doubt and The Blueprint as Z's most ambitious work.

The whole much greater than its parts, Dead Cities is creation imbued and then muted again.

Kudos to White's preservation of Lynn's loving, narrative songwriting even when paired with his own grittier sensibilities. In doing so, the two unlikely bedfellows have cut a classic.

Every emotion is intense and genuine, and the musicianship is just as moving as Mercer's lyrics.

American Idiot is one of the most politically volatile albums to come out since the ascension of the Accidental President. It's also the best album of Green Day's 12-year career.

Their robe is cut from cloth that matters: melodic Peter Hook-like basslines; the divine shoegazer textures of My Bloody Valentine and Ride; a peppy, Strokes-like bounce; and a singer who's a dead ringer for Ian Curtis.

The first hip-hop classic of the new millennium.

Sketchy sound quality (on The Vanilla Tapes), to be sure, but its rawness makes the final product that much more impressive.

Not only does it capture the unstructured verse of a masked maniac within a sheer net of plausibility, it parades his inner dementia among instrumental adornments of the highest order.

For the fan-atic, WTLO's scrapbooklike discography unveils both a gold mine of (still) unreleased material and the Seattle trio's penchant for dashing off B-sides, tributes, and noise at the smash of a guitar.

If Alabama's Drive-by Truckers are the Second Coming of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tennessee's Kings of Leon are ZZ Top -- barons of boogie.

One Beat is the Portland, Ore., trio's best work to date, illustrating yet again that women can play and will be heard, with or without a political platform.

Jaysus lads, get out the oven mitts – this one smokes.

Some Cities builds on the band's propensity for melodic grandeur and achieves pure sonic bliss in the bargain.

Fortifying her monstrous singles "Galang" and "Sunshowers" with further molten munitions, Arular is primed for worldwide insurrection.

The songs spring from a warm hearth, upping the ante from their well-received sophomore LP, 2003's Heart.

[They] have taken their love of Fifties kitsch and Sixties pop off the Jesus & Mary Chain Gang of Love and down to the Velvet Underground.

Like Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot into A Ghost Is Born, Spoon's fifth full-length finds further symbiosis between Britt Daniel's emotional obfuscation and the band's spare, uptown backbeat, then looses drummer Jim Eno to metronome the rest.

The results are reason enough for Damon Albarn's other outfit to finally pack it in.

Fans may have to have The Woods surgically removed from their players. It's just that powerful, demanding to be heard.

No other big band out there makes their pieces fit like this. Not Queens of the Stone Age, not Nine Inch Nails, certainly not Crossfade, Seether, or Chevelle. Audioslave are officially in a league of their own.

Burrows deep into the collective unconscious of American song.

The force of Okkervil's last LP, '03's Down the River of Golden Dreams, is strengthened and stretched on Black Sheep Boy, bursting with the heaviness of heart.

The 22-song epic marries Stevens' personal history to that of the state, as well as knitting spare emotional lyrics with lush orchestral and choral arrangements, upping the ante for singer-songwriters everywhere.

It's evident that the band's traditionally simple sound has been augmented with greater influences and a desire to overstuff, miraculously without overkill.

Aww, our little freak is all grown up.

It shimmers and sulks, adding a rich dimension to the group's already delicious sound.

This album is alive.

[A] psychedelic rap reality worth wigging to.

Rogue Wave has reinvented itself with soft-edged, yet masculine, music that's far from fluffy.

Birds Make Good Neighbors is autumn wrapped up in cashmere: rich, comfortable, welcome.

The Life Pursuit is certainly nothing new in the pop lexicon, but Murdoch's keen observational eye gives these songs vivid life.