For beautiful execution of a beautiful idea for a tribute/concept album, try The Beautiful Old: Turn-of-the-Century Songs.

Ultimately American Ride resounds like a victory cry--urgent, enduring and unfailingly affecting.

Needing to prove nothing, Goat have created one of the most definitive musical statements of 2016.

Fantastic Plastic might just be their finest effort. This is the music that stirs your loins and flies in your face like the sweet bird of youth come home to roost. Fingers crossed that this isn’t their Final Vinyl.

The label unearthed a stellar collection of songs the band recorded over two night in 1968.... The CD set capturing all four shows is where you should spend your money.

This is a dazzling album, steeped in soul and brimming with an uncommon musicality, all rhythmic urgency and compelling melodies and anthemic choruses.

Lanegan doesn’t need someone to make him great, he does fine by himself and it shows with the anthology of his solo work Has God Seen My Shadow?- An Anthology 1989-2011 (Light in the Attic).

They represent such a cool transitional period in Davis's career, as radical a creative juxtaposition to the jazz community as Bob Dylan blowing the minds of the folkies with the crackle of a guitar amplifier.

Leonard Cohen has made the best full album of his career (song for song, sound for sound, lyrical point for point; yes, this is true) and most certainly the best album of 2012.

What Thundercat has created with The Golden Age of Apocalypse is the sonic equivalent to a power-packed issue of Wax Poetics, bringing together several disparate elements of one nation under a groove to build a challenging and soulful playground for his indelible skills on the bass.

This current incarnation of Swans swim across the salty sea of the group's three-decade strong catalog, executing a balance of grind and grace that casts a new light on old classics.

For those a bit put off by the overt club friendliness of The Field but intrigued by Willner's affinity for glitch, Loops is definitely your conduit into the abstract nature of this BPM bard's state of mind.

This is fun music, gut music, music you can freak out to or just nod your head, depending on your mood.

Women & Work finds the Memphis band at complete ease with their mix of '70s outlaw country and plenty of punk rock attitude and swagger, making it easily the most consistently solid release in their already enviable cannon of music.

On the group's third full-length Love Will Prevail, Ragon earns his rightful place alongside the works of the underground icons he flips for profit.

While none of the songs are deeply political or poetic like the wartime bands that predated Tame Impala, they are no less poignant and often delve into a reflective sadness of longing to belong.

This follow-up is even better & louder, on par with the dizzying heights of her old band.

Once again, The War on Drugs have crafted an album of the year, built not upon flash or novelty, but a new take on traditional rock and roll that is always pushing forward.

Another exquisite solo performance entitled Rio.

Yin & Yang is an earth shattering 45 minutes of street urchin dub punk that not only reveals This Is PiL for the anti-climactic milquetoast sham that it was, but re-establishes the true soul of Public Image as it was originally intended by the vast sum of its initial parts.

Cancer4Cure is very much a window shattering Brooklyn rap record in every sense... [Meline is] busting loose some of the sharpest darts of his life.

Weird, raw and beautiful all at once.

The finished product is a beautifully fluid fusion of dub, jazz and micro-house zone-outs that continues to exemplify Oswald's two-decade strong aptitude as one of the great masters of repetitive groove theory.

On Wonder/Wander Koone transcends such dippy, blog-generated catch-phrasing, displaying a sense of genuine dominion within the art of experimental laptop pop.

Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down (Nonesuch/Perro Verde) ranks not only among his very best releases, but among the best socio-political albums ever made.

[The Cherry Thing] serves as a reminder that Neneh Cherry is a certifiable musical treasure.

Simply put, Tracer is a lovely, melodious, engaging work of electronic music that will play just as well in the bedroom as it will on the dance floor.

Co-written and produced by his missus Kathleen Brennan, Waits' songs--Bad as Me included--find their center immediately and stick like a record's skip.