It’s a jittering, coruscating sucker punch of an album--and St. Vincent’s first bona fide masterpiece.

Not quite of this world and not quite over the edge, these earthy, epic songs aren't meant to save us, only to supply some monumental crescendos and a wide-screen view on the way down.

Suffice to say that if you have enjoyed Griffin's repertoire of considered and emotionally precise songs -- as fans from the Dixie Chicks to Solomon Burke to Jessica Simpson have -- you will find your life enriched by "Children Running Through."

Magnificent.

[It] seems like the album the 66-year-old singer was born to make

This easily ranks among the top rock records of the year.

It's untamed, topsy-turvy, elliptical - and one of the most exciting albums I've heard all year.

The result is the best, most cogent album of her career.

This album is not just a revival, but a complete rejuvenation for John Fogerty. It's easily his best solo record, and what makes it so special is that he embraces his swamp-rocking Creedence Clearwater Revival days.

Not content to merely shake up the music industry by releasing Consolers with only one week's advance notice, the Raconteurs have also had the nerve to drop a near-classic album.

On one of this year's smoothest and best discs, Hunter makes The Hard Way go down so easy.

Ten exuberant, tender, casually elegant tracks later you realize - much to your surprise, if you're like me--that the pairing of the grizzled country star and the suave jazz master is an unmitigated, ear-tickling success.

This is a stroke of genius.

Backspacer, the band’s ninth studio album [is] one of its most cohesive and satisfying in terms of brevity, crisp production, and a sharp focus.

This is industrial-strength Beach House with its hallmarks intact, just bigger and better. With co-producer Chris Coady, Legrand and Scally lift some of the haze that has often enveloped their music...now the band has given us this year’s first classic album.

The result is a record that alternates between fuzzy and crisp; those who like to get lost in their headphones should approve.

Much like a riveting movie keeps you in your seat, you’ll want to pay close attention to Joanna Newsom’s astonishing new album for fear of missing too much of the plot.

The album bubbles over with insidious grooves, inventive samples, and lissome rhyming about things frivolous and fraught.

If there's a lesson to be learned from The Way Out, it's that we need little more than the sounds of each other's voices to find comfort--or in the Books' case, to crank out yet another masterwork.

You barely detect it at first, but something miraculous happens on Arcade Fire's revelatory third album. The songs breathe--occasionally in long exhales, sometimes in staccato gasps.

An “anything goes” approach to recording, which included opening up to let his bandmates collaborate on the songwriting, pays off in this captivating collection.

Solo is Iyer's grand statement, and with it he has fulfilled his promise.

The Guitar Song comes grouped in two parts, a "Black Album" and a "White Album," structured, according to Johnson, as a progressive movement from a dark and sordid beginning to a reassuring and redemptive end. That structure isn't always discernable in listening. What is immediately evident, though, is that this is a phenomenal collection of country music.

Everything in Between is a triumphant leap forward from an already solid foundation, and one that cements the duo as one of this era's incontestably exceptional indie-rock acts.

Halcyon Digest is as comforting in its familiar feel as it is startling for its sonic variety.

Anyone who doubted that Green is one of today's most commanding vocalists simply needs to hear how he negotiates moods here and turns phrases with subtlety, wit, and style. Killer stuff.

Maybe it's not surprising that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is so seamlessly his personal best.

Northern Aggression rocks as ferociously as anything Wynn has ever done.

It is an exceedingly agreeable collection of ultra-catchy garage-pop complete with slash-and-burn guitars, wheedling psychedelic organs, gauzy ballads, dollops of Motown stomp, and loads of love laments both despairing and fidgety.

Her latest album marks yet another sea change, a clanging, clamoring work of art that's as disturbing as it is moving. Let England Shake is staggering, from its seasick melodies to its visceral imagery of soldiers falling like "lumps of meat."

Where In Rainbows was mellow but brisk - an album that felt on its way somewhere - these songs are eerie and insidious, creeping like shadows - and, often because of the haunting voice of Thom Yorke, the occasional chill.

The result is Vile's best record to date, an idiosyncratic amalgam of intimate performance and communal expression - and one that continues to reveal new layers upon repeated listens.

Add in a clutch of terrific songs that perfectly balance leader Grohl's gift for pairing earworm melodies with both chunky power-pop guitars and thrashy screamers and you've got the most vital, stem-to-stern enjoyable Foo Fighters album in quite some time.

Steve Earle's stellar new album, produced by T Bone Burnett, takes its name from the final Hank Williams single (as does the multitalented Earle's debut novel, out next month).

The great, and only, disappointment with Rome is that once you've heard the album, you'll want to watch the movie it accompanies. Except there is no movie.

"Emma" was gorgeous in its austerity, but its follow-up is staggering for its vision. Bon Iver's self-titled sophomore release will go down as one of this year's most arresting albums, drunk on its own impressionistic charms and oblivious to anyone's expectations but Vernon's.

It is a stunning achievement in contemporary pop. Yet, unlike so much of contemporary pop, it's timeless.

His latest is the closest he has come to making a masterpiece in a very long time.

The result is a stunning reboot.

A set of 12 songs overflowing with bile and sonic invention.

Apple has been here before, but it makes her new album no less arresting.

Way Down Low, is one of the greatest vocal albums I've ever heard.

Ripe with propulsive tempos, drum machines, and electronic embellishments, the album sounds like nothing else she's ever done.

The Compton MC's long-awaited major label debut is a breakthrough, as he both resurrects and reinvents West Coast hip-hop.

This sensual song suite about the ephemeral nature of love and what it takes to sustain happiness should end up among this year’s finest efforts.

While outstanding songs ("The Catastrophe") stand on their own, this is a song cycle that demands to be absorbed whole.

Trouble Will Find Me is the Brooklyn, N.Y., indie-rock band’s sixth and most deft album yet, a haunted and lugubrious meditation on loss and despair.

Tomorrow’s Harvest is as strong a return to form as it is stunning an update, with the Scottish duo refining their blend of nostalgic sonics and futuristic sheen.

It’s a brave account of how you can fall out of love just as easily as you fell in. Like the first blush of a new romance, it is intoxicating.

With eight songs that unfurl to 40 minutes, it’s impeccably crafted and plays off a mercurial tension between Callahan’s voice--a parched yet resonant baritone--and the lush arrangements that envelop it.

Pusha T is at the top of his game with sharply defined autobiographical tales and defiant, self-aware verses. He often dazzles with his smooth, cold-blooded flow and connects on virtually every song.

It is no mere rehash. If anything, the sequel is more intense than the original.

It’s among her finest work in a 35-year career, assured and at ease, and one of 2014’s first great albums.

Heard in its complete, unruly, sometimes crazed glory, Miles at the Fillmore shows just how furious the evolutionary pace of his music was at this point.

It’s a tour de force. The work’s relentless, odd-accented, propulsive rhythms are a perfect fit for this band.

The highs wouldn’t feel so high without the lows here, which is a regular trope of the genre; but as with all tropes, execution trumps invention, and the Hotelier executes exceptionally.

Slavishly downbeat, it burrows even deeper into Del Rey’s torchy sensibility and rarely breaks its spell.

Less glitchy and bass-led than FlyLo’s previous work, it enters him in the canon of mystics and psychedelic journeyers who’ve sought to crack the doors of perception.

Haunting, jarring, and oddly beautiful, Soused defies the idea of “easy listening,” but its singular vision and harnessing of the avant-garde makes it one of the year’s most compelling artistic statements.

Backed by his new band the Vanguard, to whom the album is jointly credited, his sprawling funk grooves and pointed (if characteristically indecipherable) lyrics are still strikingly timely.

Thrilling and joyous, fierce and focused, the women sound like they’re having the time of their lives sinking their teeth back into the music together.

Where “good kid” was a perceptive look at Lamar’s adolescence in a small part of Los Angeles, Butterfly is a weary assessment of his adulthood, and a world that’s bigger, more complex, and more flawed that he knew. If the albums share anything, it’s that they’re both cinematic. But the movie Lamar is shooting now puts the current era into a more fitting frame.

For all of the gussy rhythms--which can stop just this side of overly cute--and legit power, there’s real subtlety at work, too, and in unlikely spots.

If there are no obvious radio-ready hits on par with “Adorn,” his massive hit from 2012’s “Kaleidoscope Dream,” there is something more potent in their place: a stone-cold classic not tethered to time, genre, or expectations.

Quieter but equally captivating.

While drummer Mikkey Dee shines on an unexpected cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” That efficient if unspectacular borrowing aside, this potent record ranks among the year’s best.

On Divers, her breathtaking follow-up to 2010’s “Have One on Me,” the singer, songwriter, and harpist affirms her stature as a visionary. It’s the most streamlined of her four albums.

If there are no uptempo blazers on the order of "Rolling in the Deep" or "Rumor Has It," the album doesn’t suffer in quality for the lack.

A sublime, succinct overview of the composer’s sprawling catalog.

The album feels stunningly fresh and cutting edge; expect to see it on some Top Ten lists later this year.

The band’s masterwork to date, IV delivers a listening experience as thrill-packed and invigorating as the loftiest comparisons you can throw at it.

The Hope Six Demolition Project might derive its title from a Housing and Urban Development program designed to “transform public housing,” but the bleak picture Harvey portrays on this stunning album gives that title a second, and more ominous, meaning.

Simply stated, here’s the experimental-listening event of the year.

The album that resulted is Simon’s richest, most instantly appealing collection since “Graceland.”

What results is an album to live with, and to live inside: engrossing and necessary.

His deeply felt meditations on matters of the heart and the soul are matched by the meticulously detailed, gorgeously rendered music that surrounds them.

Time might have pushed along, but it was obvious how much Ocean’s rich, detailed, and urgent storytelling had been missed once it was here again.

A taut display of his dry wit and ability to wring beauty out of even the most harrowing human ideals.

The set list for most of these shows was identical, so you get as many as 20 versions of certain songs. For all that, listening through the whole of this box set is an exhilarating experience.

The album is a 55-minute blitz of thumping beats and head-spinning rhymes that blur by you before you have a chance to process them.

Even now, more than four decades after being recorded, it still catches your ear as one of the most wholly original sounds in pop music.

Decisively unmodern yet not quite retro, The Queen Is Dead sounds every bit as ineffably marvelous now as it must have in 1986, and this reissue is as good an excuse as any to let it charm us all over again.

The Dusk in Us is, then, a 44-minute master class in wielding extreme art toward human ends, using hardcore’s berating heft as a foundation for dirging experimentalism.

Utopia is both resolutely avant-garde and absolutely beautiful, a combination those who associate experimental music with dissonance and ugliness will find utterly paradoxical.

White does pretty much everything except what fans have learned to expect from him. It’s an ambitious, dizzying, and sometimes challenging listen, but overall makes for one of the most maniacally creative albums of the year.

Inevitably, there’s some repetition--no fewer than 12 different attempts at “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” for example. What’s exhilarating is the chance to eavesdrop on the evolution of the songs as Dylan grasps, bit by bit, for the emotional center of each one.

The 1975’s frequently dazzling exploration of life in the iOS era, frontman Matty Healy turns the mic over to--who else?--Siri. Narrating a strangely touching fable about a man in love with the Internet, the bot contributes one of a great many moments on the album.

“Western Stars” finds Springsteen in character study mode with finely detailed storytelling about broken (sometimes literally) men on a quest to find meaning, renewal, or maybe just a bit of love. At their core and stripped of their orchestral flourishes and diverse musical dynamic, most of the songs here would not be out of place on his dark, acoustic efforts, “Nebraska,” “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” or “Devils and Dust.”

It’s an ideal album for this decisively odd moment, its homemade feel (much of it was recorded in her house, with percussion partially supplied by objects around her home) and sense of awe giving it a defiant energy. ... A thrill ride.

Harcourt's fourth album certifies his musical genius with songs that are catchy enough to be plastered all over the summer airwaves, bathing us in sweeping melodies and infectious beats.

These gauzy songs are an ideal fit for Gainsbourg's dreamy, impossibly light voice.

A collection of songs that proves nearly as personal, as socially aware, and as deft at intertwining the two, as was Pulp’s 1998 opus, ‘‘This Is Hardcore.’’

Unlike previous efforts at stylistic hop-scotch, "Phantom Punch" is Lerche's most comfortable album since "Faces Down."

Twee or not, there is a brilliant simplicity to Svanangen's music, though the tunes are never sparse.

Fortunately, the alt-country singer-songwriter’s gifts of soul mining are so acute that the songs — inspired by her mother’s passing and a wrenching breakup — enrich as well as exhaust, and engender cautious optimism.

Call it emo for adults.

The album casts the duo in a new light that may not quite eclipse their former work, but it has set them well on their way.

The album is sophisticated and layered with deft orchestration. And yet, the band's songwriting and delivery display an earnestness and lack of pretension that's pure rock.