Witching Hour could stand to be about two tracks shorter, but its quality comes as an unexpected, and highly welcome, surprise.

While This is Goodbye does suffer, like Last Exit, from being a little too consistent (there’s very little variation in tempo or arrangement, or theme for that matter), it's as cohesive a listening experience as almost any album I’ve heard this year.

The best songs on Music Tapes For Clouds And Tornados feature just Julian and banjo.

Vile has slyly written pop that enters one's head without leaving much of a permanent mark; instead of a distraction from one's deeper woes, it's chameleonic accompaniment.

In short, this is not only more like it--this is possibly Deerhoof’s best album, lingering nostalgia issues with Reveille aside.

On the surface, Replica's focus on the measured emergence of harmony seems to capture a bit of the modern struggle to find some sense amidst a constant bombardment of careless repetitions, to uncover a beautiful pattern in the digital noise of the everyday.

Whatever these songs lack in immediacy, they rebound with an artistry.

"Murder," "skimask," and "gangsta," all appended with the word "shit," are the terms in which Gibbs characterizes his oeuvre. Str8 Killa is all of those things. It is also breathtaking in its execution.

Mothertongue oscillates between the comfort/terror of singularities and excitement/terror of potentialities, but the possibilities this duality affords for Muhly’s future work are frankly exhilarating.

It’s like listening to a strong feeling that yearns to be vented, but instead is left inside its confining limits, echoing on itself.

Together is paced excellently at a little over 44 minutes, feels like half of that, and not a single song warrants a skip.

With Black Sheep Boy, Okkervil River have made the kind of minor classic that will inspire obsessive-compulsive love affairs with the lucky people who stumble upon it.

Once the shock of the new dissipates, what’s left is an impeccably assembled record worth indulging with the vigor that any of Lindstrom’s Christabelle-less work deserves.

Black Sands is an album so fully realized that comprehending the places he still so obviously has yet to reach is staggering.

Panic Prevention is no classic, but a wonderful testament to intuition, which boisterously, and rightfully, posits Jamie T in that rare class of pioneering artist, one who has created a piece of work to stand with any of the other notable records released so far this year.

If for no other reason than that VanGaalen is perfectly content to be an intuitive outsider to this “outsider” genre of music that he unplies, his Black Mold tastes fresh and new and, ultimately, life-giving to the likes of us.

We, The Vehicles is a fine collection of songs by a band running on all cylinders.

Comfort of Strangers isn’t only Orton’s best album to date, it’s her most daring.

It makes for a remarkable debut full-length-just don't expect to see any of it scoring some slow-motion spinning or pastel unicorns when those Pure Moods commercials make their inevitable comeback.

Outside the charismatic skill of Lidell's shapeshifting vocals and his forward-looking arrangements, the actual songs of Multiply aren't of as indelible an essence as the classics that they imitate.

It begins to sink in that this band has performed a theoretical feat of Hawking proportions: it has devised a fool-proof formula for the unformulaic.

If nothing else, Stars of the Lid have achieved Adam's goal of making music "to really relax to," abjectly defying intent listening, laying waste to the established vocabulary of music production and appreciation.

The style of songwriting is remarkably similar to that found on Teen Dream. Yet neither suffers much for it.

Celestial Lineage deserves every bit of attention it's garnered this year. I can personally put it on a shortlist of 2011 records that reinvigorated my confidence in metal in ways that I haven't felt in a long, long time.

Tigers cannot compete with an actual Case show, of course, and after Blacklisted we don't really need to be reminded of her talent, but, hell, why not?

What makes In Evening Air a great break-up album is the same thing that makes Teen Dream (2010) a great break-up album: it's not exactly that the lyrics espouse these profound, poetic truths about relationships so much as they use sonic patterns and pretty mundane language to create a sad and disorienting sense of something very familiar disappearing.

Aesop Rock’s terrifically brooding new record.

The album’s accompanying trappings do little to dull its impressiveness or the band’s command of its lineage.