To Be Kind is as vital and unsettling as anything they’ve ever done, and displays a mastery of their craft that seems almost automatic at this point.

Rather, it is not a rap album; it is the absolute rap album. There is craft here (and in fact this is the most musical mainstream rap record since Aquemini) but just enough room for it.

SMiLE has arrived as incredible and ground-breaking a record as any of us could have hoped.

A nearly perfect follow-up... [it] keeps intact Interpol’s singular melodic prowess, while both tightening its songwriting and making unpredictable shifts in instrumental emphasis.

The Friedbergers have made a cogent statement that leaves most other contemporary acts in the dust.

A caterwauling hunk of avant-garde precision.

What makes the album so gigantic is how intensely unique the state’s identity becomes filtered through one man.

The Woods is an incredibly intense rock record even by S-K’s lofty standards; it's a call to arms that will hopefully force complacent indie kids to demand more from their rock music.

Each song is either a seismic death rattle or aftershock.

Live at Reading is a corrective to all that [i.e. journals, Guitar Hero], a reminder that nothing so trivial could ever sully music as irreducible as this.

Destroyer’s Rubies evinces an awareness of a feeling that “I’ve heard something like this before, and really enjoyed it” while denying the listener enough material specifics to follow-up with “It was on this record, recorded by this band, which I listened to when I was this old.”

What sticks out most about Spoon, five albums in, is how singular they sound, like a jut of brilliant rock standing unfazed by crashing tides of trends and hopeful hype.

Taken all together, 29 is a staggering piece.

Dose’s clever, rich, image-gorged writing is at that forefront more than ever, and, mercy, does he ever slam down the goods.

It draws a subtle focus and then recedes from the record without resolve. Its tensions remain. If Sufjan is a perfectionist, he is now perfecting the art of stumbling, creating melodies that writhe with uncertainty and voices that echo back on themselves.

While Picaresque is a significant step forward, it’s also a logical one. The band’s sonic palette has expanded gradually from album to album, and appears to have come full circle here.

As a rap record, it excels.

Kanye West had to do him; and lo and behold, he has. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is the most cohesive and assured record in mainstream hip-hop since Jay-Z sketched his Blueprint (2001).

It is a stubborn, patient sharpening of their craft.

He, like his album, works best in its woozier, hushed moments.

This is the best rap album of 2012--not just because of champion verses and immaculate drops, but because they recognize that the most brilliant foreground only shines against a well-defined backdrop.

A surprisingly quality recording of an incredible set, The Odessa Tapes plays like what it is: a miracle shrouded in modesty, and an ephemeral moment in time.

Funeral... is a resounding success on all levels---the group clearly able to make something incredible out of the familiar, and something inexplicably moving out of one emotionally draining year.

Obsidian makes for a totally immersive plunge and, depending on where you are with your own head when you listen, either a welcome gulp of fresh air in recognition or a chance to hold your breath and dive deeply into life’s darker materials until you have to come back up again.

What they said.

There’s nothing knee-jerk about it; just the inexorable sounds of ideas beautiful and terrible unfurling. It’s a careful, masterful record.

Deerhood vs. Evil is just simultaneously astounding and utterly familiar, correct, and right.

It’s a humble record, yet one with the timeless appeal to become a classic in league with the work of Waxahathee’s influences.

Trouble Will Find Me is impeccably sequenced, even at thirteen songs the rare National record that doesn’t contain “the one song they should have obviously left off.”

What makes Ghost succeed so magnificently... is how the directness, the openness of the lyrics in general, is so beautifully matched to the damaged music, which is itself rife with symbolism and meaning.

OOIOO transforms what could be mush into wonderful, brilliant songs that fold and mutate the ideas they’re based on into moving and coherent narratives.

I think Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the album of this year and maybe of the next.

Kaputt is the sound of an artist released from his back catalogue and his own notions of how a song should be sung, or written. It is a mighty, mighty piece of work and really worth celebrating. In my mind, this is Destroyer's best album yet.

Get Behind Me Satan marks the point where The White Stripes music has finally become as charismatic and mysterious as its creators.

This is a majestic, ambitious record, and the best thing an already incredible band has ever released. The rest is noise.

It’s the music here, not the sharp-toothed lyricism, which sets the record so far apart from the rest of the field.

As a guitar record Paul’s Tomb may be, somewhat surprisingly, the best guitar record since, gosh, Pink (2005)?

Bitter Tea has a bevy or unexplained items - crazy cranes, bloodthirsty in-laws, traitors lying in grass, osmanthus blossoms, card cheats and the only pewter pocket watch that belong to Joseph Smith's Great-Great Uncle's brother in law. It's outlandish stuff, and requires suitably outlandish music, from its weird melodies to jarring segues to an ocean of sounds marking a transition from one verse to the next.

There's something downright overwhelming about this disc, whether it's the unremitting playfulness or the way the band pulls together beauty and energy from the oddest of sounds or the way over top they sometimes launch into abstract political commentary.

This is all I really want an album to be: an immense, five-star production fronted by a compelling, three-dimensional character with an unrivaled faculty for craft.

Exotic is witty, literate, and charming.

This is the new definitive rock opera.

They've proven themselves able to change drastically in the past--so, even though Minotaur is one of their lesser works, I can't help but hope that a band as consistently transcendent as the Clientele will continue on into the future.

That’s the first thing that’s striking about The Sunset Tree: the arrangements on this record are spectacular.

Sufjan's proficiency with larger-than-life arrangements has always been one of his strongest qualities as a musician, and across The Age of Adz he wields that proficiency, brazenly, like a kind of weapon.

Embryonic works so staggeringly well because it's so unafraid to place itself in the lineage of unapologetically over-the-top rock album.

Ashes is A Sunny Day’s stripes, their first truly great album of scope.

Backstreet spawn aside, it may finally be settling in that Sir Lucious Left Foot does gather itself around Big Boi enough to make it the best OutKast-related release since the duo dropped Aquemini a dozen years ago (we can debate its merits next to the incredible six tracks or so on the bloated Stankonia, sure). For a Kast fan, this is life-affirming.

Think of it as a party invitation: it is as thrilling and original a debut as has come out this year, and one that leaves an ingenious sonic blueprint to build upon.

Like on that grand finale the production on Black Up is meticulous but furtive, always pushing forward, often unwilling simply to loop. And Butler's rapping sounds perfectly at home in this sometimes chaotic environment, kicking it amidst the kinetic verve of his beats.

They may not seem on-point at first, occasionally wandering into vaguely tangential realms like a professor who’s a few dropped chalks away from the retirement home, but eventually the genius of it settles in.

The hype was (gulp) correct. Hell Hath No Fury is hot. Dirtily, nastily, pipingly hot. Not Best Rap Album of the Year hot; Best Rap Album in a Few Years hot.

The album is, in short, phenomenal. It certainly doesn’t match the beauty and heartbreak of Either/Or (1997), but it manages to recapture the spirit of that record while properly articulating the orchestration that Elliott had been working with for Figure 8 and XO (1998).

What we have here is a great album, un- or under-appreciated....What Transference does is it opens a space for this band to experiment within again.

w h o k i l l is probably the most inviting album you'll hear this year.

This variation in the songcraft amid absolute adherence to a predetermined aesthetic attests to the band’s ability to craft a well-paced, engaging arc, an album as much attuned to its coherency as it is to being a springboard for a few spectacular singles.

At Mount Zoomer is a tremendous success.

With Julia Holter, with this profound and inexhaustibly gorgeous album, we can transcend our own transcendence and find the greatest bliss in the joyful renunciation of what makes us us.

Although there are a couple of failed tracks--like the tediously slow 'The Turn'--most of this stuff is groundbreaking.

Califone are continuing the progressive refinement of their roots, giving an assured argument for the possibilities ignored by folk musicians enslaved to tradition and a smart recall to all the forward-thinking others who have moved too completely and arrogantly on.

Nearly 1700 words and I still feel like this record's left me speechless. That's an epiphany to cherish.

Neko Case has made tremendous progress here as a lyricist.

New History Warfare has enough range that it seems to have opened up a whole new fanbase that might otherwise have no interest in avant-garde music.

These songs are great expanses, sprawling and glorious.

Inch by inch -- concept, production, groove -- Scale will measure your desires and dole out exactly what you want: depth, politics, creativity, or club-ready curios.

In The Idler Wheel's ten phenomenal songs, Fiona Apple seems to lay everything out on the table.

While Skitter on Take-Off is a great album, At the Cut is a brilliant one.

The line between cheese and accessibility can be thin, and whistling or handclaps or a hidden track or an overt songwriting method can all reek, but Friend and Foe has, just as ostensibly, no wasted space. The hinge is in the balance the band manages with every inkling of sound or production seeming both spontaneous and stultifying, both labored-over and cast off.

Strange Mercy is Clark's most tense, nauseous, kaleidoscopic album yet.

Infiniheart is too bright, too beautiful, and almost too good to be believed.

This is the best music Jay-Z can make as a human--at least by my (his) definitions of what he (we) can do.

The eleven tracks here are the most concise, effortless, and melodically conspicuous songs to come out of the band’s camp.

The album's explication of its own interest in contrast and conversation is perhaps its greatest virtue.

Feels takes the Collective in an exciting new direction, creating the kind of record that expands on the group's less esoteric strengths while also pushing their sound forward.

Tonally and lyrically somewhere between L. Cohen, Aidan Moffett and David Berman, Berringer's cynical, world-worn love-letters and resigned croon work perfectly with the band's rock steady rhythm-section.

Out of the Shadow remains one of the most promisingly straight-forward indie-rock/pop debuts since Oh, Inverted World.

Visions is exactly what it sounds like: it's an aesthetic and conceptual vision, one utterly unique to Boucher, and it's both strange and satisfying.

Arular beats out most everything I’ve heard this year in terms of creativity, energy, dance-ability and fun.

Quaristice--the band’s 9th full length, with about as many EPs--is probably the best album Autechre could have created at this point in their career.

The music beneath Cookie Mountain is an earthquake of nearly generation-defining proportions.

With El-P's help, Killer Mike has produced his first unquestionably great Album.

El-P's always been ahead of the curve but Cancer for Cure isn't valuable for its prescience so much as its currency of the now and the way it unites rap head nostalgia for the future beats of the past with the beats of the present.

Simply put, in 2006, My Life is a timeless evaluation of Assimilation, sometimes harmless, sometimes bleak, but consistently absorbing.

FaCE manages to be new, fresh and experimental while still retaining the listenability of much of Pollard’s seemingly never-ending canon.

Micachu’s album has all the markers of quirky chic--an unusual voice, a fairly well-known producer, and a distinctive approach centered around pastiche.

The collection is one of the best releases of 2006 because Tom Waits is one of America’s greatest living songwriters.

He’s filled his abdicated spot with greater authority than ever before, patched up the walls punched in from Ghostface’s temper tantrums and assured us that villian-rap’s appeal will remain evergreen as long as it infused with this genius, this wild idiocy, these manic flights of syllabic invention.

XXX is something much more complex, challenging, and rewarding than a dirty joke.

A lock for most promising debut of '08.

Woman King is the sound of Iron & Wine becoming a band; the sound of a singer-songwriter taking that all-important step forward; the sound of a group refusing to slip into the trap of staleness and homogeneity.

This is not just music that I believe, in the sense that it is credible, but this is music to believe in.

It’s a sophisticated work, delicately and meticulously crafted, and its effete pleasantness lends itself as well to "Late Night" performances as "New Yorker" coverage.

The real nuggets of the album, however, lie in the moments when the inherent melancholy behind Hart’s doe-eyed mysticism comes out.

It is the best Swans live record in that it distills the essential loss of agency one is meant to endure as best as two little discs can manage.

It feels self-contained, wholly its own, and this is what allows it to hold up such a pristine and vast mirror to the scenes that surround it.

Channel Orange is going to be the standard to beat for some time. And it might very well be the best R&B album of our young decade.

Om certainly absorb religious images from every corner of the Old World with a certain reckless abandon, but despite a wandering path that would find most lost in appropriative disrespect, it all seems to melt effortlessly together into the band's unique tapestry of the void.

The melodies are entrancing, made even more intriguing by their submergence within the reverb, together resulting in an album whose scope and sound are impossible to ignore.