She is what we say we want. The ArchAndroid is not my favorite album of the year so far, but it is undoubtedly the best.

If there’s one major complaint to be made, it’s that Compass is simply overlong. These fourteen songs are proof that there is far more longevity in Lidell’s work, even if at over fifty minutes too many moments seem frivolous or forgettable compared to the striking highs.

Human Kindness is interesting and it is, in a sense, an enjoyable listen because it manifests, right in your face, an emotion not often seen in music this heavy: sheer fucking exhaustion.

Though High Violet sometimes ("Lemonworld," cough) veers dangerously close to self-parody, the National have crafted something exceptional: a massive, dynamic album that still makes good on the National's devotion to meticulous production and a sound they've kept simple and distinctive for a decade.

None of the songs quite scale the heights of a "Stuck Between Stations" or "Your Little Hoodrat Friend," but it's to the band's credit that Heaven goes down considerably easier than Stay Positive (2008), fortunately bereft of the obvious clunkers that rendered that album's Side B such a slog.

Cosmogramma bursts with inventiveness; I've found myself careening around my apartment to sounds I don't recognize as of this Earth. That Lotus takes these vibrant ideas and sets them to pulses that move asses is incredible. Apparently everyone else is bouncing along in agreement.

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

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.

Diamond Eyes incorporates all the same basic tropes as every Deftones record before and almost certainly after it, but here, for the first time in ages, they’re crafted and performed with more than mere hints of the assuredness and pummeling hooks of their one (yes) great record—a full-course meal to the last decade’s worth of scattered crumbs.

B.o.B. may be too eager to please at this stage of his career, and Adventures is perhaps too stuffed with ideas and styles to be deemed a true success, but the triumphs fucking reverberate.

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

Clinging to a Scheme feels more haphazard, more Revolver (1965) than Abbey Road (1969) as it goes from searing ambience (“A Token of Gratitude”) to the thicker-figured dance tracks. The album leaves you wanting more--whether this is for better or worse is one question you’ll have to answer for yourself.

These songs, especially in the album’s first half, are uniformly gorgeous—the melodies are often quite good, and this record is all about finding ways to showcase melodies—but they suffer from sameness.

While MGMT may no longer peddle the kind of instant-pleasure-point melodic textures that propelled the band's most well-known songs into so many playlists, they're up to something far more interesting: releasing a major, mainstream objet d'art without for a minute fooling themselves that it "matters."

What makes the record work is his acknowledgment that he's just one more voice in that cavalcade, one that neither tries to hide or overemphasize the influence of the other shouts that came before its own.

It sets up the tension between the often gentle voice and its malevolent surroundings, and this, his third collection of re-arranged traditionals, oscillates between the sweet and the almost apocalyptic, often to great success.

What this means in terms of structure and pace is that Tommy is leisurely, which to some people might suggest “boring” except that this is a very dynamic sort of leisure.

Go, then, is strangely underdeveloped for how overdeveloped it feels; by no means a trifle, it's as hard to outright hate on as it is to be trampled by, just another lovely 40 minutes from a guy with easily another 40 up his frilly sleeve.

Good songs, great times, and maybe it's a bit too long and short on variety but whatever. Plus, this record actually came out months ago and none of the songs have soured yet. That's something.

New Amerykah, Part Two: Return of the Ankh is a record full of smooth, creative, grooving (but not too grooving) songs that are exceptionally well conceived, penned, and executed.

Cuban Linx 2 was a glorious mess, but Wu-Massacre throws so many punches I feel at times like I’m listening to a promotional album sampler for some amazing full-length to be released later in the year.

Oversteps is reasonably accessible without compromising any aspect of what it means to listen to an Autechre album, which is the closest I can come to a formula for success when it comes to this band. It’s probably ten minutes too long in the middle, but the distinctive intro is a winner and the last three tracks are worth the trek.

The Way of the World is just one more Mose Allison album: exceptional in it’s own right but entirely expected.

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

Hood’s contributions dominate To-Do; of the thirteen songs, bassist Shonna Tucker gets two, and even after his jaw dropping win streak on 2008’s excellent Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, Mike Cooley is only allotted three. But he still comes off as the crafty Southern gentleman with all of the best one-liners.

Baffling production questions aside, In The Dark is still another solid entry into what's becoming a pretty spotless discography for a band with seemingly little aspirations to do anything but be a predictable answer to what a band called "the Whigs" would sound like.

Jet Lag is a confident, mature, fully-realized record, and much denser than it lets on.

Find, here, Gorillaz’ third record, some sort of masterpiece within the band’s canon, and undoubtedly the best chillwave record ever recorded.

The band will surely never be able to banish the ghosts of their tenuous acclaim, but as far as sounding finally, thankfully revitalized by their obvious talent and ravenous taste in all shapes and colors of music, Sisterworld is the most refreshing thing I’ve come upon this year.

The Winter of Mixed Drinks is a minor disappointment, then, in that in wake (and perhaps as a result) of his heart’s subsequent rehab Hutchison’s songs can’t really sustain the weight-loss of their ego.

Finely wrought themes aside (replete with a careful balance between Darwin the man and the grand ideas he unlocked), it flunks the cohesiveness test, libretto or no, destined to sit forlornly on the shelves of most of the people who sent it to the top 10 of the Billboard electronic list, unplayed and unloved.

The Monitor is ridiculously strident and frequently overblown, but somehow never slips into self-parody, which may only be true because it's obvious these guys are having a total blast indulging this hard. It's easily the most enjoyable rock record I've heard so far this year.

The Brutalist Bricks, for its moments of torrential fury, sags when Leo occasionally writes outside of an exhausted but all-encompassing formula.

There may be more pop structure and less willful wandering than, say, cLOUDDEAD, but there is still something strictly subconscious about the album at its most gripping, even as it consistently engages over repeat visits.

What damns them is how they frequently grasp at Grizzly Bear’s familiar brand of prettiness, rarely capturing the effortlessness that would keep a better record afloat.

While rarely graceless and often impressive (“Two Humans,” worth noting, develops into something sexy before going for broke), everything on Fight Softly just seems too much. There’s a lot that’s pretty here--but there’s a lot.

Be Brave doesn’t live up to the rambunctious energy and junkyard swagger of the band’s debut LP, And Girls Club, but instead offers more subdued moments that allow Sambol’s frontman personality to transcend the clatter.

Although a little inconsistent in its layout, The Law of Large Numbers packs that same precise bite that brought the Delgados to public knowledge, scaled down/expanded to suit its creator, who before writing songs was a physicist.

Nitetime Rainbows has its moments of bliss, but they aren’t as enveloping as I’d hoped; the problem here is that you wake too early from the dream.

What's interesting isn't that an ambient record has suddenly introduced vocals, which is nothing new, or that these vocals are used exclusively for talking rather than singing, which isn't particularly surprising. What's really important is what this talking is totally, explicitly about: rather than just hinting at atmospheres and moods, vaguely suggesting a concept which can be seized upon as the thematic core of the music, Loscil provides what is literally an explanation of an album, which in turn makes the album about the act of its explanation.

What’s happening with Similes is that it’s doing everything ambient music is supposed to do but is finding a very forward and fresh manner of going about it.

The Golden Archipelago falls somewhere in that tenuous space, never able to live up to the power of its initial impression. It’s more the kind of thing that should be fully absorbed over the course of a few attentive, complete listens, then allowed to dissipate into the realm of a beautiful idea.

The thing Have One On Me absolutely excels at is the creation of remarkable moments amid its rambling odes.

It begins with two heretofore uncharacteristic forays into garage rock, wanders into several guitar epics, tries on an acoustic guitar and the French language, and somewhere in there plops down a typical Quasi number or two. Unlike their three previous albums, though, Coomes shows up with some bullet-proof material.

Though the album is an hour long, there are at least thirty minutes of excellent music here. Those who were excited by the direction implied by 13 Moons, however, can't help but feel disappointed.

Another hip-hop comfort blanket, The Stimulus Package reminds us a dope loop and a capable MC justify their own existence.

One Life Stand hasn’t brought Hot Chip completely out of the deep hole they dug for themselves one album earlier, and it’s still not as consistent as the inimitable, career-defining The Warning, but it’s unquestionably more “Boy From School” than the histrionics of “Shake a Fist,” and that’s a good enough reason to stay with this band not just for the kids.

It may just be his best record. I’m New Here manages to pack a lifetime’s worth of artistic growth in one completely unobtrusive half-hour.

In practice and in total, Eyelid Movies isn’t a contrarian or particularly abrasive debut—it’s entirely likable, paced well and efficiently, dishing out a little something for everybody but never seemingly exhausted by this task.

With Black Noise the trance is too sporadic to even really exist, which does make it a much more appropriate record for a casual listen--but sometimes a listener just wants to get utterly lost.

In this way, A Chorus of Storytellers resembles the Flaming Lips’ Embryonic (2009) in that it’s a characteristic and maybe even obvious album that stuffs a band’s commercial instincts under a protective layer of feints and refusals

while on a different album “Healter Skelter” might have been a wonderful bridge between some of the more structured stuff Shining used to do; on Black Jazz it’s just the most weird and interesting version of the same track we’ve already sat through three times.

For this and a couple other of IRM‘s electronic-heavy songs, Gainsbourg sounds like she’s doing her best Trish Keenan, though the songs lack the warmth and haunting tension a band like Broadcast can create from similar soundscapes.

This album is a misstep, certainly, but an exciting one nonetheless; I can only hope that eight months from now this band bangs out another shorter record superior to this one in every way.

Teen Dream is just such a fantastic pop record because it never seems to try to be: it’s almost as if the duo had intended to make another mopey shoegazing affair and accidentally stumbled upon something transcendent.

There is Love in You renders "Ringer" primer, posits itself as perfect solution to messy experimentation, and while it’s hard to find the divisiveness in that, it’s also hard to be truly moved.

After a decade of contrarian, even petulant repudiations of the music that made the Magnetic Fields famous, Realism is capitulation, contrition, and celebration at once. It’s back to basics in the best way.

CUD aren’t the first or best among many, but what you can hear when you listen to Boca Negra--in addition to a really excellent neo-jazz record--is the sounds of a band improvising while actually not really improvising. They’re unconsciously pulling from something rich and energetic and fundamental to the way we appreciate music.

It's in the zealous craftsmanship of doing just about everything right and causing that aggregate rightness to harmonize in vibrant song about trying to be better that the truth becomes evident: this band is for real.

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.

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.

What’s clear, however, is that Heartland is a huge leap for Pallett on every level. These are the most accomplished songs he has written, and he makes up for the ground he cedes--predominantly his willingness to present conventional, immediate song structures--by making everything else so uniquely his own.

He’s good at what he does, and, to boot, he continues to release consistently enjoyable music, perhaps single-handedly keeping the obsolescing trip-hop out of the next decade’s dentist office.

We Are Young Money is like a microcosm of Wayne’s career: often frustrating, frequently brilliant, and thoroughly, lovably weird.

Fall Be Kind doesn’t exactly break past the barriers set by this year’s "Merriweather Post Pavilion," but it is an excellent extension of the ethos captured by that particular record.

What they have done on its proper follow-up is neither lazy nor hollow, merely undefined, making no clear promises on future plans.

It is High Profile rap music. He’s buttoned up here, ready for the cameras, and on occasion, things work ecstatically.

It’s music that, outside of a live setting where one has the benefit of watching her assemble her loops, calls for patience, and it’s difficult to anticipate under what circumstances her techniques could lend themselves to something either more ambitious or longer in form or structure.

Waits is still an impassioned and awe-inspiring performer; here we can still hear, as invigorated as he was before I was born--or so I can guess.

Real Estate is a remarkable debut, and I really look forward to more from this band in the future, please, which will undoubtedly be soon in some form or another.

Garbus’s peculiarities are often quite charming--often, not always, because there’s only so much so-called cute we can be expected to tolerate, and though Bird-Brains remains on the side of acceptability, it flies dangerously close to the line (er, wire).

It’s not only an addition to 2009’s unassailably fantastic class of ambient music, but in a way is unique to that class for the menace with which it’s threaded.

After a month of digesting Seek Magic thoroughly, oscillating wildly between manic enthusiasm and a kind of defiant distrust of this whole act’s shtick, I’ve committed myself to the stance about which I felt most comfortable from the beginning: this is a very good album, but there are certain things about it with which I take issue.

It is overarchingly ambitious for a solo debut, and despite Casablancas’ pre-release claims that this was going to be some classico-synth detour straight out the asshole of Tattooine, the album rarely, rarely stumbles into po-mo theatrics.

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.

I err on the side of good rap, something Unexpected Guest is full of.

Felix’s uses the second-person address and the confusion it--as well as conventional instrumentation played in freer forms within more confined song structures--creates to produce an engaging, if harder to parse, take on something similar.

The tracks feel quickly and easily produced but fucking delicious.

When these songs sound like El Perro del Mar fronting the saddest, slowest disco band in the world, they work out best, but too much of this “mini-album” doesn’t quite get there.

This is what we’ve been waiting for; we always knew they could do it.

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.

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

Blue Record is, in sound and spirit, satisfying metal painted with broad strokes and big gestures.

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

Regardless of his collaborators or how he chooses to approach his songs, The Life of the World to Come is further proof of Darnielle's ability, evident since long before he traded a boombox for a studio, to imbue his imagery, his sentiments, and his many characters with astounding weight and power.

It’s better than Nouns, better than the best songs on Weirdo Rippers (2007), and for once, I think, offers this cool idea that Randy and Dean’s next record might move away from the unilateral and slightly prudish use of noise as nothing but noise.

While moments off Bonfires have already proven hugely worthwhile, predominantly because of the textures Mel Draisey adds, it still lacks the cohesiveness, the clarion voice, of a band singularly in control of a well-tread sound.

He for sure knows enough that this sound lives and dies by its honesty, and that Childish Prodigy is just that, just an honest album, the best he could have made now, the best of its kind for a long long time. More please!

They are doing the same thing they always do, which entails gorgeous and gracefully surprising variations on a deeply resonant motif.

Dead Man’s Bones is about death, right, and about love, testing where one touches the other, flirting with sensations similar and enduring the inability to confront or frankly deal with that intimacy. Had this record a thicker dramatic arc or something less confining than a spreadsheet of rules, then maybe the songs wouldn’t so inevitably miss their obvious marks.

Why There Are Mountains is plain pleasing indie rock--how it used to be, how it’s ceased to be since, at least in spirit.

While a Basement Jaxx album used to feel like a below-the-radar party for real heads, Scars could easily soundtrack a celebrity bash. That’s not the Jaxx’s fault, of course, though capitulation suits them.

Despite having ties to shitgaze, this isn’t a record obsessed with that aesthetic, and this works to its advantage, since these songs clearly aspire to be bigger than that and have very real potential to be.

Here we’re given a respite from Bon Iver’s heavy crises while still loving on Bon Iver; here, Volcano Choir is inevitably weightless--a pretty happy band with a pretty happy album.

Eskimo Snow simply categorizes those words in a bit more careful, less adventurous fashion than Wolf and company have revealed before. While this latest release is quite literally the second side of the same coin (or recording session), it feels flatter.