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.

What they've done is only pretty good; it's clear what they can potentially do is far more amazing.

It's easily one of the strongest efforts of 2012 thus far.

Half of the fun with Dumile has always been the unexpected, ridiculous sampling and the storyline he develops around it. MMâ?¦Food seems unable to capture this element. Doom manages to drop a few great songs, but as an album, MMâ?¦Food falls flat.

Penance Soiree is everything dirty and vile about rock music.

Hissing Fauna might be Barnes’ finest work yet, an opus built entirely of sugar.

Where he used be be so proficient at letting us hear the sound of his sad, sad heart, the directionless elliptical clutter that defines The Age of Adz just sounds to me like he's manufacturing an idea of what a sad heart might sound like. What's worse, it sounds self-indulgent.

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.

Hair is more of a juicy stew than a straight-up throwback record.

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

The Shining is not a masterpiece, obviously, and nobody ought claim it as such, but it does show the producer striking out in a moderately novel direction and finding consistently satisfying results.

The White Stripes, at the same moment they claim to have finally overcome your entanglements, have provided you the ammunition of a hit-or-miss album.

The Crying Light may prove to be too precarious to hold up on its own in the future, but for now Antony & the Johnsons have provided a perfect gateway to their music.

What could come off as a gimmick, however, instead plays like a focused foray into day-glo disco.

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.

Those who felt like maybe they were starting to get Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone? only to be left out by Unicorns’ sudden dissolution should be reassured that Return to the Sea is a more rooted and confident effort.

Musically, Mirror Traffic flows lazily, songs streaming into one other. Like an engrossing 3 AM conversation lasting until daylight, it's too immersive to give notice to the passage of time, but once it's over it's difficult to recall in detail, some heady dream.

What you should go to Destroy Rock and Roll for is highly enjoyable, competent, reasonably inventive, energetic techno.

There’s not much to be said about an album that exists exactly as it should, satisfied by its own completion and purpose and really looking to nothing else for motivation or worth or whatever.

These songs are all coherently-arranged, positive, played in major keys, very easy to listen to and enjoyable on their surface.

Nothing on Thursday sounds like filler.

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?

Kill for Love may not be nearly as focused and razor-sharp as Night Drive, but it's twice as much fun and just as confidently personalized--just as purely Chromatics.

Though not perfect, it's unlikely 2005 will see many records eclipsing The Sunlandic Twins.

Hey Hey is sharper than "D-Don’t," filled out and throbbing like soul should be, not burdened with the entropy of a smattered ramshackle collection all heart and no brains.

The Last Romance, for all its disgusted veneer and inner conflict, both reads like a cogent statement and plays like a finely tuned instrument.

Superwolf is Bonnie-era Oldham trying to channel Palace-era Oldham.

There are a couple of Young's obligatory, wandering acoustic ditties to water down the already short track list, and Lanois' soft touch seems to render antiseptic even those few moments of feedback and reverb.

While Tones is tighter, smaller, and more to-the-point than its predecessor, I’m not fully convinced that it’s as good as Field Music.

Lucky Shiner is a good argument for the album as a conceptual whole, and for a musical environment a bit slower than the singles-based landscape that birthed Gold Panda as an entity to be reckoned with.

Although there are a few individual moments where those qualities round-off and transcend any qualms anybody might have about Lekman's style, that style on its own, minus a map or even the faint corners of a box, can only elicit the slow smile of admiration, not genuine, passionate interest.

It is Noir’s skills for arrangement and sequencing that allow the narrative to successfully play out.

It’s just the fucking jam, like some pulsing late-night bliss-out in front of a detuned television set whereupon everyone just sits on the couch exhausted but loving it.

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

Milk's musical vision is the binding force behind Random Axe and it's something that Price and Simpson clearly believe in; thus, all their bragging about how essential their complete gullyness is to the rap game. Because, despite lines crossed and opportunities missed, it sort of is. Nothing so far in 2011 has a total aesthetic and attitude that goes as hard as this.

These guys have the tools, and God knows they have the chops, but Thundercat has yet to develop a compelling sound of his own, and no amount of production wizardry can ultimately disguise that.

This is one of the best albums of the year, from a verifiable talent and one of the scene’s most exciting young songwriters.

If Pink’s more evolution than revolution, it still stomps all over most of its close genre surroundings, leaving maybe Tiger Bear Wolf and The Woods as far as 2005 goes.

She may remain an intimate, closely held artist for a certain sect of listeners, but by any standards hers is some powerful, accomplished songwriting-and in many ways Marissa Nadler epitomizes this ever-maturing skill more lucidly than any of her prior work.

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.

My Maudlin Career is just such a uniformly endearing record. It’s sentimental, yes, but pleasantly so, charming in its own little way.

I can’t help but feel that this album wants to have it several ways, but the net result of following all those paths means it plays out only one way.

Nothing on her self-titled debut full-length is "genius" or "brilliant," but the material is consistently well written and occasionally very good.

The coherence of Wolf’s ethic assures the consistency and believability of his cryptic, erotic, and eerie world.

Goodbye Bread specializes in this kind of twisted subtlety; no longer content letting loose and letting the detritus fall where it may, Segall has crafted a record both familiar and surprising, both sunny and spooky.

If reduced to a single disc, Street's Disciple could well be one of the more exciting albums of the year. As is it's a solid, if not brilliant album from an artist we've come to not expect too much from.

The band have always been the holding of hands between kinda-Kyuss stoner rock and spazzy synth pop, but The Wedding is unique in that it is something conclusively Oneida but also conclusively marked of indie’s recent resurgence on the mainstream pop-cultural landscape.

The album's substance is obscured by the distracting presence of its production.

Everything in Between is the sound not just of potential realized, but of expectations exceeded.

It’s an interesting, intermittently excellent album from a skilled group that could still use a little help in getting out of their own way.

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.

C'mon doesn't break much new ground for Low in the way that their last two records did, and that's clearly not the goal here.

It’s smart, depressing, inoffensive pop perfect for a rainy day.

Where the record works best are its bookends -- the places where it most sounds like Cat Power.

The terrible truth is that -- and maybe this is a matter of an album’s length, replayability, interesting tenure, obedience, whatever -- Gruff Rhys will always be as politely awesome as Gruff Rhys has always been, and that’s just not enough anymore.

I can think of nothing more liberating than to dive into its dark waters.

Mr. M is something to behold in its details: the kind of record that seems to open up gradually over time, graceful and pretty sure but brimming subcutaneously with many yet-undiscovered pleasures.

Musically the most important aspect of this collaborative effort is that their voices work so nicely with and against each other.

Pemberton’s crafted a uniquely engaging sonic statement that stands on its own legs.

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.

The tinny, noisey/flangey/hurtful sound that's shellacked on in cheap 16 bit hinders some of the best material he's written to date.

Some of these songs are excellent, in an unfinished but inspired way. But many of the album's tracks evidence a band that's bursting at the seams with talent, only to stumble on unfocused, scattershot song-writing.

So, yes: this is cuddly, warm and intimate, just like all your favorite blogs have said.

A welcome new start for this talented band.

While it's a coalition of fantastic talents, Themselves submit to the expectations of a pussy glitch-pop crowd, and the Notwist mistakenly assume that hip-hop fans don't want songs with dynamism or structure.

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

The real credit, however, goes to the songwriting of the eponymous duo. This album was not "saved in the production," as it were. The Con is a document written in the half-frenzy of a clusterfuck.

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.

Nearly everything about Citrus is so accomplished, refined, and downright transcendent that it could very well stand alongside Loveless as a modernized shoegaze staple.

It’s a lot of slickness that adds up to little, though, as a culturally myopic Roots Manuva audibly struggles to feel out the changed face of hip-hop; he sounds unsure of what tone to take and what words to say.

I believe in the Vivian Girls. In every gorgeous harmony that coats bitterness, in every ambition subjugated to truncated song structure and muffled production, in every bouncy beat beneath a baleful drawl somehow made of equally bouncy elements.

If this is EitS attempting to summarize and compact their three previous albums into one easily consumable package, the results merely drag the listener along through series of “catastrophic” cues that tell them what they should be feeling.

Yes, the album stretches itself a little thin towards the end and some of Smith’s slurred lyrics are truly unintelligible, but essentially this record is joyously, thankfully, inexplicably, after all these years, still the sound of the Fall.

Another left-field triumph for Gira.

The Magic Numbers is one of the best pop albums of the year.

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

It’s a fine record -- one of his better in some time.

A Place to Bury Strangers is a record with excitement hardwired to its musical structure: the elements of these songs are so individually pleasing that, when the band shifts them against each other, the effect is a sense of constant cataclysmic upheaval. Each new variation is giddying.

Built as they are on rock 'n' roll clichés, these songs hold the listener at a distance. It's a bit of fun, but nothing more. Unlike their influences, something about this band doesn't really stick.

Perhaps what’s most frustrating about these missteps is that their combination with the album’s brief length (at least 10 minutes shorter than their previous efforts) smacks of songwriting torpor.

The Gents waltz their way through these ten sturdy, mid-tempo numbers rarely striking a bum note.

Typically heavy subject matter aside, Mason actually seems more content in his skin than he has in some time, and anyone who has previously garnered enjoyment from the Beta Band or King Biscuit Time will unquestionably find something to dig within Boys Outside.

De La Soul [are] wise enough to keep the filler to a minimum, thus presenting a more consistent product than that offered by their followers/peers.

It’s a counterfactual, of course, but I’ve got to think that Monsters of Folk circa 2005 would have come up with something a bit more substantive than this.

Leave Home is manna for white noise aficionados and anyone who thought the last Future of the Left record was far too tempered (yeah that's right). The Men have done a good thing here.

Heaven is more like a classic Sunday morning album: a modest, extremely laid back paean to the comforts of domesticity in which every song sounds like it was recorded from a rocking chair.

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.

Interestingly, the very qualities that make this a subpar Radiohead album are what make it their most experimental record yet. But this is also Radiohead elliptically circling back on themselves in dramatic form.

Run Fast has many moments of darkness, but ultimately it’s a celebration: of growing up, of surviving, of wading through shit and coming out the other side.

Arrivals is just about a palatable enough affair; a minor stretch at sixty-two minutes but with enough peaks to be eaten in three sittings or so.

Mostly, what made Blackalicious’s last two proper albums so engaging was how Gab chose to reel in the tentacles of his glossolalia, and what makes The Craft such a disappointment is how he forgets that restraint, instead opting to crowd the tracks with ceaseless, pretentious sound.

The Wonder Show of the World, his eleventh release in half as many years, is everything for which we hope in a new Bonnie "Prince" Billy release: creeping yet expansive alt-folk; an ever-strengthening voice; erotic imagery ("The smell of your box on my mustache") paired with thoughts on family, never uncomfortably; a stark, doodled cover; a doting collaboration.

Where [Fantastic Damage] assured its legacy through sheer density, piling beats on top of one another haphazardly and layering hype tracks laced with punchlines, subtexts, and asides, Sleep finds El-P focusing his fury into individual crescendos, particularly during the record’s sterling second half.

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.

On the Water is too uncompromising, too disinterested in being for anyone outside of its circle of two.

The problem is that Vanderslice’s lyrical scope remains too broad to enable a cohesive or definitive conceptual statement, and his music too tightly defined and predictable to be considered a departure.

Gather, Form & Fly is a bright record full of energy and dynamism even in its most cacophonous sound collages, but what’s so frustrating--what becomes more urgent with every listen--is how great this album could have been.