The Horror is one of the label's most tenacious offerings yet.

Taylor and Goddard's pop impulses and the dance music they've always been exploring have finally cohered, yielding a collection of songs with the potential to be as efficient on a dance floor as it is in a bedroom.

Strawberry Jam might be art, but more interestingly, Strawberry Jam might be pop. Okay, avant-pop.

Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters is an album with a sum worse than its parts.... Still, there’s a lot of promise here.

Despite the 26 minutes wasted by these final tracks, as damning as that sounds, this is still a very good Yo La Tengo record.

You can get long way into Underneath the Pine without gaining any clear impression of exactly what kind of record it is that you're listening to. But amorphous isn't the worst thing in the world to be.

In the Future is a great second act, a consolidation of strengths, better songwriting and more ideas.

If the forced lyrical growth is a little stunted, it’s more than made up for by the band’s newfound sonic ambitions.

This EP sounds, in many ways, like a showcase of new equipment and technology, proof that White just might be one of the best pop producers working right now. However, the songs might be too cerebral, lacking the brevity, structural simplicity, and dare I say petulance that made "Lust For Life" so easy to fall so hard for.

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

I’d suggest that it’s a grower, but that doesn’t seem apt, as there’s very little depth to let grow here. What it is, however, is a winner, an album that seems loathable at first but tenaciously refuses to quit grinning.

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

Ejimiwe’s nervous energy makes Some Say I So I Say Light exhilarating, whether it’s a lucid dream or a sleep-deprived reality, and fills it with moments that you might mistake for codas.

Nowhere is this idea of acceptance clearer than on An Imaginary Country. In a sense the album evokes nothing so much as Hecker himself, diligently and intuitively molding his sounds through synthesizer, guitar and laptop, and as a result may be the most symbiotic album of the year.

As it stands, 'To Clean' and 'Rain On' deserve their place late on your sweetheart mixtapes, and they’ll be charming in their small doses, but they’re much too rare here, nestled between puzzling decisions and bedroom leftovers.

The best thing, really, that can be said of Because of the Times is that it works the hardest trick: seeming deeply personal and inclusive, but still having an embrace elastic enough to be universally appealing.

Our Blood, like most great singer-songwriter efforts, is open to interpretation, but it's the record's malleable sense of emotion that lends it its peculiar gravity.

It’s simply R.E.M. finally making a concerted effort to sound like themselves, and realizing that’s not such a horrible idea.

There are songs on Nouns that seemingly defy you to listen, and not because they’re loud or crass or due-heavy on true-dat market-maneuvers and what I guess we can now safely call “aural assault”; and not because of the bad vocals, bunkered mix job, or the hundred and one other things that would make your parents, my professors or Celine Dion hate this album.

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.

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.

Fernow's more melodic output on Bermuda Drain is somehow even more punishing, a new development in the ongoing creation of what he calls "negative energy."

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.

Convivial is the closest Ripatti has inched toward making something that would fit in with the more outrageous and flamboyantly mainstream house productions that dominate charts and hip clubs these days, and at the same time still very heady, engaging music.

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 EP is thus a fine, if also slight, document that showcases the duo's serious potential-and hints, perhaps, at how it could be used to produce a more ambitious set of songs as he approaches his next album--more than it fulfills the promises of Pallett the almost solo performer/arranger.

In making these songs more personal and more intimate, they’ve managed to make them more poignant, and even if the quality of the overall album doesn’t match the brilliance of the four or five phenomenal songs here, nothing is so cantankerous as to really offend.

Each moment is devoted to the continuing shifts in dynamics and song, and Aloha sounds sharper than ever before.

Becoming a Jackal is downright convincing-maybe sustaining-even these few weeks after first hearing the thing. I'm surprised, though maybe I shouldn't be, by just how cool and atypical that feeling is.

Half of The Sun Awakens is vigorous and wonderful; half is abhorrent and stultifying.

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.

Wasting Light is as good as mainstream arena rock gets now, twenty years after the fact.

At Mount Zoomer is a tremendous success.

By no means is It's All True a masterpiece; the duo don't stick their necks out enough to entertain that notion. But by creating a palpable tension between smart songwriting and their knack for texture, Junior Boys have pulled a legacy back from the brink of indifference.

With the possible exception of his work with Brian Eno, Backwards is his most technically honed album to date. This is the stuff of an artist refreshingly confident with his work.

In Ear Park sounds so much like Grizzly Bear that it’s difficult to recognize, at first, that it does occasionally retain the bedroom DIY aesthetic for which Department of Eagles are known, especially in the sense of its canned percussion, and at the album’s best it keeps the music attempting the scope and lushness of Grizzly Bear.

Goldfrapp have shed the sex-Moroder-robot-Bolan-fuck-disco like a used condom and re-tooled themselves as a whimsical psychedelia and pastoral folk outfit for the disappointing Seventh Tree.

This is Beach Slang’s core problem: they are constantly telling, never showing.

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.

Not so much a change of pace as a consolidation and careful re-allotment of her powers.

Freakout is a struggle between balance and shambles; the compositions constantly wobble beneath a gravity that threatens to bring them down for good and to render Broder’s brain inane for all time.

Want Two disposes of almost all of the commercial elements that had been blamed for One's downfall without revealing a satisfying work in the process.

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

While it’s very good at what the Band of Horses does best--providing a soundtrack to whistful moments or memories--unlike Everything all the Time there’s nothing here to grab onto, its songs merge together, and it’s so innocuous in the band’s trademark comfort that it can pass almost undetected.

The sparsity of their arrangements allows textures--the shushing of brushes on the snare, the scratch of the violin, the edge of distortion on the guitar--to shine through.

When they’re trying, as they do especially on the first half of the album, Cannibal Sea can be quite enjoyable.

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.

Cursive aspires for greater things, and Kasher’s aims are marred by over-production, a Nickelback whoosh here, a digitized cascade there.

The music Real Estate make is so melodic and plentiful that it could capture any feeling it wanted to--Atlas just transposes their sound into the evening.

While this technically is enjoyable alt-country circa a half-album before Summerteeth, genre-standard romance and arrangements muffle the otherwise "astonishing narratives."

Inoffensive, largely listenable, and accessible, the album is still stunted, and so never reaches the peaks of "The Civil War," still their best and most fully formed effort.

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

Unfocused, haphazard, and a bit homogenous.

Prejudices be damned, this is the best hip-hop record this year, and if that doesn’t satiate your hype-riddled appetite, then you would be well-served to shut off your computer, removing yourself from the power of the web, and throw this in your car stereo.

All of its tracks are kila kila killer.

This freak of a record is almost obscene in its flippant disregard for the core elements of such a well-defined thing as what Boris is supposed to sound like... as crazy and over-polished and un-Boris as it is, New Album is still a new Boris album. And, apparently, that still means excellence.

It's not that the record is so unclassifiable--shit is downright pleasant to listen to--as it exudes the confidence to acknowledge its influences and contemporaries with the same convivial grace that has marked Q-Tip's entire career.

This one sees him expanding outward in any number of directions, and succeeding in nearly all of them.

Here is a great band putting out a just pretty good EP whose existence is really only justified by its brilliant title track.

LOSE is captivating because it uses all the right tricks.

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 Drive-By Truckers remain a distinctly American band, a band whose stories are on equal footing with the music beneath.

With Total Life Forever, Foals have objectively identified the shortcomings (shouted vocals, claustrophobic song structures) of their first album, and erased them while keeping their trademark mathematical riffing intact.

It's an excellent debut, and hints at a potentially significant force in indie rock in the coming years.

Too bad, then, that I Love You is underdeveloped.

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.

This record is the “hardest” thing the Twilight Singers have released, but is situated squarely within the realm of anthemic arena rock, not the more straightforward stuff of Whigs nostalgics. Most of the time this works beautifully.

A relatively straightforward rock record with no shortage of epic flourishes and catchy choruses.

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

There is nothing here but a band very awkwardly trying to have a good time, and that’s the kind of party you always leave early.

Sirens is no "Heartbreaker" - though the stylistic grab-bag is reminiscent of Adams’s debut - but it is a damn good start.

The Fresh & Onlys have achieved something captivating with Secret Walls, conjuring up vast, mysterious spaces within economical songs, songs demanding repeating listens to decipher.

This doesn’t seem so much a pop internalization of Deerhoof’s unique talent as it is a kind of album-costume where they adorn the talents of other bands.

An album at once tighter and more terrifying than anything they’ve yet released.

It’s an entertaining record to hear, but at times a devastating one to listen to.

Who knows if Josephine will ultimately have the staying power of Molina’s very best work, but he and his band are back doing what they do best--and, for all the talk of ramblers heading for the horizon, they finally sound at home.

Love is All has refined its basic ideas and yielded a follow-up much more playable than its predecessor.

New Magnetic Wonder’s high points are in its more quirky and musically ambitious moments.

If McCombs' first release this year evoked a sense of baroque horror, this one does loosen up, offering at least a few degrees of clarity in a catalog more defined with each passing year by its creator's desire to subvert the tropes of his genre and refuse anything resembling an easy reading.

Rabbit Fur Coat is an album of easy strumming and likeable melodies, a PG distillation of vintage country influences and the Watson Twin’s spot-on gospel harmonies.

The result is a collection of great, hard-driving tracks that feel poppier than any of the long-winding snores on that new Justin Timberlake album.

They ["The Stage Names" and The Stand Ins]were released as distinct (though interrelated) albums, and this one is better.

With the handicap of not having entered a studio until his forties, White still creates work that maintains a deft wisdom even in its worst choices.

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.

More than anything else, Channel Pressure is a triumph of studio craft and evidence that the group has as much potential as producers as they do as composers.

Veirs’ songs are content to be four-minute pop numbers that exude hooks and instrumental magic; her album is content to be a collection of these songs, with no big finish or three-act dramatic arc.

He’s back in the groove here: relaxed, confident, weird in his own special way, smart, and ready to make great albums again.

The Life Pursuit is unquestionably even more upbeat than its predecessor, but contains newfound degrees of confidence and swagger that elevate it over DCW in nearly every respect, resulting in the finest Belle and Sebastian record top to bottom since Sinister.

What follows are a series of maybe-serious experiments that aren't much fun.

If this record had come out in ’94 it would have been groundbreaking. ’98 and it would have been good. But it’s ’05 now, and there aren’t many reasons to be impressed.

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.

Real Gone... is Waits’ grittiest work to date and is an excellent introduction, for those unacquainted, to his hard-boiled thirty-year run.

While it never outshines the alt-country canon that precedes it, The Brag & Cuss is a welcome addition to the genre, an album that understands its influences and rarely oversteps the boundaries they’ve set.

The Broken String is a collection of mostly likeable songs, one dud, and one song-of-the-year-quality track.

His delivery is exhilarating, but it made me nervous, jittery. It’s kind of like Miles Davis scatting, but instead of a trumpet he’s playing the entire writing staff of The Simpsons.

It’s in the songs that teeter on the edge, where the twang feels like the last button pressed before an apocalypse, that Shrink Dust becomes special.

An album that does the exact same thing as their previous records, only not as well.

Lullabies to Paralyze loses points for a handful of uninspired tracks and questionable production values, but I can’t imagine anybody who’s enjoyed the Queens in the past not taking to at least half of the songs on this album.