All of its tracks are kila kila killer.

Tender Buttons feels more urgent and alive than anything Broadcast has ever recorded.

Easily the most cohesive and consistent album of his career, and one of the first great albums of 2005.

Funny, relevant, incisive, compassionate, and even profound-this is the stuff a Great album [is] made of.

Frankie's doesn't bear the weight of an obviously solo effort and at once succeeds in creating music that rivals any full-band effort from any of her peers.

It's a staid achievement-a soundtrack to unwillingly letting go of the unsustainable, both figurative and literal.

Bon Iver, Bon Iver is wrought using a dazzling pointillism. Producer Vernon has carefully studded his album with thousands of cul-de-sacs of grace and poise and lavishly attended precision.

So to those bored to tears by Sumday, take notice: though it fails to break any new ground, Just Like the Fambly Cat is as good a parting shot from these guys as we could have expected.

A quietly brilliant album.

What is clear, though, is that this is a finely drawn, funny, animated, and gumdrop authentic record, never less than fascinating in its endless and disburdening involutions.

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

Might not be as mature as [Rejoicing] but manages to reach greater, more varied heights as a result.

This, then, is the future fashioned out of the stuffs of past and present, out of maintaining a firm aesthetic while employing a staggering array of techniques, out of reaching for the proverbial stars. Tronic hits with the intrinsic revelation and self-evident relevance of new truth.

It’s downright exciting for a band like the Thermals to emerge with something so simple and unflustered, so bereft of unnecessary baggage, a shining light of a record that delivers on its early promise.

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.

Wong is at the apex of his songwriting. This is not to be missed.

It works, but it doesn't make sense, and can't be explained. It can only be heard.

Animal Collective keep getting better.

Is it their best album? Maybe not. Is it still the best pop album of the year? Of course.

It's not perfect, but in the context of its subject matter one feels like its accidents are worth more than another album's successes.

Raekwon has not made a valid sequel to that classic--but he has quite validly added a couple hundred new bars to that performance.

Modern Times is a record of both giddy songwriting peaks and overall uniformity, a record whose music ultimately delivers and enriches its well-bred messages of realism and religion, work and devotion, the certitude of decay and the decay of certitude.

It is indeed a soaring achievement, one seemingly without missteps.... In fact, the only drawback of an album this expertly executed is its smoothness.

When you get past the initial impressions of both "Silent Shout" (2006) and Monoliths & Dimensions, you find something not only stellar but surprisingly different from one’s initial impression.

We adore this album and are pretty sure most of you will, too.

Radiohead sound as ephemeral and variegated as ever, flowering and streaming and as big as the light our eyes can catch.

Happy New Year is fresh and adventurous and, most important, it is consistently so.

Where the album really excels is in how it marries slightly absurd melodies to its lyrics to create a portrait of surreality and madness, as was so often rendered by those same Modernist poets Harvey cites as an influence.

With Show Your Bones, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have proven themselves worthy of the hype, and, more importantly, the excitement caused by an undeniably fantastic record.

The 24 songs... are characteristically and uniformly excellent.

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.

Despite its more fractured stylistic elements -- shoegaze smashing headlong into folk pop -- Writer’s Block emerges as one of the most complete and satisfying records of this year.

It’s hard to parse the band’s ultimate intentions, but there’s no doubt that every note and lyric on this album are in fact intended, and, most importantly, sincere.

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

The honesty of Bozulich and her band is striking, their creativity voracious.

It is a bright and rousing thing.

Object 47 does an excellent job of making a leap toward the avant-pop side of the pop/punk wire walked by…uh…Wire on "Chairs Missing" and "154."

Give Mobile time, and it will fasten itself, embed its patterns, and stay with you longer than you could have imagined a solo percussion album ever could.

I am aware that I am giving the following guy an 85% on Cokemachineglow. The thing is, he deserves it.

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.

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

Maybe that’s the real spiritual value of the album: rather than impress their personal convictions, the band acts as a conduit for all these forces to combine and radiate like a prism.

Of course it’s cheeseball, as we all were at that age. But that’s ultimately what makes this accessible, highly-listenable album a reinvigoration of both catalogue and genre.

More critically, though, is that Eye Contact works very well as a stamp on this band's original turn with Saint Dymphna: now that we know that a lot of their contemporaries were also going to turn in this direction, it's nice to see a band that was once ahead of the curve still working so hard to keep their sound this fascinating.

At some point in that outrageous lifestyle that flips between videogames and spitting stoned, stupid raps, he makes hard, smart decisions about what to lend his voice to and how that should be packaged.

Swans always understood better than most post-punk bands that the crushing, wall-of-sound repetition pioneered by Glenn Branca could be taken to its logical, nihilistic extreme in rock-n-roll.

It is often silly, occasionally ridiculous, always catchy as hell, and as loose as an album with this kind of production credit can be. What more could we ask from a pop record?

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

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 starburst drum-fills, the jackknife stabs of guitar, the vocal melodies bronzed with catchiness-all of it soars, nodding at vitality, as though the aesthetics of joy might, if stressed enough, smother sadness until it's finally gone for good.

If dubstep is dead, then Burial is some magnificent tower of dust and light built on the remains.

This album is a knowing genre-piece and incessantly listenable effort from one who some were beginning to suspect had become lost in a desert of his own vision.

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.

And while every song contains allusions to forgotten surf rockish guitar chords and Duke Ellington violins, the real fun is in the way the Pipettes play off each other in harmony.

Parallax Error Beheads You improves upon [his previous] albums’ strengths--wide-eyed eclecticism among other things--managing greater coherence and scope than anything he’s ever done.

Genuinely affecting, and fun, pop music.

When I say “melancholy masterpiece” I mean “beautiful, melodic progressive pop bombast with realistically contemplative lyrics," not “Damien Rice."

The sobering after-party to Wolf Parade’s debut.

The fact is that Black Cascade is half victory lap and half turf statement: it hones in on their strengths without sacrificing originality; it pays off magnificently on all the chances they’ve taken in the past; it is fucking brutal; and it is another high water mark in the band’s catalogue for the New Wave of American Metal.

With a Cape and a Cane sounds almost nothing like its predecessor; the songs ring a million times clearer and the hooks bite far harder.

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

A Vintage Burden’s embrace is still emotional, still heartbreaking, still sad, and at times still chilling, but somehow, it’s less of an exercise to wrap your arms around it.

Comparing The Dirty South to the last two Truckers’ records is like arguing over the merits of the first two Godfather movies. Either way you win.

What we’re left with, speakers humming with aftermath, is the possibility of a real and significant realization: that between Hecker and Mountains, 2009 suggests a sea change--and I can’t think of a more appropriately grand term--in which ambient music may just enter a post-Eno peak.

High Places is an indie dance album about rhythm rather than dancing, that’s danceable without pandering.

CYHSY’s songs ring of The Bends-era songwriting, but loungier, more playful, more comfortable in their own skin.

The Loon is nothing short of an incredibly focused song suite, minus all the extraneous frivolities that you’ve gotten too used to hearing from an "incredibly focused song suite."

Sometimes, in the wrong mood, Tomboy can come across as eleven great songs chipping away at each other.

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.

Miguel De Pedro has instead delivered an oeuvre that plays like a stream-of-consciousness narrative of his growth, and of his many, many tangents, as a musician.

It’s an approximation of what perfection might mean, which is: precise, lean, deliberate. There’s not a wasted moment here, and not one moment overstays it’s welcome, which from a bunch of aristocrats (I get) is pretty frickin’ rich.

There is not a bad verse on it.

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.

Looping State of Mind both conquers and surpasses the only-so-many-pieces-in-the-box standards of most traditional dance forms by appeasing those crescendo/break/denouement expectations in name only.

There’s a lot to be impressed with here, but it’s the emotional intimacy that the songs establish even at their most grandiose that makes the album great.

The album is imminently listenable, providing a brisk background as easily as it rewards a close listen.

Odd, joyous, and wonderful.

Sexsmith’s got a knack for melody, and Froom’s got a knack for bringing it out.

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

Franz Ferdinand have slightly tweaked the neo-Brit-pop genre – mixing in funk, dashes of punk, and a bit of disco – and come out with a sophomore album even more confident and hungry for glory than their debut.

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

I'm elated to report that Zonoscope is a more than worthy successor to Colours, adhering to the tried and true follow-up formula of introducing just enough new wrinkles to their method to keep the proceedings from being a rehash, but containing plenty of the rapturous pop hooks that drew us to them in the first place.

Habits & Contradictions is a pleasurable listen with head-scratchingly pretty samplings and lyrics more or less liberated from value care of Q's devotion to "weed and brews" and the delirious enjoyment of something so simple as saying "fuck" a lot.

Dragonslayer is a shockingly good record, but it’s no surprise that things ended up this way.

Street Halo shows his commitment to his music both by tweaking it and sticking to the formula. It still makes him capable of bridging the brutal and the delicate. Only experienced crisis negotiators can say that.

Though wrong and stupid kinda work (in a good way!), Tha Carter III is more a balanced, self-conscious synthesis of everything viably great about Lil Wayne, hyperbolic or not, than the penultimate statement of the MC’s “legendary” status.

It takes more getting used to than their previous work, but it rewards even more for it.

If there is one thing that might be wrong with this album -- besides an uneventful last third -- is that the album might be too tailor-made for music critics worn out by music fatigue, hype fatigue, and irony fatigue.

Over five years and around an international filming schedule, Riz MC has managed to use his credentials to mount a dazzling attack on what he sees going on in Farringdon Road, and has emerged with the kind of crossover masterstroke that could outshine the National Curriculum.

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.

Gira's half is solid, but Akron/Family can't help but demand most of the credit for the record's artistic heft and overall cohesiveness.

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.

From the ground up, Plumb is through and through the work of a band that has absolutely mastered its craft.

Yamagata’s music creates a feeling of another time and place and conjures imagery of Rachael sitting in a dank, smoky, yet quaint piano bar playing her beautiful music to an intimate crowd of people.

If you give it a chance (or maybe even a dozen chances, if you can stand it), and don't immediately dismiss it because it's by Joanna, I’m sure you’ll find something to love.

It is a cohesive suite of powerfully effective songs with one thing on its mind: "the inexorable march of Time."

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

They've struck a balance, similar to Terrible Two, that's instantly accessible, consistently surprising, and extremely satisfying.