Gloss Drop shows a band still well ahead of the curve in terms of how they perform music, and one that understands how an aesthetic can be stretched to its most experimental limit and retracted to a simple confection without a wide chasm between the two modes of expression.

Sheâ??s funky, confident and fun, and thatâ??s just on the first song.

With Playtime Is Over Wiley is finally living up to his reputation by achieving consistency without becoming mediocre; delivering a steady, honed set that's sharp enough to split flesh from bone.

His rhymes are intelligent and image-packed, his drums are classic, and his inspired sample choices come together to make a striking aesthetic statement.

While Mythomania doesn’t necessarily punch its way out of that paper bag, the album does feel more immediate, its melodies are more memorable, and the songs do occasionally allow themselves to become more ragged.

Callahan's made plenty of fine albums-some of which boast higher highs than this one-but Apocalypse is such a satisfying and downright elegant listen because of its commitment to a narrative arc; as soon as it ends and you step back, the album takes the shape of a remarkably complete thought.

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.

Salon des Amateurs is undeniably an important album for Hauschka, both for its distillation of his rigorous methods and its energized perspective.

In a graceful return to form, Jan and Andi make it clear that they're as present as ever, ready to jump into the game like it hasn't been six years since we last met.

This record has a way of making you feel alone and alienated even in a crowded room.

Salem evokes the seismic thrill of a good Gucci drop alongside all of Nico's ghostly beauty within the very framework and timbre of their productions. The result is no less than one of 2010's most exciting debuts.

The Air Force has a lot of good songs on it.

A gorgeous little nightmare.

Nobody who has ever had some semblance of an interest in this band should ignore Journal For Plague Lovers, which is simply far more awesome than anyone had a right to expect.

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.

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.

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.

Watch Me Fall isn’t evolution, but it is certainly maturation, the first physical testament of aging as a slog toward something better.

They're also carrying on in the tradition of independent rap artists from the fertile early 2000s, producing whatever they damn please and selling it for ten bucks. An uncompromising approach can lead to disaster, either financially or creatively, but COHESIVE is the paradigmatic fruit of such an approach.

With both "Everybody" and now Car Alarm, the Sea and Cake would appear to be in the midst of an inspiration streak unheard of since their first three albums, and we’re richer for it. Impressive for a quartet of mid-‘40s post-rockers on their eighth record.

Perhaps it took a grueling creative journey and a battle with self-doubt to get there, but the end result is a band that has retained its brash experimental flare while discovering its heart.

It is, itself, a joyful record, prickly and playful and sometimes downright bizarre, but never less than welcoming.

This stuff is genuinely, earnestly satisfying, in the same way all great pop music is: these songs, simply and purely, sound fucking great.

Clumsy it might be, familiar it might be; redundant it sure isn't quite yet.

A textbook example of restrained, stylish writing, Here We Go Magic have found their muse: a 40-something producer from England who just knows well enough to get out of the way.

Ditherer is a far-flying leap above and beyond anything that Fog’s done before, but not a shocking leap because it’s still very clear that this is Fog.

A surprising record and a mess of contradictions--an okay band making a great record, classic rock songcraft made contemporary through sheer force of will, a quiet and loud album simultaneously, dancing along the lo-fi/hi-fi binary, a fucking record about Appalachia made by dudes from Portland!--that thrillingly, thinly, radiantly congeals.

Its tone is largely exuberant, even when its content seems dour; its ancillary themes seem surprisingly relatable and humanizing, even though its thesis stresses how uniquely untouchable and alone they are at the top.

It's never pretentious, showy, or fake-tough; it's just Shad, doing what he does, and it sounds earnestly great.

The record is a gem. Twelve tracks with a sense of cohesiveness that side-steps homogeneity in favor of straight-up old-fashioned album workmanship.

The core of his sadness may still be a mystery to me, but his monument to it, in all its eccentricity, is by far the hardest thing to ignore that he's done yet.

Port Entropy, Shugo's fifth LP (depending on how you reckon Fragment, his 2003 CD-R self-release), decisively occupies the realm of the waking: the nimble, the abstract, and the exciting.

Her efforts have crafted a soul album that is resistant to any claims of mere charlatanism, a record that brings a modern tongue to a classic style.

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.

It provides the kind of visceral excitement absent in so many of those other albums.

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.

Sure, there’s no “Watermelon” or “Communism”, but Be’s wit presents on a grander scale than a dependence on sprinkled, chucklable oneliners would allow.

[A] beautiful little album.

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.

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

To me this sounds like clear-headed music for lovers of straightforward disco pop--an unblemished set that asks haters and the insecure alike to wait behind the velvet rope where they’re most comfortable while the rest of us throw a cloth over the lampshade in the living room and put on a really great record.

More than any other melodic recording this year, Earth Grid feels truly timeless.

Tryptych is something of a good trade convention, showcasing just how Demdike's samples become reborn with a strong modern edge. You feel like you're privy to seeing something here that's all set to sweep across the market.

Trouble has its highs (the second chorus of “Rivers,” all eight minutes of “Shooting Rockets”) and lows (“The State,” a messy rocker that all but collapses in upon itself), but the band’s prowess and Bejar’s vision makes the songs an impressive, if jagged, piece of work.

Nothing on Thursday sounds like filler.

Poised as hyper-indulgent fellas, Smother is a startlingly controlled album, one that's exactly as smooth and smoldering as its moniker posits.

Even if this time around the music takes a more prominent role, it’s this delivery that gives ExitingARM a sense of unity.

Skin of Evil is hardened, seamless, and totally unrelenting, everything full-bodied and visceral about Frog Eyes squeezed until it sublimates. This is scary, ethereal shit. It’s also a gorgeously captivating half hour of bedroom pop pushed screaming out of bed.

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

Brightblack Morning Light is a chambered catacomb of meticulous design, a long-player so calm and unassuming that genre modifiers flock to its veneer, are swallowed into its depths, and murdered.

Enter the Vaselines serves as a timely reminder of the old ways we found music: for Cobain, one dreams, as a record in a bin somewhere, and for the rest of us, a recommendation from a friend, a cassette loaned around like a dirty one-hitter.

Space is Only Noise is delivered with an impressive restraint, especially for a debut LP and from an artist of Jaar's age, its songs warm and dense whilst seeming full of negative space, gentle and humorous whilst threatening claustrophobia.

As fun and crafty a debut as you’re likely to hear this year.

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.

OS's greatest feat is in its restraint. The urge to collapse into all-out roaring is there for the whole forty-three minutes, but Skodvin and Totman have made a sort of pact: you stay feathery on the piano, I won't go to Hades in the mix.

In many ways, Kensington Heights is what maturity sounds like, done right: too young to relinquish their punk energy and too experienced to let it limit their songwriting, the band has combined their twin urges into a single path.

It is markedly less frenetic and more cohesive, and for that it is pitch-black and menacing, and for that it is head-and-shoulders the better record.

Like all of his records before it, Devils & Dust sounds at once like everything and nothing Bruce Springsteen has ever released.

What makes Winchester Cathedral stick out amongst their previous works, and make it their best release since Internal Wrangler, is a willingness to explore, albeit briefly, the previously malnourished middle ground between their seemingly two-speed approach.

Three more songs of similar quality and dropping the story about how this was just some free writing experiment and Sweaty Magic would probably have been one of my albums of the year.

This might be the last material we hear from Dilla that echoes the endlessly fascinating turn his music was taking before his passing, and it couldn’t be constructed more appealingly, its jittery creativity augmented by one of Dilla’s esteemed contemporaries, himself a fan and close friend.

Josh Homme wants Era Vulgaris to be your summer bonfire record. And with a restored aura of cockiness and predictably massive arsenal of riffage, he’s once again fulfilled his goal.

Suffice it to say, Milky Ways covers more territory than a dance album of its ilk rightfully should, though it never really clings to that designation in the first place and struggles to fit into any sensible line of kin.

There's lots to love about WIXIW, but it is all so much the band's own creation that anything less than experience falls severely short of capturing it.

Serena Maneesh injects the Warhols' toothy, cocksure swagger [into] the lush, narcotic insularity of My Bloody Valentine and Ride.

Sleeker but no less cartoony than her debut, it mixes freestyle house into her signature sound and comes off richer than anything she’s done before.

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

This is music that, thanks to the global marketplace, its own ingenuity, and Youtube, moves beyond boundaries of nation and language, sound and image, rationalization and emotion.

Her progression in two short years, from the sonic scarcity of Tragedy to the evocative symphonic grandeur of Loud City Song, hints at a vision we are only beginning to see the full range of.

Despite a couple of weaker links, Somewhere Else is extremely well put-together, and spilling over with appealing melodies, wit, and truth.

It is explorative, enchanting, wide-reaching, and so hopeful it ignites a tender pain all its own.

For all its seriousness, it's the absence of big moments and Hadreas' refusal to give in to easy outs that make what he does so compelling.

People have finally started to give this band its due attention, and with Future Islands’s virtually unmatched ability to make such a wide variety of lived experience sound unwaveringly electrifying, it’s no wonder why.

How To Dress Well is certainly not the only contemporary act to use nostalgia as the basis for an aesthetic, but Krell's ideas about the past and our relationship to it seem to be considerably more sophisticated than those of his peers.

Somehow Portamento is snuggled amidst St. Vincent and Braids and Tim Hecker and Colin Stetson on my year-end list.

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

Dancer Equired is short at thirty minutes, but it does the job of re-leasing Times New Viking's mad energy.

It's a deeply felt, lively record that stands tall on its own merits, and further proof that Tucker's talent is bigger than that which can be expressed through one band's sound.

White’s arrangements and production are simple and effective, clear without gloss.

Vivian Girls have responded in a way I never saw coming. Everything Goes Wrong is, proudly and brilliantly, a long player.

It’s wild music, and it’s wildly musical, and, yeah, it’s probably the most wonderfully raw production Springsteen’s talent has ever been channeled through.

Mirrored is Battles at their most experimental and their most immediate, their most wanky and most focused.

It comes into the world jubilantly, then spends the next forty minutes kicking and screaming against your ideas of what you can landscape it against. It dies with a characteristically quick whimper. No cheap shots against Explosions in the Sky, I promise, but that’s not pretty. It is beautiful.

Quit +/Or Fight is in a select catalog of records able to build songs out of studio arrangements that never seem contrived or overdone.

Forget the hype now; when they made this last summer, without hype, without de-habilitating expectation, they may just have created the finest indie-rock album of the year.

Beast Moans works far better than anyone should have expected.

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.

The charms of Harlem River are hard to explain, as this record thrives on a certain groove, a certain verve, that makes it an overall pleasure to listen to.

The record builds a whole new feeling of intimacy, and it's a ravishing enough record to, in its final breaths, break free of its own confines.

That BlackenedWhite doesn't really bother with the kind of extreme lyrical content Bastard and Earl traded in is what makes it an infinitely more enjoyable listening experience on just the most basic level.

As one may ascertain, the world of the Caretaker is a potential rabbit hole of nostalgia, anxiety, and all manner of undisclosed obsessions, but a distinct sense of calm washes over the best of this material.

Her writing on Real Hair sacrifices none of Major Arcana’s verve or crystalline observations in spite of being notably denser, with Dupuis layering syllable over syllable, image over image, until these songs should burst apart.

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.

Halcyon Digest is bliss, it is Deerhunter's best album to date-their first not to belie some raptorial need to plum my ears with mooching loudness.

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.

It’s entirely too richly tragic and fitting that the man’s last release is the apotheosis of his work, the finest and most representative example of what he contributed to music and, in turn, how music inspired him.

For all its maximalist glory, DISCO is remarkably nuanced, minor elements seamlessly shifting in and out of frame behind the compositions’ vibrant foregrounds.

If this isn't the most mature mixtape K.R.I.T.'s produced yet, it may very well be his most honest, and coming from this guy, that's high praise indeed.