It was as if all of those constituent elements were combined in equal parts and to perfect balance and have since simply been maintained.

She continues to prove herself anyway, again and again: here throughout twenty songs, and throughout thirty-five years and beyond.

Even at its most seemingly ascetic, The Moon Rang Like a Bell is among the most generous, tender, radiant albums you’ll hear all year. It just wants your ears.

The record is absolutely at a pace with the band's great debut.

You’d think that an album with somewhat conventional music that eschews a conventional sense of arc, narrative or otherwise, would come off awkward or ineffectual, but with Stitches there is aesthetic, textural immediacy and, even more importantly, immaculate craftmanship to help it make an impact from the very first listen.

Ryan Adams, is up there with his best work because while it doesn’t have a lot of sweat on it, it’s a record that feels clearly considered enough, and carefully produced to maximize Adams’s strengths.

The Worse Things Get is powerful and assured, and in making true of its promise--to fight harder, and to love one’s self in the face of adversity--it pulls off one of the hardest feats there is.

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.

Another understated near-masterpiece from a band that doesn’t need to make a bang to make a deep impression.

This record is hip-hop as post-ambient.

The titles and lyrics form a kind of manifesto of loneliness, elevating self-doubt and even insecurity into badges of honour. He struggles but, with the music growing all around him like a protective cushion, we only hear the sound of a deep, blissful sigh.

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.

Modern Vampires of the City’s songs rarely feel overstuffed or overwritten, with simple kick-snare drumming, plaintive piano chords, and astoundingly well-recorded vocals at their centers.

Morrissey has managed to assemble a record that feels like a genuine Morrissey record while not being insufferably self-important and brooding.

She is expressing something ineffable in a way that is consumable and still interesting: the album as starting point, a work that grows with the listener--the gateway drug to thinking differently.

Maybe it lacks the frenetic energy of Night Falls Over Kortedala, but I Know What Love Isn't is a great record in its own right, a showcase of Lekman's prodigious storytelling gifts that also makes an effort to connect those stories, and that music, into an emotionally resonant whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

While the Knife seem to have outlined a much clearer vision for what they were trying to achieve, they do so, crucially, through experimentation starting outward from their own comfort zones, and with almost zero lyrical element.

King of Jeans, for the most part, delivers compact, devastating blows--the tautest, in fact, that the band has ever dealt.

A damned great indie rock record.

It is a slender, limber album, blissfully aware of itself and not daring to overstay its welcome.

It’s an exhilarating listen, even if all of this dread seems to be in the name of dread only.

If it's not a truly inspiring album, it's nevertheless undeniably impressive.

At this point MacKaye and Farina are splitting vocal duties fairly, um, evenly, and the contrast between his weathered bark and her more soulful emoting creates a dynamic equally as fascinating as their instrumental dexterity.

Last Summer is a difficult album to describe because it's made up entirely of these kinds of small moments, gliding gracefully from memory to memory, place to place, like an inside joke stretched into a one-act play.

The most intense moments in Past Life Martyred Saints are evocative enough to drag you back through your own most overblown emotional crises, but when the buzz fades, you are plopped back into the halcyon present, strangely empty.

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.

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

If Ashworth’s lyrical razorblade was blunted by the quaintness of Casiotone consistency before, his new compositional confidence allows its sharpness to shine and cut as deep as you could handle without running a bath.

It cements the Clientele as one of the best pop bands around today.

It’s subtly more adventurous, and certainly scarier, in the way that even mundane things are always scarier in dreams, filtered through a disordered mind, revealing painful truths in unexpected places.

Fans of Angles should rejoice as Comedown Machine is essentially a refined version of that album’s strengths.

Despite its big, dumb rock ‘n’ roll template and primary color lyrics, albums like Lost in the Dream can be as restorative of faith in old metaphors and storytelling tropes

Nurses are a psychedelic freak-folk trio from Portland with ridiculous facial hair. But Apple’s Acre is also very, very good.

You can’t really blame Bowie for conforming to 21st-century quality control when it comes to the sound and scope of this record, but it’s not exactly something to be celebrated either. What deserves celebration, or at least indulgence, are the glimpses of sublime execution on The Next Day, as well as Bowie’s skill in maintaining his mystique after all this time.

This is an not an album designed for navel gazing introspection, but rather one to be played at neighbor-annoying volumes before you hit the town on a Friday night.

This album is the hot shit.

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.

The finest songs here are as solid as any other rock music you’ll find in 2013.

Baldi manages to find a comfortable place in between the all-potential pleasure-all-the-time approach of his first two records and the potential for all-out sad dude sonic violence, delivering a criticism of and break-up message to computer music by jettisoning every aspect of his work that could possibly be labeled as such.

The result would be encyclopedia-thumbing pastiche if it weren’t all so carefully curated, and if the production wasn’t so intricately, lavishly produced that as each track stretches into the fifth or sixth or eighth minute it was not still revealing permutations, secrets, strange little surprises.

The Terror is an unselfish view of a world free of human manipulation, and as such is a staggering listen to fans accustomed to the Lips’ sheeny pop orchestra and, before that, their lo-fi quirk.

It’s an expert turn by seasoned professions thoroughly in their own comfort zone.

It is exactly the record you’d expect Kevin Barnes to make right now: briefly, the concept record as heart failure. Seriously. Never before has engaging in serious cardiomyopathic trade been this remote, or satisfying.

And while it most certainly does fill this grunge kid with nostalgia for a simpler time, it’s the first latter day Pearl Jam album that is plenty good enough to stand on its own.

In the end, a few weak verses are easy to brush aside on an album this likable.

Who Me? is another quirky entry in Wauters’s unique discography. But it’s also his most honest, delicate effort to date--two good qualities for a musician with so much natural charisma to explore.

A modern pop echo chamber, In Colour pushes the pleasure principle with ease, intelligence, grace, and a myriad of reflections that become one spectrum. RIYL: anything.

Burn Your Fire stands against records that damage and internalise by sticking to their convictions, instead of meta-analysing and working out where the lines are drawn.

It sounds more coherent than episodic, placeless, and with a definite emphasis on the rock aspects that, on "Recording a Tape," were used sparingly.

We’ve been shown angry Clark, blinded by passion and vigor, and we’ve seen drowsy, reverb-soaked Clark, but never before have the two parts struggled with one another in such a fascinating, rewarding way.

jj n° 2 proves itself to be inexplicable in its origins and quite possibly a rare summer thing that’ll survive the post-August comedown and re-emerge in heavy rotation in late fall, when its sunny disposition will try its damnedest to win my heart and maybe even succeed.

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.

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.

It’s melodramatic, yes, but the layers to the narrator of Home, Like Noplace Is There are vast. This guy cycles through a series of emotions, each feeling valid, each feeling like an appropriate result of confusion in the wake of a huge loss.

Phoenix has somehow managed to follow a universally acclaimed breakout record with one that not only avoids falling flat, but succeeds at creating and sustaining a subtly different atmosphere.

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.

Her confessionalism hits harder with the muscle of her band behind her words.

The Baseball Project is one of those “why the hell hasn’t anybody thought of this before?” ideas that is carried out exceedingly well.

It’s the most welcome of dinosaurs: a top to bottom summertime rock album that sounds equally great on a car radio or in teenage bedroom.

The tracks feel quickly and easily produced but fucking delicious.

Christmas Island shoots you down and makes loathing the same thing as self-loathing. But it’s also inspiring to listen to.

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

Soft Will is the perfect summer record, hazy and ill-defined and hard to remember but oh-so-euphoric.

It’s conceivable that she can be marketed as a hipper Michelle Branch (the string arrangements get a little schmaltzy), but at her most accessible she’s still too resolutely quirky.

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

This is drone ambiance for your buds, and Buds. Meaning: Crocodiles did good!

To the un-jaded, yes, boring, but to these well-worn ears, Lower Plenty drop some serious knowledge.

The result is a nearly anonymous album of stellar pop music, one where it seems all the attention was placed not on positioning Carly Rae as a cultural force, but on making sure Emotion makes you smile.

And with so much music, some cuts solidly fail, and some stand up to the best in the Bad Seeds canon.

Seriously, if there’s one thing on No Way Down that doesn’t at least momentarily hook you, even in the basest, more familiar way, where do your roots go and where do your loyalties lie, eh? Maybe in that sub-dermal nostalgia something about this EP truly resonates, well beyond its frugal runtime.

One of the most immediate records of the year so far, Here We Go Magic materialize as if they’ve always been here. Which, it turns out, may be right where they deserve to be.

Tromatic Reflexxions is a roaring success for both parties, blowing the fresh air of invention through an increasingly tribalist scene.

It’s nowhere near as inviting as his previous works, even with the excellent production and introduction of strings. But give it a few weeks; it’ll grow.

There’s a central and important paradox at work here, something that elevates the record above what might otherwise be emo-aspirations of gushy earnestness. Singer Devon Welsh makes himself the first target of an incisive analysis.

Although these judgments point toward Slave Ambient being among the top records the summer of 2011 has to offer, the record's off-axis dichotomy, now favoring studio-assembled mellowness, steals enough of the bite and traction from these songs to keep it merely a contender.

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.

Headhunter’s Nomad, taking cues from the mutated sonic vocabulary of minimal techno connoisseurs like Berlin’s Basic Channel, is altogether headier and more unreal. This is a futuristic, moody and vaguely menacing kind of dance music.

Certain artists’ albums sound like they’re effortless because they’re actually lacking in effort, but Röyksopp’s albums sound effortless because these guys are just that good at turning out great downtempo tunes.

This album sinks in, each listen dry rubbing the quiescent hums and lulls into the brain like a dream half remembered.

There’s just something about it --- I like Pixel Revolt, and I like it a lot.

The result is a whirlwind of a record, tight but decidedly fleshed-out, doting on death but still affirming life, and definitive proof that Widowspeak looks and sounds best in rapturous tones of earth.

[A] lovable shamble of a rock record.

Fade is approaching a late career masterwork, their strongest top to bottom effort since their mid-'90s peak.

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.

It is a more mature record.

Together these four pieces create a single, near-breathless listening experience, robust enough to envelop but varied enough to leave you both craving and curious for more.

Let’s Stay Friends is the most ambitious abuse of genre the band’s yet laid, like somehow when the indie revolution got gerrymandered Les Savy Fav came out on top.

Even though it’s as proficient as the Dodos have always been, albeit in subtler ways, there’s nothing about this record that feels arbitrary. It’s an album that feels like honesty, or at least a very well done facsimile of it.

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.

This is a record filled with breezy jazz tunes ripe for a dance hall. It’s also music that will give you a headache from thinking, if you take the time to truly appreciate the multi-faceted work of art that it is.

Throughout, as ever, it’s Stewart’s voice that grounds the music in something recognizably human, his inexhaustibly elastic voice capable of so much but never able to be anything less than beautiful.

Here, as on their last effort, probably the most well fitted referent is Andrew Bird, but Forest flattens the jubilant hop of Pale Young Gentlemen into a cluster of songs much darker and more expansive.

It’s the Casiotone defence mechanism: take your innermost awkward lumps and bathe them in rose-tinted easy listening. Ashworth successfully translate this to his new instruments no fewer than nine or ten times on this eleven track set.

It is an expertly crafted and detailed work which accomplishes total immersion in the listener. [Review of UK release]

While originality may not be high up on Blank Realm’s list of virtues, there’s something engaging about a record this wonderfully crafted and this genuine in its own personal zeitgeist.

The tone is set: They Want My Soul gives pleasures immediate and unlocked, a freshly bitten peach dribbling sweet nectar down your chin.

Beyond simply being a fantastic musician, he’s a master of imaginative storytelling, and manages to perfectly capture the feeling of such a cruel yet contemplative season.

This record speaks into the empty vastness of our endless music consumerism, and all it says is "me too."