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.