Nearly 1700 words and I still feel like this record's left me speechless. That's an epiphany to cherish.

Neko Case has made tremendous progress here as a lyricist.

New History Warfare has enough range that it seems to have opened up a whole new fanbase that might otherwise have no interest in avant-garde music.

These songs are great expanses, sprawling and glorious.

Inch by inch -- concept, production, groove -- Scale will measure your desires and dole out exactly what you want: depth, politics, creativity, or club-ready curios.

In The Idler Wheel's ten phenomenal songs, Fiona Apple seems to lay everything out on the table.

While Skitter on Take-Off is a great album, At the Cut is a brilliant one.

The line between cheese and accessibility can be thin, and whistling or handclaps or a hidden track or an overt songwriting method can all reek, but Friend and Foe has, just as ostensibly, no wasted space. The hinge is in the balance the band manages with every inkling of sound or production seeming both spontaneous and stultifying, both labored-over and cast off.

Strange Mercy is Clark's most tense, nauseous, kaleidoscopic album yet.

Infiniheart is too bright, too beautiful, and almost too good to be believed.

This is the best music Jay-Z can make as a human--at least by my (his) definitions of what he (we) can do.

The eleven tracks here are the most concise, effortless, and melodically conspicuous songs to come out of the band’s camp.

The album's explication of its own interest in contrast and conversation is perhaps its greatest virtue.

Feels takes the Collective in an exciting new direction, creating the kind of record that expands on the group's less esoteric strengths while also pushing their sound forward.

Tonally and lyrically somewhere between L. Cohen, Aidan Moffett and David Berman, Berringer's cynical, world-worn love-letters and resigned croon work perfectly with the band's rock steady rhythm-section.

Out of the Shadow remains one of the most promisingly straight-forward indie-rock/pop debuts since Oh, Inverted World.

Visions is exactly what it sounds like: it's an aesthetic and conceptual vision, one utterly unique to Boucher, and it's both strange and satisfying.

Arular beats out most everything I’ve heard this year in terms of creativity, energy, dance-ability and fun.

Quaristice--the band’s 9th full length, with about as many EPs--is probably the best album Autechre could have created at this point in their career.

The music beneath Cookie Mountain is an earthquake of nearly generation-defining proportions.

With El-P's help, Killer Mike has produced his first unquestionably great Album.

El-P's always been ahead of the curve but Cancer for Cure isn't valuable for its prescience so much as its currency of the now and the way it unites rap head nostalgia for the future beats of the past with the beats of the present.

Simply put, in 2006, My Life is a timeless evaluation of Assimilation, sometimes harmless, sometimes bleak, but consistently absorbing.

FaCE manages to be new, fresh and experimental while still retaining the listenability of much of Pollard’s seemingly never-ending canon.

Micachu’s album has all the markers of quirky chic--an unusual voice, a fairly well-known producer, and a distinctive approach centered around pastiche.

The collection is one of the best releases of 2006 because Tom Waits is one of America’s greatest living songwriters.

He’s filled his abdicated spot with greater authority than ever before, patched up the walls punched in from Ghostface’s temper tantrums and assured us that villian-rap’s appeal will remain evergreen as long as it infused with this genius, this wild idiocy, these manic flights of syllabic invention.

XXX is something much more complex, challenging, and rewarding than a dirty joke.