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

Rather, it is not a rap album; it is the absolute rap album. There is craft here (and in fact this is the most musical mainstream rap record since Aquemini) but just enough room for it.

Kanye West had to do him; and lo and behold, he has. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is the most cohesive and assured record in mainstream hip-hop since Jay-Z sketched his Blueprint (2001).

Live at Reading is a corrective to all that [i.e. journals, Guitar Hero], a reminder that nothing so trivial could ever sully music as irreducible as this.

A caterwauling hunk of avant-garde precision.

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

Channel Orange is going to be the standard to beat for some time. And it might very well be the best R&B album of our young decade.

Cohen manages to find the happy (and probably most obvious) middle ground between his spare origins and the sheen of his later work with light, jazzy instrumentation, with the songs stretched out to allow for several solos and interludes.

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.

This is the best rap album of 2012--not just because of champion verses and immaculate drops, but because they recognize that the most brilliant foreground only shines against a well-defined backdrop.

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.

This is an album you could easily hate -- especially if you like things like change and development.

What makes the album so gigantic is how intensely unique the state’s identity becomes filtered through one man.

It draws a subtle focus and then recedes from the record without resolve. Its tensions remain. If Sufjan is a perfectionist, he is now perfecting the art of stumbling, creating melodies that writhe with uncertainty and voices that echo back on themselves.

Funeral... is a resounding success on all levels---the group clearly able to make something incredible out of the familiar, and something inexplicably moving out of one emotionally draining year.

Backstreet spawn aside, it may finally be settling in that Sir Lucious Left Foot does gather itself around Big Boi enough to make it the best OutKast-related release since the duo dropped Aquemini a dozen years ago (we can debate its merits next to the incredible six tracks or so on the bloated Stankonia, sure). For a Kast fan, this is life-affirming.

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.

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

Animal Collective keep getting better.

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

The hype was (gulp) correct. Hell Hath No Fury is hot. Dirtily, nastily, pipingly hot. Not Best Rap Album of the Year hot; Best Rap Album in a Few Years hot.

Push Barman truly captures the trajectory of the band’s seven-year career in about two hours, and it does so in a way that does the band justice.

To Be Kind is as vital and unsettling as anything they’ve ever done, and displays a mastery of their craft that seems almost automatic at this point.

Hypermagic Mountain absolutely trounces nearly every other act in its general stylistic area. Regrettably, however, the duo’s fourth album lacks the formal and emotional peaks and valleys that encourage listening and re-listening to albums in other less hectic and punishing genres.

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

What they said.

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.

The record has more than its share of enjoyable moments, and more than its share of predictable "genius," but a seemingly new dread, a latent, sometimes crippling anxiety, lends the album a certain emotional edge, a hint of vulnerability, that is normally absent in the work of this Baddest of singer-songwriters.

Dave Sitek’s production is the magnetic north of this musical universe, and with it the band is never lost. They would be well to sound more so; to get lost, rather than cluck with pleasure at how well they know themselves.

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

I love that Bay of Pigs sounds like an extended triumphant version of most things Dan’s attempted in the past, only bigger, better, and with more of a plot.

Destroyer’s Rubies evinces an awareness of a feeling that “I’ve heard something like this before, and really enjoyed it” while denying the listener enough material specifics to follow-up with “It was on this record, recorded by this band, which I listened to when I was this old.”

The album is, in short, phenomenal. It certainly doesn’t match the beauty and heartbreak of Either/Or (1997), but it manages to recapture the spirit of that record while properly articulating the orchestration that Elliott had been working with for Figure 8 and XO (1998).

It feels like vital parts are gone, missed somewhere in Radiohead’s search through their own oeuvre for something more and more facilely universal, something that draws lines within lines of song types and not the larger methodology, something that can be "important" without being challenging.

The Woods is an incredibly intense rock record even by S-K’s lofty standards; it's a call to arms that will hopefully force complacent indie kids to demand more from their rock music.

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.

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.

Art Angels is the kind of album that simultaneously captures its era, is made all the better for it (this 35-year-old Beatles fan would’ve given her nothing but bad advice), and obsolesces it overnight.

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

For what it lacks in consistency, I Am A Bird Now gains in being, even at its most tedious of moments, an interesting and thematically compelling listen.

It isn’t the street rap of Ironman, it isn’t an exercise in abstract lyricism akin to Supreme Clientele, or the partially-focused and repeatedly disappointing Bulletproof Wallets. Regardless of that, the album captures exactly that Ghostface Killah is and has been over his past four records.

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

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

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.

A sure-footed assertion of the artist's individual talents and landing it a spot among the best folk records of 2007 has to offer.

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

Odd, joyous, and wonderful.

Everything that makes Shackleton's sound a singular one is on proud display through this extensive compilation of new material.

While Showtime has one or two more duds than its shock-assault of a predecessor, its continued siege is of essentially comparable caliber.

So, while Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is a pretty good album and as characteristically lip-smacking as Cave is capable, it’s only engaging in the details which, unfortunately, are hard to hear because Cave’s screaming something about vulvas over top.

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.

Los Lobos sound fresher, more invigorated, and weirder than they have in years.

This is a majestic, ambitious record, and the best thing an already incredible band has ever released. The rest is noise.

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

If nothing else, Stars of the Lid have achieved Adam's goal of making music "to really relax to," abjectly defying intent listening, laying waste to the established vocabulary of music production and appreciation.

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.

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

A considerably more gothic affair than Funeral, a set that sometimes screams “overcompensation!”

Celestial Lineage deserves every bit of attention it's garnered this year. I can personally put it on a shortlist of 2011 records that reinvigorated my confidence in metal in ways that I haven't felt in a long, long time.

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.

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

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.

House of Balloons is an album suspended in contradiction--a collection of sex jams tired of sex, or a paean to coke addled irretrievably by the same. It lacks dynamism because it has to; the Weeknd know nothing else, just that in every solid groove lurks the metronomic pulse of something waiting to die.

Although there are a couple of failed tracks--like the tediously slow 'The Turn'--most of this stuff is groundbreaking.

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.

w h o k i l l is probably the most inviting album you'll hear this year.

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

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.

Together, “School” and “Silverbacks” make the best Wu-Tang one-two punch that I can recall.

It’s 1980, honey. It’s always 1980 in here. Enjoy yourself; let yourself go.

This is the new definitive rock opera.

Take Finn’s vocals out of the equation and you have a fun and even innovative garage band steeped in the brand of classic rock to which indie has never properly paid its due. With Finn, they’re monotonous, even annoying.

He, like his album, works best in its woozier, hushed moments.

Think of it as a party invitation: it is as thrilling and original a debut as has come out this year, and one that leaves an ingenious sonic blueprint to build upon.

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.

Weighty and authoritative, the gospel backings help convert Gelb’s often world-weary musings into straight-talking wisdom, the kind of stuff you want to listen to on a bad day.

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.

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

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.

With Black Sheep Boy, Okkervil River have made the kind of minor classic that will inspire obsessive-compulsive love affairs with the lucky people who stumble upon it.

After a month of digesting Seek Magic thoroughly, oscillating wildly between manic enthusiasm and a kind of defiant distrust of this whole act’s shtick, I’ve committed myself to the stance about which I felt most comfortable from the beginning: this is a very good album, but there are certain things about it with which I take issue.

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.

They may not seem on-point at first, occasionally wandering into vaguely tangential realms like a professor who’s a few dropped chalks away from the retirement home, but eventually the genius of it settles in.

It begins to sink in that this band has performed a theoretical feat of Hawking proportions: it has devised a fool-proof formula for the unformulaic.

Newman’s work here demands high praise, especially with his resume.

It sets up the tension between the often gentle voice and its malevolent surroundings, and this, his third collection of re-arranged traditionals, oscillates between the sweet and the almost apocalyptic, often to great success.

This attention to economy marks these records [I Don't Rock At All and Man With Potential] as two of Swanson's most digestible and re-playable releases to date.

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.

Generally speaking that's good enough, especially since trying to find specific meaning in this kind of music is a largely futile exercise that I and others at CMG still occasionally agonize our way through against our better judgment. Perhaps the appeal of this music lies in nothing more or less than how painstakingly moulded it is, and in that respect Hecker will probably always release really impressive records.

The narrative of David is not quite as cohesive as Fucked Up think it is, the lyrics too cliché, but if writing a rock opera was the impetus required to push them to produce an album as gloriously overblown as David Comes to Life, then it's worth a thousand dead Veronicas and even more mopey dorks to mourn them.

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

Although The Mysterious Production of Eggs lacks the gleeful variety of Swimming Hour, it is obvious that Bird has created his most cohesive statement to date.

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.

A surprisingly quality recording of an incredible set, The Odessa Tapes plays like what it is: a miracle shrouded in modesty, and an ephemeral moment in time.

Worth mentioning about Rook, as something of a corollary to its ostensible punch-in-the-gut dynamics, is how creatively put together it all is.

Neko Case has made tremendous progress here as a lyricist.

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