The Last Romance, for all its disgusted veneer and inner conflict, both reads like a cogent statement and plays like a finely tuned instrument.

Superwolf is Bonnie-era Oldham trying to channel Palace-era Oldham.

There are a couple of Young's obligatory, wandering acoustic ditties to water down the already short track list, and Lanois' soft touch seems to render antiseptic even those few moments of feedback and reverb.

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.

Lucky Shiner is a good argument for the album as a conceptual whole, and for a musical environment a bit slower than the singles-based landscape that birthed Gold Panda as an entity to be reckoned with.

It is Noir’s skills for arrangement and sequencing that allow the narrative to successfully play out.

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.

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

Milk's musical vision is the binding force behind Random Axe and it's something that Price and Simpson clearly believe in; thus, all their bragging about how essential their complete gullyness is to the rap game. Because, despite lines crossed and opportunities missed, it sort of is. Nothing so far in 2011 has a total aesthetic and attitude that goes as hard as this.

These guys have the tools, and God knows they have the chops, but Thundercat has yet to develop a compelling sound of his own, and no amount of production wizardry can ultimately disguise that.

This is one of the best albums of the year, from a verifiable talent and one of the scene’s most exciting young songwriters.

If Pink’s more evolution than revolution, it still stomps all over most of its close genre surroundings, leaving maybe Tiger Bear Wolf and The Woods as far as 2005 goes.

She may remain an intimate, closely held artist for a certain sect of listeners, but by any standards hers is some powerful, accomplished songwriting-and in many ways Marissa Nadler epitomizes this ever-maturing skill more lucidly than any of her prior work.

What we have here is a great album, un- or under-appreciated....What Transference does is it opens a space for this band to experiment within again.

My Maudlin Career is just such a uniformly endearing record. It’s sentimental, yes, but pleasantly so, charming in its own little way.

I can’t help but feel that this album wants to have it several ways, but the net result of following all those paths means it plays out only one way.

Nothing on her self-titled debut full-length is "genius" or "brilliant," but the material is consistently well written and occasionally very good.

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

Goodbye Bread specializes in this kind of twisted subtlety; no longer content letting loose and letting the detritus fall where it may, Segall has crafted a record both familiar and surprising, both sunny and spooky.

If reduced to a single disc, Street's Disciple could well be one of the more exciting albums of the year. As is it's a solid, if not brilliant album from an artist we've come to not expect too much from.

The band have always been the holding of hands between kinda-Kyuss stoner rock and spazzy synth pop, but The Wedding is unique in that it is something conclusively Oneida but also conclusively marked of indie’s recent resurgence on the mainstream pop-cultural landscape.

The album's substance is obscured by the distracting presence of its production.

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

It’s an interesting, intermittently excellent album from a skilled group that could still use a little help in getting out of their own way.

For this and a couple other of IRM‘s electronic-heavy songs, Gainsbourg sounds like she’s doing her best Trish Keenan, though the songs lack the warmth and haunting tension a band like Broadcast can create from similar soundscapes.

C'mon doesn't break much new ground for Low in the way that their last two records did, and that's clearly not the goal here.

It’s smart, depressing, inoffensive pop perfect for a rainy day.

Where the record works best are its bookends -- the places where it most sounds like Cat Power.

The terrible truth is that -- and maybe this is a matter of an album’s length, replayability, interesting tenure, obedience, whatever -- Gruff Rhys will always be as politely awesome as Gruff Rhys has always been, and that’s just not enough anymore.

I can think of nothing more liberating than to dive into its dark waters.

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.

Musically the most important aspect of this collaborative effort is that their voices work so nicely with and against each other.

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

What's interesting isn't that an ambient record has suddenly introduced vocals, which is nothing new, or that these vocals are used exclusively for talking rather than singing, which isn't particularly surprising. What's really important is what this talking is totally, explicitly about: rather than just hinting at atmospheres and moods, vaguely suggesting a concept which can be seized upon as the thematic core of the music, Loscil provides what is literally an explanation of an album, which in turn makes the album about the act of its explanation.

The tinny, noisey/flangey/hurtful sound that's shellacked on in cheap 16 bit hinders some of the best material he's written to date.

Some of these songs are excellent, in an unfinished but inspired way. But many of the album's tracks evidence a band that's bursting at the seams with talent, only to stumble on unfocused, scattershot song-writing.

So, yes: this is cuddly, warm and intimate, just like all your favorite blogs have said.

A welcome new start for this talented band.

While it's a coalition of fantastic talents, Themselves submit to the expectations of a pussy glitch-pop crowd, and the Notwist mistakenly assume that hip-hop fans don't want songs with dynamism or structure.

We, The Vehicles is a fine collection of songs by a band running on all cylinders.

The real credit, however, goes to the songwriting of the eponymous duo. This album was not "saved in the production," as it were. The Con is a document written in the half-frenzy of a clusterfuck.

It’s better than Nouns, better than the best songs on Weirdo Rippers (2007), and for once, I think, offers this cool idea that Randy and Dean’s next record might move away from the unilateral and slightly prudish use of noise as nothing but noise.

Nearly everything about Citrus is so accomplished, refined, and downright transcendent that it could very well stand alongside Loveless as a modernized shoegaze staple.

I believe in the Vivian Girls. In every gorgeous harmony that coats bitterness, in every ambition subjugated to truncated song structure and muffled production, in every bouncy beat beneath a baleful drawl somehow made of equally bouncy elements.

Yes, the album stretches itself a little thin towards the end and some of Smith’s slurred lyrics are truly unintelligible, but essentially this record is joyously, thankfully, inexplicably, after all these years, still the sound of the Fall.

Another left-field triumph for Gira.

The Magic Numbers is one of the best pop albums of the year.

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

It’s a fine record -- one of his better in some time.

A Place to Bury Strangers is a record with excitement hardwired to its musical structure: the elements of these songs are so individually pleasing that, when the band shifts them against each other, the effect is a sense of constant cataclysmic upheaval. Each new variation is giddying.

Built as they are on rock 'n' roll clichés, these songs hold the listener at a distance. It's a bit of fun, but nothing more. Unlike their influences, something about this band doesn't really stick.

Perhaps what’s most frustrating about these missteps is that their combination with the album’s brief length (at least 10 minutes shorter than their previous efforts) smacks of songwriting torpor.

The Gents waltz their way through these ten sturdy, mid-tempo numbers rarely striking a bum note.

Typically heavy subject matter aside, Mason actually seems more content in his skin than he has in some time, and anyone who has previously garnered enjoyment from the Beta Band or King Biscuit Time will unquestionably find something to dig within Boys Outside.

De La Soul [are] wise enough to keep the filler to a minimum, thus presenting a more consistent product than that offered by their followers/peers.

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.

Heaven is more like a classic Sunday morning album: a modest, extremely laid back paean to the comforts of domesticity in which every song sounds like it was recorded from a rocking chair.

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.

Interestingly, the very qualities that make this a subpar Radiohead album are what make it their most experimental record yet. But this is also Radiohead elliptically circling back on themselves in dramatic form.

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.

Arrivals is just about a palatable enough affair; a minor stretch at sixty-two minutes but with enough peaks to be eaten in three sittings or so.

The Wonder Show of the World, his eleventh release in half as many years, is everything for which we hope in a new Bonnie "Prince" Billy release: creeping yet expansive alt-folk; an ever-strengthening voice; erotic imagery ("The smell of your box on my mustache") paired with thoughts on family, never uncomfortably; a stark, doodled cover; a doting collaboration.

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.

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.

On the Water is too uncompromising, too disinterested in being for anyone outside of its circle of two.

The problem is that Vanderslice’s lyrical scope remains too broad to enable a cohesive or definitive conceptual statement, and his music too tightly defined and predictable to be considered a departure.

Gather, Form & Fly is a bright record full of energy and dynamism even in its most cacophonous sound collages, but what’s so frustrating--what becomes more urgent with every listen--is how great this album could have been.

Curren$y drops some of the meanest s*** he's ever done, giving real credence to his attempt to crawl out of his obvious niche.

They have it in them to write great pop music or truly important experimental music, but Dirty Projectors have to decide where they want to end up before they start.

Happy New Year is fresh and adventurous and, most important, it is consistently so.

This is a fans-only document, but it’s one of roaring, immutable spirit.

Price’s work behind the boards, while often commanding, is hardly ambitious; running the tracks together to try and give Madge the "album" sound is noteworthy, but he’s picked the wrong pop-star to prod.

Vaguely melodious, embedded with overtones, sometimes placid and sometimes stormy, Black Sea is like a wave in that its diverse parts meld together to form a powerful, all-encompassing entity.

A nearly perfect follow-up... [it] keeps intact Interpol’s singular melodic prowess, while both tightening its songwriting and making unpredictable shifts in instrumental emphasis.

Azeda Booth achieve with their style one of the best and most exciting grafts yet of pop with electronica.

As a guitar record Paul’s Tomb may be, somewhat surprisingly, the best guitar record since, gosh, Pink (2005)?

Outside Closer seems to have mined an infinitesimal point on the musical map, something near the intersection of RJD2, Sigur Rós and Iron & Wine. It’s the detail and obsession with which Hood has excavated this minute point that makes the album so warmly, hopelessly riveting.

Flight of the Conchords ultimately succeeds apart from its parent television show because it’s a modest comedy album.

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

With II, the Psychic Paramount have created an record both gratifying in its dense magnitude and equally rewarding in the fragility of the elements that the album is composed of.

All of this should read like the ingredients of a truly brilliant album. And perhaps on vinyl it is, but the mastering of Wavering Radiant‘s digital format is atrocious, as heavily brickwalled and distorted as Metallica’s criminal "Death Magnetic" (2008).

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

As an amalgam of mind-warping melodies and high-minded concepts, Alegranza! is more than deserving of our praise. Then again, El Guincho could have avoided the album’s key missteps by cutting down on the obvious Afrobeat tropes and experimenting more with traditional song-oriented vocals.

It is a more mature record.

With Broken Arm, Marnie Stern has delivered a frenetic and ridiculously entertaining debut.

No single frontman in indie quite possesses Falkous’s unique blend of obnoxious charisma, and that fact alone makes Travels a sometimes engaging listen, but he’s still made an album that steers dangerously close to emulating the bros he’s spent his entire career railing against.

Noble Beast overcomplicates what should be a simpler formula; the meat is in Bird’s performances, the virtuoso skills at his disposal, not the antiseptic display of distorted guitar tones that the album’s best song unfortunately resorts to in its final section.

Son strikes me as even more experimental than Tres Cosas, and as such it’s less interested than that record on really opening itself up to the listener. That may be a good thing, admirable even, but it doesn’t stop the whole thing from feeling a little cold at first listen.

The imprint scores its hat-trick with Ouliposaliva: the entree of Angil and the Hiddentracks, one of the most bizarre/bankable records to air outside of its creators’ Parisian side-streets.

Liars is all about that Liars blueprint, and in that sense the album can get redundant.

Sheff is he orchestrator, but through all the manipulating elements, all the new band members, Sheff seems to be more at odds with his art than ever before.

While This is Goodbye does suffer, like Last Exit, from being a little too consistent (there’s very little variation in tempo or arrangement, or theme for that matter), it's as cohesive a listening experience as almost any album I’ve heard this year.

But far from ruffled or startling, Hold Time simply fills the quota Ward’s assigned himself and, (im)properly slaked, poofs off, contrails the last reminder that, yes, Jason Lytle’s still alive.

Waits is still an impassioned and awe-inspiring performer; here we can still hear, as invigorated as he was before I was born--or so I can guess.

No matter how smartly sequenced these parts are in Desire’s segmented flow, they remain varying nascent coups without one distinct rallying cry to organize the din.

It's the first truly inessential album he's made.

If this album is less immediately impressive than its predecessor it’s because apart from tightening their arrangements the sound is still exactly what you expect.