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.