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.

It’s entertaining, sure, but also empty and a bit soulless.

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]

LCD Soundsystem is mostly too afraid to be balls-out fun, but too unambitious to make for a really rewarding artistic experience. Essentially, it sits awkwardly in a no-man’s land between artistry and actual dancing fun, like guess-what-demographic.

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.