So the news is good. They didn't sell out, they didn't run out of ideas, and they were able to find still more places to yell "Whooo!" Go buy this now.

On A Grand, everything Skinner does is in service to an infinitely satisfying and resonant whole.

My only problem with the album is that it begins to devour its own tail about halfway through, at times sounding tedious, or worse, precious.

Like The Fiery Furnaces' Gallowsbird Park, or Interpol's Turn On The Bright Lights, Funeral is a debut record that simply refuses to be ignored.

An album that's both effortlessly confident of its sound and monumentally fearless of introducing cohesive surprises.

Halfway through the album, it's clear that this is a glimpse into the future of pop music.

What worries me about the obviously talented Junior Boys is their tendency to round their corners. The music is so safe, so pleasant; it's not hard to imagine it in the Starbucks CD rotation without raising an eyebrow.

Perhaps the best overall representation of Belle and Sebastian’s distinctive brand of indie pop.

The 10 tracks are hands down the most irresistible pop music you'll hear this year.

Better than anything they've recorded to date, Hypermagic Mountain approximates the swelling energy of Lightning Bolt's live havoc.

Rejoicing in the Hands finds Banhart developing past his early lo-fi recordings in favor of a crisper, more succinct sound that highlights his intricate guitar picking.

Although an extreme statement, it is a major stylistic step forward for the band and pays off great dividends to those so inclined to follow them into The Woods.

Cave's songwriting chops and incisive lyrics have, if anything, grown stronger.

Arular is what The Coup’s second record set out to be but wasn’t: Party Music, both for the warehouse hedonists and the basement dissidents.

Guthrie successfully matches his idiosyncratic lyrics with subtle, layered arrangements lush with strings, crisp guitars, and shifting song structures as likely to burst into anthem or lilt towards confession.

What sets Franz Ferdinand apart is their unapologetic adherence to the pop formula.

Worthy of any superlative you can throw its way.

It is Stevens' creepier qualities that make him a cut above the average singer-songwriter.

It is every bit the equal of recent pop classics like the Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin, Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, or The Shins' Oh, Inverted World.

There's nothing Herren can't and won't do on this record.

Quicksand/Cradlesnake establishes Califone as an ambitious band with the songwriting chops to back up its penchant for studio strangeness.

The mish-mash of moods and modes leaves little from which to gather a theme.

You really don't know what you're dealing with until you sit down and take in the freewheeling beauty of one of the year's best.

An exceptional testament to James Murphy, both as a musician and producer.

By album's end, two coming-of-age stories are complete: the boy has grown into a black sheep man, and the literate musicians have become a hell of a rock band.

Sure, with so much to hear and such a range of styles, the album can take a couple of listens before it starts to bloom. That said, after these requisite spins, one can't help but admire how smoothly Feast of Wire glides from track to track, style to style.

Sounding like a lost classic from Britain's 1979 art-punk scene, the Futureheads' debut is an assured masterpiece of twitchy, nervous pop.

Possessing a richly elastic set of vocal chords, Bird is in league with such silver-throated singers as Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright, but he rarely if ever over-emotes, a common criticism leveled at Buckley and Wainwright.