The most shocking aspect about You Forgot It in People is just how easily everything seems to be accomplished. Every note and transition is smooth and effortless, and there is such a wealth of brilliantly executed music.

What makes Thunder... such an easy-to-love affair is the schoolyard exuberance they ply their tunes with.

This is exactly the album that should be blasting from car radios all summer.

It's a classic case of debut album as faux anthology of musical influences, but it's also a successful collection with a marked sense of individuality, massively helped by Murphy's dry sense of humor, which demonstrates a willingness to embrace the contradiction at the heart of his musical personality.

It's like Bright Eyes -- urgent, personal, pent-up -- but better; less focused on the individual ego of the "creative genius," more about the group dynamics.

Chávez Ravine works because, ultimately, it isn't a history lesson or museum piece. It's the sound of musicians, now on the periphery, playing and singing the music they love.

Little Sparrow proves that 1999's The Grass Is Green was no fleeting burst of inspiration; Parton hasn't been so consistently exciting since the '70s.

A sturdy reminder of why Warren will be missed.

Though this new political bent shows a heightened sense of maturity and substance, two of Morning's best tracks are poignant, unabashed love songs.

Spoon's most ambitious album is also their best.

The Magnolia Electric Co. succeeds where other albums of a similar nature fail because it has the courage to point towards what is wrong with itself and the medium through which it is presented.

What really puts the album over the top is the way Edan manages to twist the DNA of two distinctly throwback styles, '60s psych-rock and '80s golden-age hip-hop, into a 2005 mutant plaid platypus.

In danger of hitting the point of "OK, we get it" -- when that zap of newness wears off and a successful band suddenly feels less than essential -- the New Pornographers instead come up pretty big on Twin Cinema, transitioning to a sound just as catchy as their old stuff but with more space for the tunes to breathe.

Their finest record to date and the most blistering, blissful album to be released by anyone in years.

So while not breaking new ground -- a near impossible expectation given the amount of ground The Fall has already broken -- The Real New Fall LP is a strong indication that Mark E. Smith is nowhere near finished.

Crimes is nothing but poetry, poetry in that way that song lyrics never are, profound both on page and in song.

Where The Blackened Air sounded haunting, Run to Ruin sounds downright haunted, and, indeed, it's got moments filled with menace and chords written to make you feel uncomfortable.

With all four members taking the mic, cohesion should hardly be expected. Yet, for all the different styles the band employs on this album, all but the closing number seem indelibly stamped as this band's work, uniquely The Wrens.

The difference this time is that the Hold Steady consistently kick ass, nailing both Paul Westerberg's Teenage Yearning/Angst and Bruce's Common Man to a cross of Pure American Rock, unafraid of cliché, undaunted by the task of making the familiar exciting again.

All of One Beat is strung loosely together by a common plea: for awareness, for understanding, and, most of all, for holding onto hope.

The Last Broadcast is big, intelligent, irony-free music that demands an open mind -- and rewards the heart quite well. Magnificent.

O's seductive, cooing/shrieking contributions to the power of the Yeahs are immense, but they are no bigger than those of guitarist Zinner or drummer Chase.

Across Old Ramon's sprawling 70-minute set, Kozelek is still a master of his sly charade, disguising sprawling webs of complex guitar chords and considered narratives as humble, simple acoustic ditties.

This disc may have a wilder sense of love-and-adventure about it, and may offer the thrills of an unpredictable ride, but, in its capriciousness and incongruousness, the thing Medulla rarely feels like is an album.

Although surprisingly self-conscious at moments, Feels remains rife with a triumphant beauty, a bucolic sound that stirs and entrances the listener like a happy secret.

Lyrically Black Cadillac is exquisite. Musically it's far more than a country record, expanding into those mighty rooms of roots music and pop-rock where Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind and Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels on a Gravel Road shine and burn against their own dark palettes.

Sigur Rós piece together breathtaking orchestrations that sound like they're singing to you from another world, telling you why your world is not so bad, that even in all the miserable monotony, something beautiful perseveres.

The Black Album is a spectacular farewell if that's what it turns out to be.