The process of writing this album was personal and intimate, but the end result is a confident, bold debut.

As the name may suggest, it's a daring, sprawling effort that simultaneously ventures beyond hip-hop and celebrates the genre's very history.

Just this performance of Jubilee Street is worth the price of this EP. While on record, the song simmers to a boil, live, it explodes. Cave sings like a man possessed as the band rips through the tune behind him. Both From Her to Eternity and The Mercy Seat hit as forcefully as they did when first released.

What resulted is ultimately an album of destructive beauty. Elegance married with sonic destruction!

You're probably not going to find another record quite so beautifully produced this year, or quite so warmly inviting, or just quite so full of lovely stuff.

In spite of the album's wilfully hard-to-stomach intensity, [it] will appeal to fans of art music of many different backgrounds.

Saturnalia revels in sin while occasionally contemplating salvation. Mesmerizing comes to mind.

Route One or Die is many things--immense, joyful, weird and above all aptly titled, as you'd be hard-pressed to find another debut album released this year --British or otherwise--that sounds so completely vibrant and alive.

You can’t necessarily call this new music, but it works because it doesn’t sound vintage, nor does it completely owe itself to any bygone era of “remember when?”.

To put it simply, it’s a near perfect conclusion to one of the finest records I’ve heard this year.

Even when it seems a bit disjointed on close inspection, it's when you take a step back that this album really comes into focus.

Even with the songwriting differences, Hope Downs sounds like a unified partnership between five musicians who've known each other for most of their lives.

Her wordplay ducks and weaves among the braided guitar melodies and idiosyncratic rhythm section with a razor-sharp cutting edge, with varying levels of daintiness, allowing the dangerously catchy melodies and thicker-bodied hooks to amass into a fantastically fluid LP.

This is hip-hop that doesn't attack; it drifts. Black Up is full of ghostly howls and weird barely-there percussion, devoid of anything like a single.

Welcome to Mali was one of 2008's hidden gems, so do yourself a favor and go check it out now.

Beams builds on the dense, sexy sound of Black City. Great dance music makes you feel like a beautiful Adonis, like an existential god as you jerk your body around to the rhythm.

Sound Kapital, with its concise length and sound quality (omit none of these songs), should be the flagship for such a shift. Spencer Krug should take note.

The reason The Futureheads is so good is because, quite simply, the music is simply stunning.

An eight-song trove of volume, emotional density, and social critique, its commonalities with sounds cultivated by labels like Touch & Go and Amphetamine Reptile not so much evidentiary of retread as they are respectful and refreshing pulls from an era of dissonant rock plentitude. ... Noise rock excellence.

Not only does Undercard not disappoint--there are more than a couple earworms here and there--but it's brilliant and fresh from two musicians who aren't exactly freshmen to the scene.

That the record plays out so consistently and yet flows with such apparent ease is testament to the skills honed by the band since its inception back in Copenhagen in 2000.

For her, it’s filtered through the attitude of the cowboy, her power coming through in her music and her words. Under these guises, she finds layers of emotional truth that are messy, confusing and often conflicting, but no less honest because of that.

The Unicorns’ Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone? defines indie-pop, laden with hooks boasting a charmingly lo-fi sound devoid of pretensions and true to whatever whimsy their muse has stricken them with.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is a triumph that will, like its predecessor, take years to unpeel.

It’s a confident, fantastic and ultimately very rewarding record that should be met with an open mind.

Introvert is a beautiful collection of poems filled with stories and experiences, on which Simz doesn't skimp on resources and thinks big.

Largely magnificent.

The entire subject seems to be instinct, a bombardment from Friel’s own psyche, expressed in a way that words could never do. Being therefore, indescribable. But nevertheless astonishingly glorious.