They’ve made the first record of their career that feels like it might teach you something over time. It is rare, and special, for a band to be this effortlessly and completely themselves.

Freetown resonates with everyone sagging under the weight of systemic oppression.

For a record fixated on personal nostalgia, Life Is Full of Possibilities still feels bright-eyed and forward-thinking.

The test of any conceptual record is how well it stands on its own, removed from the angle. And A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure is a first-rate work, even if you're unfamiliar with the backstory.

How the West Was Won serves up their muscle, sweaty heart and golden grandeur in an exhaustingly persuasive light. That, and a hundred of the best riffs you've ever heard.

Ranging from the tightly wound “Brown Earth” to the sprawling “Christmas in My Soul,” it is the album of hers I would recommend to newcomers. The surrounding records are also strong.

The ark-like box should provide serious leisure-time satisfaction for both longtime Floyd freaks and aspiring heads alike.

These sublime ensemble recordings reflect not just the result but the process of deep enlightenment. Coltrane, performing with ashram members, illuminates Hindu devotionals with meditative Indian instrumentation, a sparkling Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer, droning Wurlitzer lines, and full-bodied singing evoking the Detroit church choirs of her youth.

Its stylized, specific, and unflinching sound roars with a singular menace, at once terrifying and captivating.

The title of this album is a challenge as well, as How to Dress Well’s modern masterpiece is conducted with the most eternal transparency--Krell asks “what is this heart” and lets you look right into his own.

Her lyrics have the conviction of someone like Fiona Apple: a profoundly individual presence that centers, above all, on self-reliance, on searing autonomy, on the act of becoming. My Woman does this more vividly and lucidly and daringly than before.

Mostly, though, the Young we get here resembles the Young we already know: the one who we first met on his rootsy-yet-metaphysical 1972 breakout album, Harvest, then again later on Comes a Time, in 1978. ... When all is said and done, we’re left wanting more.

Temporal displacement and imagistic writing make Here in the Pitch feel vaporous at first, but it soon becomes its own transfixing language, a magnet that makes your internal compass go haywire.

Cosmogramma is an intricate, challenging record that fuses his loves-- jazz, hip-hop, videogame sounds, IDM-- into something unique. It's an album in the truest sense.

The campy flair, smirking irony, and deliberately "retrolicious" alliteration matches the scarecrow-genius of his new album, Pom Pom.

Despite its density (they fit worlds into just nine songs), the album remains exciting and accessible, albeit highly sobering.

It sounds quite good, another weird and sloppy record from a guy who released a lot of them. And hearing it again with all the fantastic music that surrounded it, music that further cements Dylan’s Bootleg Series as one of the most important archival projects in modern pop history, it remains a beguiling artifact.

Behind this happy clash of stylistic preferences is a subtly but surely revivified Malkmus, confident to experiment more deliberately than ever.

The Blueprint is possibly the least sonically inventive hip-hop chart topper in years-- stunning and captivating for sure, but still loungily comfortable enough to sleep to.

It’s a playful, fantastical response to some serious life changes.

The album is like a discovery of a new mutation of still-recognizable DNA. And finally this new strain of sound isn’t just bold for Low; it’s just plain bold.

Parallax feels like a more complete work than any other Atlas Sound record, with the differences between the songs less distinct and everything flowing together more naturally.

But for now, basking in Pink's riptide, Wata, Takeshi, and Atsuo are 2006's balls-out riff-makers to beat.

Plunge is riskier than anything she has made before. It is sometimes harsh, often dissonant, frequently audacious.

It’s the impossible sweep and grandeur of the music that tells the real story, of how a rush of sound can take us somewhere we can’t explain.

Excavation gains power from gathering a little dust for a while, becoming a dark treat to occasionally sink into.

An expanded version of the Truckers’ The Dirty South that finally reveals the true breadth of their 2004 masterpiece.

Once again, though, Baldi is simply unwilling or unable to stop writing hook-filled songs, rendering Here and Nowhere Else even more tense and thrillingly conflicted than its predecessor.