Definitely Maybe is the sound of people who feel like they need to scream to be heard—and even then, the chances of anyone actually listening seems depressingly unlikely. And yet, not wholly impossible.

Washington’s strengths have never been clearer. His sound is sinewy and centered, his rhythmic footing sure. And he’s a catharsis engine who also knows when to shrewdly dial it back.

New York, New York is a significant artifact. The music and photographs capture the formative moments of punk and new wave, before those genres had been thoroughly defined.

These are soulful sing-alongs with grit, pop nuggets that hold up to hours of repeat play in humid bumper-to-bumper traffic, and ultimately, the sound of a great songwriter hitting his stride.

Bored is one of 11 songs on I Love You, Honeybear, an album by turns passionate and disillusioned, tender and angry, so cynical it's repulsive and so openhearted it hurts.

It's deeply refreshing to hear an artist who exudes such depth and consideration.

The album is loaded with songs whose greatness is revealed slowly, where the simplest, most understated chord change can blow a track wide open and elevate it from simply pretty to absolutely devastating.

Audacious and spectacular high stakes.

Helplessness Blues' analytical and inquisitive nature never tips into self-indulgence.

Less ferocious, more deliberate but in many ways more compelling, Everything in Between finds No Age matching a new, nuanced approach to their expansive noise.

Ra alights on almost all aspects of its bandleader’s multidimensional sound and presents a coherent trajectory through it, alternating between otherworldly explorations and earthbound beats.

The appeal of the Miles at the Fillmore material is obvious: This is an amazing band and they rip, but they never leave traditional ideas of rhythm and melody behind.

It's both epilogue and prologue, yet these songs retain their own specific flavor, as R.E.M. map the borders between small clubs and large venues, between underground and mainstream, between rhythm and melody, between outrage and hope. That in-between quality still sounds invigorating so many years later.

Invention has very few peers, in my opinion. Though Schlammpeitzinger's Collected Simple Songs of My Temporary Past and Andrew Coleman's Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt come close, I'm firmly resigned that I'll not hear a more effortlessly charming album this year.

It's the kind of meet-you-halfway hipster party record the Dismemberment Plan has decided they don't want to make anymore.

This album sounds every bit as absurd, chaotic, and exhilarating as it did 14 years ago.

Lorde captures emotions like none other. Her second album is a masterful study of being a young woman, a sleek and humid pop record full of grief and hedonism, crafted with the utmost care and wisdom.

If it doesn’t quite show the knack for experimentation and variety hinted at via Inspiration, Wings is a quietly amazing document of Otis’ doggged determination over the quarter century between leaving the business and the first Inspiration reissue.

he point is that there are lots of people who haven't yet had the occasion to discover Elliott Smith, and ultimately this gives them a chance to scratch away at the bittersweet reality of his work, at how conflicted he sounded, at how bitterly unresolved his career remains, and how every single song still somehow feels like both a confection and a dagger.

Though Band of Horses aren't likely to be heralded as trailblazers, they do sound quietly innovative and genuinely refreshing over the course of these 10 sweeping, heart-on-sleeve anthems.

The weakest of the three versions of Nothing Has Changed is the chronologically sequenced 2xCD version. It's basically just a slight revision of Best of Bowie, compressed to throw in five later songs....The 3xCD Nothing Has Changed, though, is the jewel among the three variations on the same core material. Its masterstroke is that its 59 tracks appear in reverse chronological order.

The record will remain, something that channels the past but sounds like little else right now, an album about rediscovery that's situated in the constantly-shifting present.

A handy 4xCD compilation (disc four a fascinating set of outtakes and unreleased material) that captures the good Captain’s cagey albeit failed move towards mainstream rock acceptance.

Ruins has a vivid sense of place.

Vernon himself sings with more texture and conviction than ever before. He’s shifted fully from vessel to commander, steering the music instead of seeping into it.

Abstract, yet brutally honest, Burma shame the transparent, insecure and phony, reminding us that ideals can be standards.

Released today, it instead feels like a staggering transformation and a return to form that was never lost, an ideal adaptation by a group that many people didn't know they needed to hear again.

You don’t need to be an expert in Cave’s wider cosmology to be swept inside of Ghosteen, to be devastated by its despair and lifted higher by its humanity. You only need the ability to suffer and the desire to survive.