The power of Frank’s work often comes via extreme transparency, but he’s not writing diaries. It’s about how he’s able to locate the crux of any situation, or expose undue artifice, or peel things back to their naked core.

A madcap sense of humor animates all his best work, and The Life of Pablo has a freewheeling energy that is infectious and unique to his discography. Somehow, it comes off as both his most labored-over and unfinished album, full of asterisks and corrections and footnotes.

By turns jubilant, confused, afraid, angry, sad, relieved, all pretty poignant, yes.

At its heart, jazz thrives on bold, sensitive interaction in the moment, and Live in Europe 1967 represents the pinnacle of that practice.

Picture of Bunny Rabbit offers the chill of encountering more of a beloved artist’s classic work in the moment they made it. There’s something near-holy about overhearing Russell in this magic half-light again.

Dragon is as heavy in its lyrical concerns as any previous Big Thief record, and more ambitious in its musical ideas than all of them. But it also sounds unburdened, animated by a newfound sense of childlike exploration and play.

This great unknowing serves as the album’s guiding principle. In Cave’s wounded voice, you hear him grapple in real-time with the incidental prophecies of his lyrics and his need to get the job done.

Really, in a world far too concerned with backstories and far too lacking in good old dedication to craft, Grizzly Bear's just about as boring as they come: four guys who very quietly set out to make a fantastic record. And so they did.

This self-fulfilling fatalism is at the heart of innumerable rock songs by innumerable bitter young men, but it is rarely expressed with the introspective clarity that Bachmann displays throughout Icky Mettle.

Profound, innovative, and absolutely vital.

The more Big Thief zoom in, the more magical they sound.

Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven is a massive, achingly beautiful work, alternately elegiac and ferocious. However, Lift plays like an oddly transitional album: much of the first disc presents a refinement of the sound that crystallized on the Slow Riot EP, while the second disc flirts with moments of vertiginous shoegazing, looser rock drumming and reckless crescendos of unalloyed noise. Succinctly, the first disc is easily continuous with their earlier work; the second disc might just be the future.

Summerteeth looms ominously in Wilco’s catalog, marking a point where he [Tweedy] knows it all could have gone wrong. He now sounds like a man who understands pop music will save his life. That quality makes the bonus material on this drinking-age-anniversary all the more potent.

The end result is a great album, albeit one more lighthearted than its myth would suggest.

The OOZ drops at our feet like a piece of poisoned fruit, a masterpiece of jaundiced vision from one of the most compelling artists alive.

Murray Street is Sonic Youth's first successful convergence of envelope-pushing guitarwork and accessible songery since 1988.

It remains exceptional because it captured a moment when a premiere showman worked his hardest to win over new fans. Decades later, these 1966 concerts at the Whisky A Go Go still possess the power to convert skeptics so seems that Otis Redding did indeed get his wish: He made one of the greatest albums that ever came out.

Oui is stunning easy listening in recession, but up close, it's genius. The production, the arrangements, the instrumentation, the electronics would sound cumbersome in the hands of the unexperienced, but the Sea and Cake fuse these elements with economy and care. If Oui doesn't erupt like an outright revolution, it's only because the band makes it look it too easy.

New Bermuda, if anything, is more overwhelming than Sunbather.

Fishscale reiterates with cinematic verve that the most vital current Wu Tang Clan member's storytelling can match Biggie's in both excitement and humor. Yet Ghost's songs are unrelenting in their slavishness to density and credibility, and that can turn off casual listeners even as it intoxicates hip-hop purists.

The live album (recorded in Stockholm in 1994) and disc of rarities and demos put the finished product in context, while the array of EPs show off the wide stylistic range of everything the Breeders could do well.

Out Hud also back up their flash with remarkable substance, setting their music apart from anything as one-dimensional as standard club offerings or moody trance cuts.

"Street Horrrsing" was a great record, but Tarot Sport is a cut above. Perhaps surprisingly, it's also a welcoming album--and one of the best of this already fruitful year.

Even at its most dissonant and abstract, this record is human to the core, and if you're ready to face a few demons, it's as inspiring as music gets.

"Left Alone" is nothing short of a vocal masterclass. It has the singer going from the verses' rap-like cadence to the hook's curlicue jazz stylings to the operatic long notes of the bridge-- notes that slowly curdle underneath their own exasperated weariness.

While the rest of pop culture infantilizes itself with cussing puppets and manufactured bands who willfully dangle like marionettes, Waits is serving up vintage brittle fusion and somehow breaking the law of diminishing returns. [Review of both Alice and Blood Money]

For 30 years Swans have challenged the boundaries between beauty and ugliness, music and noise, catharsis and abuse.... The Seer is the album that transcends them.

Despite the new song structures, guitar solos, and drum fills, Brownstein's guitar still roars wildly, Weiss's drums still thunder, and Tucker still wails with a primal urgency that is one of the most compelling sounds in rock music today.

So This Is Goodbye isn't just an improbable notch above 2004's Last Exit-- it's also among the best records you'll hear all year.

If Willner doesn't hit at least some of your pleasure centers, well, forget your ears-- your nerve endings might actually be dead. Even three months in, it's a safe bet that From Here We Go Sublime will wind up 2007's most luxuriant record.

22, A Million sounds only like itself.

Tame Impala prove far more exciting because, by maximizing the use of the available technology, they tap into the progressive and experimental spirit of psychedelic rock, and not just the sound.

While the rest of pop culture infantilizes itself with cussing puppets and manufactured bands who willfully dangle like marionettes, Waits is serving up vintage brittle fusion and somehow breaking the law of diminishing returns. [Review of both Alice and Blood Money]

With this new LP -- released on a major label on both sides of the Atlantic, no less -- odds are, a lot of people are going to listen, and I don't mean in the tail-eating, blog-bite-blog sort of way.

It's a real trove, and not just because this lineup is relatively obscure.

Don't just judge it as an album by a band coming off a major line-up change. You won't need to.

It has a distinctive blend of magic and might, the sound of a band who knows they’ve hit their stride and still gets giddy at the noise they make. It’s a bar band delivering communion.

Frankly [add-ons would] just be a distraction from the underlying theme that becomes clear once you get absorbed into the music, which is that Blue Lines is still Blue Lines, and most of the world is still trying to catch up to it.

Calexico have created their first genuinely masterful full-length, crammed with immediate songcraft, shifting moods and open-ended exploration.

This is a solid, intelligent album that a lot of people will love-- one that'll slot onto indie-crossover CD racks right beside the debuts from Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, and the Futureheads.

Deerhoof, an indie band who have released plenty of discombobulated pop and no wave albums, have lately turned toward accessible, foot-stomping rock. It worked on The Runners Four, but it works better and quicker on their new album, Friend Opportunity.

This is a massive artistic statement from The Microphones, and though it may be cryptic-- even overwhelming at times-- it remains warm and open, thanks to the stunning intimacy that has consistently been the group's hallmark.

The most entertaining and lushly melodic work of Morrissey's solo career.

Despite its eclecticism and relatively Dadaist leanings, Sung Tongs is a romantic album; romantic in its celebration of innocence and nonsensical shared knowledge, and the sweet, trusted idea that everything will be fine-- as if it hadn't always been.

It's tempting to think of Art Brut as the foreign replacement for the catchy/clever observances Weezer used to traffic.

[The Merge reissues of Copper, Beaster, and FU:EL] are a wonderfully presented document of a punk legend [Bob Mould], starting over creatively and emotionally in a brief window he helped open, and succeeding beyond his and anyone's expectations.

The pair’s songwriting is so inventive and electric that even the depths of the late capitalist abyss begin to offer pathways to freedom.

With Sunbather, Deafheaven have made one of the biggest albums of the year, one that impresses you with its scale, the way Swans' The Seer did last year.

They rival The Shins, or The Magnetic Fields, or any of the innumerable indie touchstones, but what truly sets Who Will Cut Our Hair apart is the near-total absence of traditional verse/chorus/verse framework in their songs; to nail beautiful, memorable lines with such remarkable ease is a feat unto itself, but to do so in essentially formless compositions is a different class of achievement entirely.

Focusing on Wildheart's overt eroticism is one way of listening, but it's impossible to overlook just how seriously he's taking craft.

In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country runs like updated material from their majestic 1998 offering, Music has the Right to Children. And like that album's namesake, these five elegantly mournful melodies creep and explore like adored but unruly children, full of wide-eyed astonishment and naïveté.

Greenspan... manages to fold elements of nearly a quarter-century of forward-looking pop into a distinct sound without sounding either conceptual or trading on contradictions or the smoke-and-mirrors of attention-grabbing eclecticism.

Not simply an excellent album, Chutes Too Narrow is also a powerful testament to pop music's capacity for depth, beauty and expressiveness.

On 7, all the contrasts that mark their music are dialed up to blinding; you are plunged into darkness and then showered in light. The experience is so enveloping that you find yourself contending, once again, with that familiar itch to locate meaning.

Kala is clattering, buzzy, and sonically audacious.

Phantom Power sees the down-to-earth Welsh band moving away from genre-hopping and rough juxtapositions, and beginning to blend their influences into an evenly spread melange that simply sounds like a highly evolved pop band.

Olsen suggests that nihilism and optimism are closer than you think, that what feels like knowing yourself is almost always revealed as delusion. On All Mirrors, she glories in that tumult, and the sparks that fly illuminate her bravura turn.

Given its fragmented genesis, it's surprising how listenable and of-a-piece Fall Be Kind is.

Their best album to date-- a bold claim to the upper echelon of rock.

You Are Free is full of arresting, serene beauty, but as an album-- as that quantifiable object-- it has composite failings. Sans a handful of lesser inclusions and tributes, the imaginary, shorter version of You Are Free is flawless.

While Cryptograms presents its own obstacles, it's easily enjoyed as a whole. Memorable melodies and an awkward, charismatic narrator are often peeking from behind the dissonance-laden mists that self-consciously choke them.

Spoon's latest is their magnum opus to date; it takes a scalpel to the highlight reel of their career, cutting and pasting a 35-minute tour de force that ends too soon.

This is probably the most uplifting album of his career... Exhilarating.

Black Origami is a gorgeous and overwhelming piece of musical architecture, an epic treatise on where rhythm comes from and where it can go.

Beauty and the Beat sounds like a record made by someone who once devoured the catalog and history of his favorite artists, traced their lineage as far back as he could, and has discovered his place in the genealogy. With that enlightenment, Edan is no longer an impersonation of his idols, but one of their peers.

This is music that digs deeper and burrows beneath the level of shared associations to discover the sparkling emotional potential of carefully arranged vibrations moving through the air.

This unguarded, individualistic expression encourages strong identification in listeners, so don't be surprised if this record earns Garbus a very earnest and intense cult following.

These 14 complex compositions warp the pop textbook into something more knotty and internal, creating a unique zone where the 27-year-old thrives: She’s never sounded so large, even in the record’s quietest moments.

Pray for Haiti is his most ambitious, definitive project since his 2016 masterpiece Haitian Body Odor, a collage rendered in full.

Alvvays came out with a record that finally is large enough to contain the band’s splendor. Every song on Blue Rev is a feast, done up with effortless élan.

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.