Whether or not Iron & Wine and Calexico ever choose to follow this up with another collaboration (fingers crossed), it's clear that both acts are stronger for having worked with the other.

Crucial parts of the album don't sound as intriguing today as they once did-- namely, all of the voices.... On the other hand, the rhythm tracks still kick ass 10 ways to Sunday.

Warm Leatherette was alternately more sanguine and more severe—a bracing confluence of reggae, new-wave, and post-punk that showcased Jones’ range as a performer and her uncanny, occasionally perverse vision as an interpreter of other people’s songs.

Wiki has always wielded his considerable talent to paint cityscapes with words, but with Elsesser’s production, they become transportive.

Guided by a more mature sound, Infinite Worlds is the rock music we need nowadays, when it seems like home, wherever it might be, is getting farther away.

It's packed with ideas, some of which work beautifully and some of which are just a joy to hear play out, but most of all, it's still a whole other world of pop music--an absolutely unique, enchanting, and irreplaceable vision of how the stuff can work.

The excitement is sustained so consistently over the hour-long running time that you'll almost begin to wish the six-minute songs were even longer.

The “new” material on Piano & a Microphone has already circulated as bootlegs, but this album clarifies its details, rescues it from indistinct hiss.

A significant step forward from her debut, Two Suns is home to some of the year's most thrilling music so far.

Flower Boy shows thoughtfulness can be freeing. As Tyler, the Creator embarks on a journey of self-discovery, he becomes close to whole.

It still speaks for Cluster’s prescience, to render the mechanistic noise of early electronic devices and warm them up in such a manner so as to reveal that no matter the new technology, such components are ultimately human after all.

This ambient music is not psychedelic. It never evokes outer space or the cosmos or, for that matter, the natural world, even when it uses the sound of water. It’s music for the indoors, music for doing things, there for you if you want to listen closely but also content to exist on a subliminal plane.

The rare box set that’s actually more than the sum of its parts. The highs on here are higher than the lows are low, and, more significantly, the warts-and-all approach creates a compelling context for Dick Jensen and the O’Jays alike.

Half of rage is confronting the sorrow that births it and watching it metamorphize. Witnessing the chrysalis is With a Hammer’s most generous gift.

Love is turning everyone into an audiophile, then, which means it's making younger people a little older. And it's also a mashup remix, which means it's making older people a little younger. They were just a pop band, yes, but if anyone can bring all these music fans together under one tent, it's the Beatles. Which is what Love is ultimately all about.

On an LP dubbed Razz Tape, this session spills out energy, with complex songs that slam hard and flow with ease.

Yeah, it's a fun album, and it's probably the most affable thing they've done so far together. But don't take that for a weakness.

What distinguishes the recordings on The Time for Peace Is Now is how the passion of the singers is tempered by the professionalism of their supporting players. Everybody involved was attempting to appeal to a broad audience: They were converting doubters into believers by playing gospel that could masquerade as pop.

Here every sound and beat is laid bare, with no heavy reverb blanketing the songs like fog. The newfound clarity produces neither thinness nor tedium, but simply a direct, unadulterated power.

Compared to 2017’s ken, a gothic-sounding record distinguished by chillier tones and pared-down lyrics, his masterful new album Have We Met sets a larger canvas. Produced by bandmate John Collins, the music is sweeping and bold and surprising.

Cold House takes a fantastic batch of songs and intelligently mixes in cutting edge electronic elements a la Autechre and Nobukazu Takemura, a couple of west coast underground hip-hop artists, and some delicate backing arrangements, and creates one of the most innovative releases of the past year.

Bakesale add-ons will mostly be of value to those who loved Sebadoh's first few years of all-over-the-place wildness, but it's not as if their second-disc inclusion can dull the parent album's punch.

It all adds up to a remarkably visceral, sensual, confident electronic record that stays absorbing from beginning to end, and should finally catapult Hopkins to stardom in his own story.

Their self-titled debut EP for Warp and LuckyMe spans 16 minutes of some of the year's most brazen, positively huge hip-hop sounds.

Like a great sacred text, the music of Kirtan: Turiya Sings is concentrated and rigorous, yet simple and full of ease. Like the original Turiya Sings, it’s also a pleasure.

Only two things matter here: the production, which is masterful, and Beanie himself, a virtuoso of lonely, bitter desperation.

Atrocity Exhibition finds Brown back behind the lens, capturing raw emotion with grainy 16mm.

A U R O R A can be heard as Frost’s attempt to create something physical, and it stands above the rest of his discography.

Across the album, Hynes sings, writes, produces, and plays guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, synths. But this is hardly a solo act. In fact, one of the record's greatest strengths lies in its pitch-perfect deployment of guests.

On Watch the Throne, they push each other and have fun doing it, and the result is a stadium-sized event-rap spectacle that still sounds like two insanely talented guys' idiosyncratic vision. That's worth celebrating.

These are crisper, brighter, bolder songs, retaining Beach House's sense of elegant decay while sweeping up the debris.

The music becomes something like a natural process: one clean, simple sweep, but built from an insane complexity of detail. And there's enough to un-knot in there to make this a terrific step for Deacon--out from the sticky basements into a space where he can try to tackle the sublime.

If you're down with the diversity and can sit still while the band tears through every idea it has left, Wild Mountain Nation is a revelation from beginning to end.

The ravishing delight Tumor brings to this character is what makes their music so affecting. Yves is a performer whose roles, played with the utmost rigor, always find a way to linger in the memory.

It’s a graceful record. ... Cheek and co-producer Andrew Lappin’s work is painterly and methodical, daubing vocal loops over clattering percussion, sweeping strings, and resonant synths to create a shapeshifting strain of experimental pop.

Per Sunn O)))'s long-standing dogma, "Maximum volume [still] yields maximum results." But this time, there's enough musical range and temperance to usher even the most resolute naysayer into this intricate wonderland.

Matsson is both a romantic and a realist, and on The Wild Hunt, he uses the barest of pop-folk settings to give mundane moments--another break-up, another tour, another change of season, another Dylan comparison--a grandeur so disproportional that it's difficult not to identify and sympathize with him.

The Sophtware Slump manages to sound reasonably fresh, yields its share of unshakable melodies, and excels in production. This is quite possibly the last great entry in the atmospheric pop canon.

Even a casual listener could hear the spark--Staples' first fame came from getting the best of known mic terrorist Earl Sweatshirt--his production values have finally caught up enough to push him past the scrappy sidekick division into the big leagues.

Viet Cong has only seven tracks and more than half don’t pass the five minute mark. Yet all are heavy, ingenious contraptions.

Though briskly paced, Bleach is a front-loaded record, the maniacal/melodic contrasts of its stellar first half--anchored by the epochal anti-love song 'About a Girl'--ceding to the more period-typical grunge of its second.

A huge array of guests help out, representing acts like Disfear, 108, Genghis Tron, and Neurosis. They are too many to list, but the bottom line is, they work. Whether they're yelling, singing, or laying down leads, they fit their songs. And that in itself is fitting.

Iyer and Ismaily’s hypnotic interplay leaves the listener unmoored in time and space. The grand sweep of Aftab’s voice is a galactic super-wind capable of carrying you off to wondrous new worlds. The force of their collaboration is so much greater than the sum of its simple parts that it borders on the mystical.

The Greater Wings is no funeral, and Byrne’s calm assurance renders her words irresistibly commanding.

There’s something special about Agora in how it integrates the immediate pleasure of his pop influences with the patience of his extended works.

It's also a meditation on a complex world, one devoid of the nostalgic innocence preached by the Mike Love-fronted Beach Boys of late, and its remastered, 2xCD Legacy Recordings release- the first CD release of the album since 1991--is astoundingly refreshing.

Offering passes that test, it’s both an “important” jazz release and one that’s actually enjoyable to listen to.

Eye Contact-- the group's latest album-- is Gang Gang Dance's finest, weirdest, and most uplifting statement yet.

The one-time Blur frontman has transcended some of the post-modern artifice of this project, and created the group's most affecting and uniquely inviting album. Joke's over, Gorillaz are real.

He channels the wonder of his youth as if no time has passed, exalting the sublimity of waterfalls, rainstorms, and crashing waves. ... Elverum imbues these memories of constant experimentation with undeniable romance.

Human Love is Deafheaven’s subtlest, prettiest music, and it aims for a different kind of transcendence. For all the influences their music conjures, you’d never mistake these songs for any other band.

The members of the 1975 began playing together in their teens as an emo band, and they are still interested in wringing out unadulterated feeling from everything they touch. This is the thread that grounds even their most dubious dabblings, and makes their dilettantism amount to more than a series of stunts.

The subject matter of Purple Mountains is grim, but he’s still David Berman, and he can still dazzle with the sheer beauty of his writing or wink at the camera to lighten the mood when necessary.

Mirah, it appears, has made the album we've been waiting for.

An album where Ashin fearlessly reveals himself as a person and an artist and dares you to open up in the same way.

The struggle between salvation and damnation has rarely sounded so lively or so gloriously conflicted.

As rewarding as this new album is, it's even more impressive when you consider its context: Crystal Castles may have come on at the tail-end of the blog-house/nu-rave/French-touch mini-rage, but they've now transcended it, moving from scene linchpin to indie stars.

Bursting with color, nostalgic but never retro, easy-going yet slightly unhinged.

Woman King will provide eager Iron & Wine fans a welcome holdover between proper albums, but the EP also serves a larger developmental purpose, marking one more evolutionary hop for Sam Beam, and christening a new genre-- post-basement.

Tears of the Valedictorian is Frog Eyes' first substantial advance since 2003's The Golden River.

His most consistent and playful album yet.

It’s hard to imagine a more vocally versatile pair than Lal and Mike, whose interplay adds depth to all of these moods.

Oh Me Oh My manages to be Holley’s most approachable and most ambitious album all at once.

As catchy and well-crafted as these songs are, they never feel restricted or overly polished. Each track is given room to grow, stretching into extended intros, impulsive solos, and oft-repeated verses.

With that in mind, the album is perfectly titled, as Actor proves St. Vincent as an artist capable of crafting believable, complicated characters with compassion, insight, and exacting skill.

Past Life Martyred Saints is a fiercely individual record, made by a musician with a fearless and courageous approach to her art. Crucially, the desire to let such raw emotion out in song never feels forced.

You sense feelings of longing and unease all over Nepenthe, which makes it a less blissful place to spend time than her previous album. But that also makes it a much more cathartic listen, and perhaps a more rewarding one.

The consistency of Wilderness' eleven songs is almost overwhelming.

Parklive showcases Blur in top form, but live albums are about a little more than a band; they document a moment too.

One of this year's most remarkable "punk" albums.

Before the Dawn demystifies what we’ve fetishized in her absence. Without draining her magic, it lets Bush exist back down on Earth.

Present within these songs are grace and generosity--two words I could not imagine summoning to describe Father John Misty’s music a year ago.

They're pleasure-pushers, filling tunes with riffs, phrases, and beats a five-year-old could love. But, on Wolfgang, those same songs are unfulfilled--and this band wouldn't have it any other way. There's beauty in a sunset. Phoenix are wringing it out.

But while Random Spirit Lover is dense and thorny-- even opaque, at times--it's never haphazard.

The new-stuff disc offers few hints as to where the label is headed next, which is unsurprising, but the variety on display is only matched by the quality of the tunes themselves.

Her best music, this album included, has the effect of putting one in the kind of treasured, child-like space--not so much innocent as open to imagination--that never gets old.

What it is is the announcement of a stunning and unexpected late-career renaissance; Prodigy is tapping back into the fearsome frustration that once drove him.

On Islah, his hook-writing is sterling.

The album deepens and expands upon the imagistic nature of Lange’s lyrics and cosmic synth-folk, using found sound and his own sonorous, humming voice to tease out the complicated harmony of love and power at the heart of Kincaid’s short story.

Each disc stands on its own as a powerful document; together, they genuinely earn the word "epic.

Even at its darkest, though, softscars is a blast, its turbo-charged riffs and sticky melodies all but begging you to crank the volume up to levels that will require future ENT visits. And there are plenty of purely fun moments here too.

Yet another leap forward for a band that has constantly pushed itself in new directions.

Friend and Foe follows through on the potential of their unique sound, proving their wildly great debut was no fluke.

Blitzen Trapper are no longer talented jacks-of-all-trades, but a master of one, and Furr is proof that this already-great band gets even better as they define themselves more specifically.

Divers is not a puzzle to crack, but a dialog that generously articulates the intimate chasm of loss, the way it's both irrational and very real.

Like The Clash before them, The Libertines draw primarily from decades of rock tradition-- blues, dub, a healthy whiff of the English countryside, and a few gorgeous rock riffs straight from the brainstem of Chuck Berry-- and fuse them into an unruly and triumphant monster of an album.

It is a joy to hear, and a reminder that the struggle for a better world is a beautiful and worthwhile endeavor, despite the many powerful voices that work daily to convince us otherwise. branch fought the good fight until the very end.

By stepping out of focus and receding into his assembled ranks, Hecker has found a renewed compositional approach. And on the most fascinating album of his career, he has, at last, expressed an idea he has pursued for a decade.

Much of More Blood, More Tracks elicits an eerie feeling, a dramatic feedback loop of Dylan’s shifting self-image. It’s not uncommon for the Bootleg Series to leave breadcrumb trails for fans, yet hearing Dylan obsess over these songs about obsession creates an uncanny Synecdoche, New York effect.

The Endless Not features some of the subtlest songwriting of TG's career, playing that knot of tension for all it's worth and all the more disturbing for how pensive and restrained it feels.

There is not a single second of new or unreleased music waiting for you inside this handsomely designed object.... His three studio albums have settled into cultural totems, albums that anyone hoping to know something about rock history buys sooner or later. Even 40-odd years later, their thumbprint remains unique, a strange and compelling mix of timeless poetic melancholy on the one hand, and cloistered, pampered schoolboy modernity on the other.

Magnetic Fields-like numbers 'Winter' and 'Undeclared' seem vanilla by comparison to some, but by making room for both, Visiter ends up being one of the most welcoming (and welcome) records of 2008 so far.

Heavy Light thrives in this sort of dissociative blaze where gender politics, grief, and deeply fucked-up pop hooks slam into one another. So much of Heavy Light exists in this emotional space that feels like an exquisite freefall.

On a lyric sheet, Titus Andronicus may appear to espouse the sort of wrist-cutting histrionics emo's typically lambasted for, but the magic lies in the band's oddly enthusiastic grass roots delivery.

Barnes’ work is less concerned with trends or scenes than experiences and memories that everyone has had, regardless of what music they’ve listened to before. On that count, Engravings is a broad success.

The surface is a gorgeous invitation to return and see if you can figure out what it all means.

It's the kind of record that will have a profound impact on a small number of people, be ridiculed by many more, and never be heard at all by almost everybody.

[A] collection of seven gorgeous, baroque-folk songs.