Boys & Girls is more than a debut album. It's an introduction to a band you thought you knew for years, but are just fortunate enough to meet now.

These are great pop songs put across in fantastic performances.

Familiar yet fresh, Lay It Down presents Satin Soul at its finest.

Released through Cherry Red Records, and coupled with a gorgeous book of notes and commentary from Henderson, the compilation reminds listeners of the importance of an “exciting”, “shambolic” period, one in which today’s music was born.

A whole lot of fun to listen to.... Anna is one of this year's best records.

This is pure unadulterated fun, masterfully executed.

One Day equally recalls the strengths of Fucked Up’s critically acclaimed second record, The Chemistry of Common Life (2008), which received the 2009 Polaris Music Prize. ... One Day is in keeping with this spirit of invention and reinvention, by expanding the group’s sound while still maintaining an ethos of ongoing collaboration and collective commitment.

This is brave, beautiful music that can appeal to just about everybody with either a working brain or an ass to shake. If you have both, this should be your next new obsession.

Shall We Go on Sinning So That Grace May Increase? comes a bit out of nowhere and is surely the most impactful release he's ever made, Matmos included.

The more introspective stance that Gang Gang Dance take in this instance reveals a much richer and more impressive depth. The relentless energy has given way to a form of meditation, that reveals a sense of peace and tranquility. The exploration that the band performs in this instance, crazy as it might seem, is more substantial and covers more ground, resulting in a monumental release.

In SOPHIE's most intimate work yet, she subverts pop motifs into the catchiest form of self-assertion, reminding us all of why pop music still matters.

Little in the scarce, affable output of her former project could have prepared us for the depths plunged here: a soul-purging, powerful statement of survival and self-assertion that stands head and shoulders above the current crop of navel-gazers populating today’s underground music scene.

It's startlingly good, better than an eight-year-layoff album has any right to be.

The Long Goodbye is an amazing achievement that accomplishes its mission of encapsulating a 45-year career with wit and aplomb.

It's already on my list as one of the absolute best albums of 2005.

On a very basic level, this CD is a fun, weird, nifty album of Brazilian pop music, and can easily be enjoyed as such. Unpeel the layers, and you will reap even greeter rewards, revealing a creative treatise on the rights of women in society.

It’s their most crucial album since 1999’s stunning "Still Life," and its title could not be more appropriate.

OH (ohio) is flat-out one of the best records Lambchop has made, and certainly their best since 2000’s classic "Nixon."

Calling God's Favorite Customer Father John Misty's "break-up album" is probably not off the mark, but it shouldn't discourage anyone who was swept up in the epic grandeur of Pure Comedy. This is the same Josh Tillman you've known all these years, albeit one who's shifting gears while retaining both his characteristic wit and his unique way with a melody.

Musically invigorating, lyrically exciting, and thematically prescient from start to finish, Love and Curses gets my vote as the best album of 2009.

Ghosts of the Great Highway represents an expansive, continent-traversing narrative that evokes the literary style of John Steinbeck and the vivid imagery of everyday American life captured in the watercolors of Edward Hopper.

Already one of the greatest rappers in history, this is the kind of late career artistic push that will cement Jay-Z’s place on rap’s Mount Rushmore. This is Jay-Z walking onto the stage alone, standing contritely in front of the world, and speaking from the heart, revealing himself in order to heal.

Through sweeping up intelligent, elusive imagery into well-sequenced, compact traditional tunes, this album redeems itself.

The band trusted Crowe to choose the tracks for the soundtrack, and Crowe came through in spades.

Aside from being a gifted musician and lyricist, he also has a gorgeous voice, soulful and thrilling. Building on the excellence of his previous albums, What We Call Life is easily one of this year’s best albums.

Her music is constructing itself before our ears, filling itself out with complexity, regardless of how we want to judge it. It’s another way the album seems to be reacting to the cultural moment and standing outside of it, on its own two feet.

For anyone who has enjoyed even the briefest of flirtations with pop music, The Magic Position is as bold and captivating a record as you will surely hear all year.

It’s powerful, empowering, and, most importantly, fun.

The album marks the high point of an amazing band's amazing career.

So fresh, so revelatory, so alive.

E is one of the best songwriters America has to offer, and he has made as personal, poignant, and ultimately redeeming an album that you are ever going to hear.

Far from the pitch-perfect storytelling of good kid m.A.A.d city or the exquisite poetry of To Pimp a Butterfly, Mr. Morale feels intentionally haphazard, even provocative. The double album is lengthy and prickly, its immediate pleasures counterbalanced by its confusions and difficulties.

The work here is as intricate as it is impassioned, with neither form nor feeling sacrificed as Ejstes builds a multidimensional musical world. Whether or not you’re familiar with Dungen’s previous work, this is a phenomenal display of their collective skill and penchant for a rich and genre-bending atmosphere.

As the most comprehensive portrait of her significant body of work yet, it’s the perfect opportunity to listen closer to the whole picture, to see what overarching stories Parton’s music offers, to think about the rich bounty of stories and ideas that live in her songs.

Much like [Matana] Roberts, Klein is free of structures, settings and lets ideas flow in a fashion following a stream of consciousness narrative. It's this underlying theme that gives Lifetime its free and unfiltered form, shining a light into the creative mind of one of the most promising artists of today.

This is the best, most sincere, most skillful piece of pop music making you are going to hear in 2013.

There are a few moments that don’t feel too far removed from regular west coast tropes (“A Bove Crenshaw”, the opening/closing duo “Doin’ Nothin’ / Doin’ Somethin’”, and “Ronal Morgan”), but most of your time spent with NoYork! will be a decidedly original experience.

The problem with Madvillainy, if it can even be termed a problem, is that Doom and Madlib just have too many ideas.

Showcases her eclecticism in technique and execution on her magnificent terms.

The Spade feels like Butch Walker has stopped his numerous genre exercises--as entertaining as they've been--and finally wrote an album that is entirely in his own voice. What's even more amazing about it is that it completely works.

As good as the proper album is, nothing--absolutely nothing--will prepare you for the masterwork that is “Observer”. It is, in short, brilliance, pure magnificence.

With De Vermis Mysteriis, the beauty of High on Fire is visible therein, as enjoyment may be found on numerous levels.

What emerges is undoubtedly her strongest record since the post-9/11 opus Scarlet’s Walk, several tunes even managing to best that album’s preoccupation with Americana, and our relationships to each other culturally and to the land itself.

Demon Days is fantastic.

All in all, The Naked Truth is a great musical and lyrical effort, as well as a timely response to the media and the peanut gallery.

The overall vibe of the album is much richer, sonically. Honky-tonk pianos, lively Hammond organ, tambourines hitting all the right beats: Funk draws out the right sound for these songs and Craft sings his heart out on every track.

This is the most cohesive, band-centric album the current iteration of Pere Ubu has released, its strongest album of the new millennium.

The new album may be very No Wave and avant-garde influenced but it is a truly original record.

With Cobblestone Runway, he proves once again he's one of the best songwriters out there, and easily the best Canadian songwriter working today.

This is truly a marvelous creation.

It solidifies the group’s track record for absolute greatness, adding an unexpected sixth turn to a career that followed one aesthetic path but was always moving.

The Optimist LP is a treasure chest of sparkly baubles and rare gems, and from top to bottom it is precious and priceless.

Rich in heart-rending beauty, tough-but-lovable gutter poetry, and plenty of genuine emotion.

Might be one of the most original albums you'll ever hear.

Imarhan have always been strongest for their subtleties, and never more so than on the immaculately crafted tracks of Aboogi. This group amplifies their and their neighbors’ local experiences as Kel Tamasheq citizens of the world, and the music they make in doing so dazzles every time.

The Guitar Song quite firmly cements Johnson's place at the forefront of today's country music songwriters, performers, and singers. The fact that he had the courage to put out a 25-song album after achieving some success is not as significant as the courage he had to keep following his vision of what country music can and should be.

Simply, one of the year's best.

These outtakes give a sort of new context for the album itself, which sounds brilliant in this remaster, but they don’t exactly give us a complete story. Even the huge booklet and documentary about the band here don’t exactly give us the clear picture of Spiderland.

Review #1: <A HREF="http://popmatters.com/music/reviews/s/smithelliott-fromabasement.shtml" TARGET="_blank">A decisive triumph, and probably a personal best for Smith</A> [score=90]; Review #2: <A HREF="http://popmatters.com/music/reviews/s/smithelliott-fromabasement2.shtml" TARGET="_blank">May be Smith's finest.</A> [score=90]

Drug Church’s ability to pull off this multiplicity deserves huge praise. In doing so, they’ve bent the aging punk and hardcore genre into new shapes whilst also becoming tighter, sharper, and more accessible.

Bell X1 has set its aim high, the sky’s the limit, and Flock is right on target.

Each play of Grievances is like that triumphant, sweaty bar show, right there in your room.

Machines is not just a fantastic album--easily the best work Pritchard has produced since Global Communication--it’s also an early contender for album of the year.

These are tunes for the head as much as the body and offer a grander perspective on the dignity of human feelings, like putting a still life in a gilded frame. Overall, the songs on the new album are short. Most are under three minutes. However, one can easily imagine extended versions of each as they lend themselves to being set on repeat on repeat on repeat. It’s time to open the disco.

Italian Platinum isn't as thoroughly pitch-perfect as Lifestyle, but the albums share similar peaks.

Message aside and from a purely musical standpoint, the new album is Springsteen's most enjoyable and freshest-sounding in ages.

All of these songs build from more simple riffs to fleeting layers and orchestral flourishes, with an impressive array of backup vocal and instruments. Sweet and sour in perfectly produced measure, July Flame will easily be one of the best albums of the year.

Although, at times, it is a chilly and detached album, it’s not a solemn one. There’s a bleakness to it, but there is still plenty to keep the feet moving—even if it is just to keep yourself warm. In a year with so many great immersive electronic albums, this could well be one of the finest of the lot.

"I Love You But I Don't Know What to Say" is a perfect finale to a near perfect album by a performer who seems, at least for the time being, to have learned to focus his wide-open talents on one narrow vein of material, and in the process has struck pure gold.

Hiatus Kaiyote have crafted something brilliant with Mood Valiant – an album that’s effortlessly likable, commandingly confident, and rich with heart and soul.

With a single flutter, she exudes both confidence and insecurity. With each fragile note, she conveys experience and doe-eyed enthusiasm, optimism and loneliness, and ends up wooing us and wowing us in the process.

The finest mainstream hip-hop album of the year.

It’s defiantly, proudly, and gorgeously organic, in a different universe from today’s processed digital pop.

A masterwork filled with heavy violins, silky woodwinds, a driving soprano sax, a haunting bass guitar, and expert melding of jazz and rock, with Latin beats and bluesy overtones.

Every aspect of the project is an improvement on the last.

The Pool is very much a worthy follow-up to Of All Things and can take its rightful place alongside any other classic album of the electro-crossover persuasion.

It feels less like an album than a suite of movements, more akin to avant-garde, classical music than anything remotely approaching traditional electronic music. In that way, he has skillfully managed to reinvent himself further on an album of breathtaking scope and vision.

Lyricist [Eric] Johnson's faculties for observation are what turn sonic pleasantries into vehicles of magic and myth.

Automata II achieves three feats at once: it ranks as its own triumph while simultaneously recontextualizing--and elevating--Automata as a whole and strengthening Between the Buried and Me's place as the king of the genre.

Growing all the more discernable and immediate with each listen, More Faithful proves itself to be an impressive statement from the group, one that finds No Joy transcending their influences and proves them worthy of inclusion in the same breath as the genre’s biggest names.

Kendrick Effect or no, In Another life is a future classic.

Numero Group has performed a great public service here for aficionados of joyful noise. Anyone who spent time left of the dial during the heyday of college radio should pick up this collection.

A slam-bang dance pop album of the first order, MTMTMK is technically an Africa-meets-Western-pop hybrid.

Rarely do records come around that are such a great mix of a physical adrenaline rush combined with intellectualism.

To hear the sonic progression between the two distinct albums is to hear an artist constantly evolving, reevaluating and creating at a vital pace. In this, Cale proves himself to be, if not the most culturally significant member of the Velvet Underground, certainly the most musically so.

Doomin' Sun is indie music at its most engaging. ... A reminder of how exceptional songwriting and musicianship can be even in the face of apocalyptic anxiety as long it's the right mix of artists.

Whether or not Songs for the Deaf manages to break through to the ever-fickle TRL crowd remains to be seen; those people with the patience to sit through this remarkable album a few times, though, will know the score.

Frankly, Shade sounds like the band is still ruling the world, such is their confidence and skill level here.

A carefully layered, multifaceted album in terms of its sound, music, lyrics, and thematic cohesion -- in short, a great musical achievement.

Despite its girth, Shout! Factory's The Complete Beat isn't really complete....Complete still gives you three Peel Sessions, a mini-concert, and some fine dubs and 12" mixes along with the original albums.

Woodland Echoes is Heyward's first solo album in 18 years, not to mention one of the more pleasant musical surprises of 2017.

All tracks short and sweet, We Come From the Same Place is an exceptional release from a band to watch and who hold great promise.

*The* hook-saturated, dance-rock record of 2002.... A near-perfect hybrid of perpetual rhythm, flow and hooks.

Evoking the mystery and quirky inventiveness of Smith's earliest work, this latest offering possesses a sense of coherence and all-engrossing appeal that makes good on the renewed promise.

Albeit brief, with Crystal Nuns Cathedral, Pollard and co. have struck gold once again, delivering a hi-fi record that proves itself to be just as virtuosic and inventive as any indie rock album of recent memory.

Free of genre restrictions, this is an important album by an important artist.

On Timbuktu, Oumou Sangaré continues to prove how much work she puts in to maintain her reputation as a musical force and yet how open she is to worthwhile sonic change. There’s not a sound or note wasted.

Unencumbered by the weight of expectation or reinvention, Ware reclaimed her love for making music. In the process, she created one of the year's best records, the rapturous What's Your Pleasure?