There are outstanding performances throughout Sundial. Rapper billy woods in “Gospel?” spews magma, and Chicago legend Common drops a verse on the song “Oblivion” that could have easily fit into his great album Be from 2005. The singer Ayoni adds her voice on two tracks to make Sundial feel like a momentous occasion.

It's heartfelt. It's dark. It's intricate but immediate, rocking but lush. It does all those things at once, and it does them better than most artists could hope to do any one of them.

It would be easy to think this might be the final great outing from such an important reggae music figure, but part of Rebirth's lore is that it sounds so fresh.

The disregard for conventional structure and instrumentation, combined with the adroit, sincere lyrics, makes Ants From Up There one of the richest and most emotionally-honest albums released by a young British band for quite some time.

Consistently excellent, Okkervil River's Black Sheep Boy is a record that stuns on first listen, then manages the elusive -- it sinks deep into your soul.

Skillful, rootsy, and laying bare the group's strong interpretations of environs and emotions, this is an album that lends itself well to sensitive audiences of all sorts and is well worth listening to, feeling, and loving.

T.I. is the whole package: gritty, smooth, smart, dangerous, introspective, and wise.

Electricity thrills from start to finish, yet another well-crafted work from a band that continually shows itself to be unbound by categories of space, time, and genre. This is past, present, and future funk all rolled into one and ready for a fantastic time.

So much of Homo Anxietatem is about using guitar-driven music to excavate deep feelings of hurt, fear, and anxiety and to process those feelings through the music. Those who listened to Shamir’s previous record won’t be surprised and just how fantastic Homo Anxietatem is.

The thing is, it’s brand new music. But it sounds like it wasn’t recorded within 100 miles of a laptop.

All That Must Be is that rare electronic album that matches musical accomplishment with an emotional pull. There are real depth and soul to the record with the head and heart working in perfect harmony. Musically assured, it sees FitzGerald draw on his various influences to create something reflective, distinctive and downright stunning.

Eye Contact solidifies the group's heavyweight majesty. Gang Gang Dance injects pop music with new life, leading the quest for newer sounds from ageless sources and mixing it all together in a critically irresistible way.

As the 12 songs pass by in 31 minutes, the overall effect is nothing short of exhilarating. While their musical antecedents are clearly apparent, at no stage does Nouns feel in any way derivative or familiar.

With their third album, the War on Drugs continue to recreate classic rock in their own image and in doing so they created a classic album of their own.

This is an album of controlled kinetics and clockwork alignments, of bonding repetition and mindful invention; where words poke and play, bubble and pop, echo and disturbingly hang.

Chesnutt has rarely sounded better... expressing a full array of vivid and contrasting emotional states.

Pain remains a fertile ground for compelling art, but the brilliance of Rat Saw God lies in how the band also captures the resistant luminance within that pain. The characters in these songs suffer, but Hartzman draws them from places of empathy and honesty.

Imperfect and ambitious, sometimes startling and always smart.

These are deeply personal songs that chart the different kinds of emotions he’s working through, whether it’s to do with the affairs of the heart or the turmoil of the outside world; it’s also a wildly ambitious record that takes its musical cutes from Black American popular music. The sum of all these great parts makes for a thrilling listen.

Married improves even on Wainwright’s excellent 2005 debut. It’s a more subtle, diverse, self-assured affair.

Combine the above average writing with the production skills of longtime Cleaves collaborator Gurf Morlix (who also contributes his legendary guitar on Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away) and you’ve got yourself a frontrunner for Americana album of the year.

After Robots exudes an energy and a lack of self-consciousness that is exciting and refreshing.

Instrumentals balances simplicity and depth, abrasiveness and beauty, with rare skill, reminding anyone who does not already know that Flying Saucer Attack are masters of this type of music.

Sung Tongs is an inch more sublime than anything they've done previously, with more phenomenal use of their manic choir of Motown vocals, less scattered, clique-ish dissonance, and more sideshow bubblegum-pop freaking out on god-knows-what powerful substance.

RTJ2 is filled with such thoughtful, penetrating moments, tightly wound up in 11 bona fide bangers.

Pom Poko is a band that refuses to make predictable choices. Their music contains no clean lines or pat conclusions. Birthday is an audacious debut album that is as messy and comforting as an unmade bed.

The Age of Immunology is the rare album that arrives full of what might topple over under the weight of its (potentially pretentious) baggage, but which instead delivers a new world of experience beyond any category, musical or otherwise. Music like this may not change your life, but it would be most surprising if it did not seriously alter your perspective.

One of the year's best pop albums.