With American Ride, Willie Nile joins their ranks and proves he can do it just as well as the best of them, sometimes better--Springsteen included.

One of the best releases of 2013, so far.

Visceral but poised, mannered but emotionally lucid, seductive but astringent, cacophonous but, yes, focused, the album finds Hung and Power charting kaleidoscopic tableaux out of giddy contradictions with the confidence of dancefloor pros.

Where Does This Door Go improves over his last effort, which was already pretty good to begin with, and may go down as one of the year’s most exceptional releases. Where Does This Door Go is as refreshing as a tropical breeze, if not a good cup of joe at your favorite hangout.

An eminently powerful work of rock ‘n’ roll from start to finish, Slave Vows hasn’t saved the soul of rock music, but it sure as hell has revitalized it.

This is truly a marvelous creation.

If there ever was a Gogol Bordello album that deserves to launch them onto American radio waves, it’s Pura Vida Conspiracy.

Many of the best records manage the trick of making the listener feel like they are hearing nothing less than a satisfyingly total and complete sound-world, that for its length no other music could or need exist. The stoned-lava flows and driving inertia of Circumambulation make that trick seem like the easiest one in the world.

It’s an impressive record to listen to--the compositions are even more beautiful than Ekstasis, even though they’re often more fragmented--but it’s also a frightening depiction of what it feels like to have a whole population making you up in its head.

This album is undeniable proof that creating something with resounding beauty is the ultimate defiance of death.

You could drop in on 6 Feet Beneath the Moon at any moment and let it unspool to its end, looping back to the start, and feel as captivated as you would at any other point of entry.

John Wizards contains a surplus of happiness spilling out all over the place, but there is also a haunting sadness on many of these tracks, one often turning on a dime into the other.

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

The inner life of the walking wounded and the angst of embracing adulthood haven’t been this well documented on record in quite a long time and I can say without hesitance that If You Wait is a classic in the making.

These discs should be played loud, but not to ramp up the cinematics. Rather, they should be played loud to highlight the intimate details, to convince you just how uniquely, impossibly good these guys were when they played together.

Excavation is entirely capable of conjuring up all sorts of images in your mind while the music plays, but Virgins keeps you focused instead on what’s happening inside of it; for music with so few conventional entry points, Hecker has again managed to make his work structurally and viscerally gripping.

This is music for uncontrollable giggle fits, playing fetch with over excited border collies, and sledding down steep, snowy hills with your kids; this is music that makes you feel intensely alive.

This box set illuminates the complicated, tangled bits of history and ideology and personality that connect that man to that myth. Those threads are frayed, tough to follow at times, but strong.

If, by chance, Spaces happens to be the very first record which you pick up by Nils Frahm, I must proclaim to be extremely jealous--you have a beautiful and highly rewarding journey ahead of you, my friend.

This is the metal album of 2013, and proof that Carcass still hold the tools of the trade to show all and sundry how to write a winning (“comeback”) album.

If you’ve got a sense of adventure and you’re holding out hope that even in these days of disposable product, rock music can approach art, you will love Folly.

Each song is a story. And that’s greatness in this kind of music.

No Way There from Here is packed to bursting with influences from country to pop, tons of different instruments, happy songs, sad songs, fast songs, slow songs--but each in such a measure as to blend to near perfection.

You will be hard pressed to find another album that is as essential and equal parts human and inhuman as The Satanist, a world-beating return from near death for Behemoth’s enigmatic emperor.

The whole record is very carefully balanced.

Clark’s songwriting has a peculiar gap to it, and St. Vincent’s best moments are the ones that happen between sense and nonsense, between the long story and the primal reaction to it.

The way Wild Beasts can’t seem to play a bum note or place a single syllable in the wrong verse, makes Present Tense one of the most quietly exhilarating albums in recent memory, and all the more so for using its evocative power to unsettle and seduce in equal measure.

Those who bought the album first time round may well feel tempted by the goodies on offer in the second disc. But for those unacquainted with High Land Hard Rain, or know Aztec Camera only from their 1988 hit “Somewhere In My Heart”, you are in for a treat.