With help from seasoned pros, he’s delivering (to an extent) on the promise many saw in him after Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

All the elements of Espers' sound come together more seamlessly than ever before here.

A certain amount of reassurance in the power of The Flaming Lips comes with each of the band's album releases, and this one is no different.

The sound isn’t youthful, nor does it try to be. To Del, the quintessential alternative hip-hop artist, and Tame, underground hip-hop mainstay, the panacea to the apparent predicament of age is craftsmanship.

Sure, he takes his cues from old sources, but the result -- dreamwave, or chillwave, or whatever--is so unique and lush that Palomo should be content to ride off of the high you imagine he might get from making something so effective.

As a result, Know Better Learn Faster is (with the exception of the last track, an awkward dance number called "Easy") an album full of radio-ready singles, each as infectious and heartfelt as the last.

The xx recorded not only the year's best debut but also one of its best albums, period.

The disc is packed with tightly crafted modern pop, and seamlessly melds the artist’s myriad influences.

This is a record not so much crying in the wilderness, but one recognizing that its characters are in that wilderness.

There Is No Enemy does not offer new horizons for Built to Spill, but it does shine in a consistently good catalog.

In and Out of Control is still hindered by what has sunk every Raveonettes album from being great; there’s a sinking feeling upon multiple listens that you’re just listening to one long song.

The songs on Goodnight Unknown are well crafted and it’s clear that Barlow still has quite a bit of passion for making music, but the spark of genuine creativity is not there.

The Sound the Speed the Light pushes the same boundaries that Mission of Burma has always pushed, and no doubt it will lose points for not pushing any new boundaries.

That flash of a golden moment in between something sparking in the air and fading quickly away is all The Clientele are living for in this batch of heart-breakingly beautiful tunes, and its what Bonfires on the Heath seems to hold in the center of its heart.

Vile seems to find his best inspiration in the album's valleys rather than its peaks.

The Dutchess and the Duke lend such conviction and humanity to these songs that it’s hard not to like them, even with their occasional missteps.

Dead Man’s Bones evokes all the right images of a haunted October, and with such sensitivity and sincerity, it’s rarely kitschy and never inappropriate.

In the hands of a lesser band, Six could be depressive and trudging. But Jenkins and Nathaniel build this hellish world only to fill it with sweat-soaked fight songs against all those demons and devils. And in the end, they sound like they just might have survived.

There may be a language barrier to be dealt with here, but the feelings of the songs here transcend all walls, real or perceived.

The members of Massive Attack are using the EP to continue to explore their old sound with new voices, in much the same way that the idea of splitting the atom is concurrently old and futuristic.

Cymbals Eat Guitars don’t get drowned in homage, however; from the first explosive note to the last, Why There Are Mountains is a routinely rewarding album, with each listen revealing great new scenery.

No matter what music critics might say about the album, Karen O scores a direct hit in her most important demographic. That she was able to do it without pandering or obvious compromise is a tribute to her artistry.

It was all too easy to brush aside Turbo Fruits when the band was doing straightforward, blues-tinged punk. Echo Kid makes that less than possible.

Throughout its 43 minutes, Fool’s Gold has the air of the kind of effortless breeziness that comes with tossed-off side projects. But that vibe underscores the effectiveness of the album, which features multiple stylistic quirks that could lead Fool’s Gold in a variety of directions if they continue as a project.

The players on Monsters of Folk complement each other extremely well. There is definitely something to be said for group chemistry. These songs don’t always shine the way they could, but the album is a great effort.

Girls are, at their most basic, a solid band of rock ‘n’ roll reappropriators.

The album is a crumbling beauty.

Why?’s ability to write so prolifically, that holds Eskimo Snow together. It keeps us looking forward to what the collective will present us with next, even if the quality of Yoni Wolf's vocals are up for debate.

Vapours gives Thorburn fans what they’ve wanted for a while: a great album of pop bliss from a guy who for too long has avoided delivering just that.

The Big Pink's A Brief History of Love is exactly the kind of album I wish had existed when I was 14. That's not a dig at the record; one of the more special things that a group can do musically is create a sound that appeals both to teenagers and adults.

Texas Rose, The Thaw and The Beasts is the closest Raposa has come to a straight country record. But he doesn't come that close, as all these players steer him further out on tangents rather than towards the middle. And the record is all the better for it.

Born Again Revisited is brimming with catchy choruses, expert song craft, and a few honest-to-goodness fist-pumping anthems. And this time around, your eardrums remain intact.

These four new songs are impeccably recorded, and frontman Kip Berman's voice sounds so intimate and close it's as if he's whispering a secret into your ear.

Together, which was recorded during a period of lengthy down time for all parties earlier this year, is the sound of five guys bro-ing down, drinking beers and recording an album. It’s not the deepest thing ever recorded, but it is a fun little record that bears no pretense of seriousness.

The songs are better, the guest performers more exciting and enthused, and the production varied enough to highlight the differences between each track (which wasn’t always the case on the previous album).

Time to Die by itself isn’t a bad album, necessarily, but it’s not even close to the same level as Visiter and what made Dodos different to begin with. I hope that on their fourth album, these guys return to their roots.

Wedren is game, and the hooks are there, but it’s been proven many times that a person can never truly go home again. It’s how far away Live From Home ends up that provides its greatest interest.

The 22 tracks on this album range freely in length from 11 seconds to six and a half minutes and a rare few would stand on their own, as the musical shifts between them can be so slight.

Survival Skills is a call to arms, and a poetic, uncompromising one at that.

Even as Joyner drifts out into that snow, he remembers to bring some warmth along with him, which is what makes Out Into the Snow the comforting mess that it is.

Instead of spoon-feeding you how you’re supposed to react, they challenge you to understand them.

Popular Songs finds the band crafting solid indie rock that is more by-the-numbers than Yo La Tengo has been in the past.

It surpasses the previous Circulatory System effort, and stands to rival the best of Olivia Tremor Control's output.

The Blueprint 3 starts well enough. Its first half is good to great....But around the time we get to the Timbaland-produced, Limbaugh-dissing, Drake-featuring 'Off That,' a song about how far ahead of the curve Jay is, the album's quality falls off considerably.

After Robots more than answers the call to hype; it breaks down the borders between countries and scenes, and it bears a message that it’s just as possible to create progged-out songs of unending complexity if you’re from Johannesburg as it is if you’re from Williamsburg.

On Get Color Health hit upon a noise that’s all their own. If they make the kind of leap between albums two and three that they did between one and two, Health’s third album should be nothing short of spectacular.

It’s the sound of Polvo insistently reminding listeners that they brought hot fire in 1993, and they can still bring it as good as ever in 2009.

Only Built for Cuban Linx...Pt. 2 is top-to-bottom brilliant, and it's energy and emotion is too infectious not to inspire a dozen great hip-hop records to come.

By all accounts, A Strange Arrangement is a potentially star-making turn from a completely unlikely source.

What’s funny about the album is that despite all it hard-rocking aggression, it’s a collection of mostly love songs. And it works.

For all the talk that's been made recently of Bazan's own struggles with alcoholism and faith, it's telling that on Branches the strongest, most evocative tracks are those that, in the singer's beautifully worn and warm delivery, choose, in essence, melody over meaning.

Wildbirds & Peacedrums make experimental music that really carves out its own sonic space, that intrigues and engages without ever really attempting to "challenge," because that's not what it cares about.

Whether you call the Arctic Monkeys' evolving sound Britpop or Britprog, it's clear the album shows remarkable progress for the band.

At the age of 76, the Texas native proves that there is still plenty of stardust left under his cowboy hat.

No More Stories… finishes Mew’s transition into the swirling, arena-rock monsters they’ve threatened to become all along, with reliably decent results, but it fails to top the blissful heights of "Glass Handed Kits" or the pop-theory class of "Frengers."

My Guilty Pleasure is more cohesive, its production more varied, its songwriting more effective.

A barnstorming, kiwi-pop-delicate album that is Reatard’s best album-length statement to date.

Hospice mixes the personal and fictional in a way that few indie albums outside releases from Arcade Fire and Neutral Milk Hotel tend to do. Granted, Antlers aren’t in that league yet, but Hospice positions them as one of the more exciting young bands in indie rock today.

That restlessness and aggression make King of Jeans a visceral, honest mess of a record. This is all ragged glory.

It's this combination of the simple and the intricate, the elegant and the forceful, that makes Luminous Night work so well.

The rest of Wind’s Poem plays out slow, shimmering, and really just classic Phil Elvrum, even if the album’s tone is darker, well produced and generally well executed. But once an experimentalist folk musician, always an experimentalist folk musician, and kudos to Elvrum for experimenting even further outside of the realm.

There may only be two songs here, but Bejar does a lot with them. He gives us both the clever tricks we expect from him and a whole new sound in which for them to swirl around.

Behind all the artifice, behind the production and underwater effects, is some simple but solid songwriting. The catchy, cheerful melodies combine with the psychedelic production to create a trippy beach-music feel appropriate for their St. Petersburg roots.

This Is for the White in Your Eyes is a come-out-of-the-gate winner.

While The Bachelor is not a bad listen, it takes a little more energy to understand than seems fair for what it delivers.

Love and Curses is filled with great melodies that burrow deep into the skull without being cloying, and offers lyrical sentiments that tug at universal truths without pandering.

Filled with bounce, bite and surprising cohesion, Post-Nothing is a deceptive little piece that is as much fun as it is subversive.

Immaculate production and carefully conceived themes are sure to make your nerd-tent a lot bigger, but is the space worth it if you push out even one well-penned ditty?

It's a member of a rock band that plays tightly controlled music stretching his compositional abilities to new instruments and more subtle arrangements. They're not all successes.

The album's affinity for traditional hooks, mixed with Johnson's ability to depart from the traditional makes this album one of the Fruit Bats most listenable and enjoyable.

Blur may not have gotten the adulation they deserved in the states during their heyday, but Midlife is a solid move to reevaluate Blur’s position in the pantheon.

Paint the Fence Invisible couples sparseness and creative vibrancy, with every untreated strum and vocal crack complimented by a subtle twist in the expected arrangement.

It's at times fragile, at times bolstering, at times bittersweet, at times even triumphant, but it's timeless all the same.

The Knot isn’t a happy album by any stretch of the imagination, but optimism can be found within the notion that Wassner and Stack, by some strange alchemy, make sadness beautiful. In so doing, they have made an album that needs to be heard.

While there's no shortage of stylistic/historical touchstones for the wildly varied batch of tracks that makes up Rites, there's some indefinable thread connecting it all, ultimately giving the band members their own sound whether they really want one or not.

Horehound doesn’t sound like the first album from a tossed-off side project; it crackles with the intensity of a band that has been together longer than a few months.

Up From Below is an album to be commended, even if it might lead to the scourge of other hippie hipsters appearing in buses across the nation.

Fortino's considerable talent for trance-inducing musical honesty could probably use a little bit of editing. It's better in the end for listeners to feel like they're being driven, not just along for the ride.

These Four Walls retains its charm, even when Thompson goes to the well perhaps one too many times with the line repetition trick.

McCombs still has an ear for language and roll-off-the-tongue singing. His voice coats the lyrics like thick warm caramel on this one. Though often obtuse and twisted, McCombs includes some straightforward lyrics, as well, with some political commentary to boot.

Unfortunately, his unleashed creativity didn’t inspire unforeseen greatness. It’s just more Moby, but without a kick drum.

It is worth repeating that Far takes everything Regina Spektor has done in the near ten-year span of her career and mashes it up to perfection.

While Dragonslayer might not be the best album in Krug’s robust oeuvre, there’s still enough here to convince us that Krug is still the ascendant king of indie rock, and that he might have a magnum opus yet to come.

This new direction doesn't feel like a 180-degree response to the noodly fusion sounds of It's All Around You so much as a natural desire to light out for new territory.

Stephen Wilkinson has taken the field recordings and organic experiments of his previous albums and filtered them through a stylistic prism, resulting in a kaleidoscopic but nearly uniformly accomplished set of songs.

The dreamy-but-tuneful approach that Bats lovers have come to expect still reigns, but The Guilty Office also shows a willingness to expand things a bit.

A front-to-back play of Guns may not work for a dorm-room style throwdown, but it is a successful album of dancehall tracks that shows good teamwork within this collaboration.

Bitte Orca is the kind of album that is best taken from start to finish, where the songs and musical themes are allowed to grow, endear and impress.

They may play noisy guitar rock, but they also wear military uniforms in concert and write songs about Czech history. Man of Aran illustrates both the successes and shortcomings of that dichotomy.

Still, for all the sophisticated, melodic pleasure to be found on Here and Now, a comfy old shoe of an album, one could be forgiven for occasionally wondering whether things might achieve just a touch more frisson if Holsapple and Stamey surrendered just a little to the temptations of that sharp-edged sound of yore.

If you don’t mind the lack of edge or grunginess--which is to say, if you like your danger safe--bring extra artillery. You could spend serious time deconstructing this album.

Risky though it may have seen (in terms of both taste and talent), this is a great record.

Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire is another record that hones and refines what it means to be Eels. Mark Oliver Everett continues his daring and heart-baring, and we continue to be the better for it.

It plainly improves Grizzly Bear’s sound, and lends itself well to multiple spins, because each repeated listen reveals another perfectly crafted shard you missed on the last go-round.

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix showcases a band that has only gotten better with each album.

Black Moth Super Rainbow’s improved fourth album, Eating Us, bears all the touches of a follow-up to a critically lauded work: larger sounds, a big name producer (Dave Fridmann) and a honed sense of purpose that forms the band’s best effort to date.

With the explorations of additional instrumentation as well being more comfortable with silences and with echo, SunnO))) approach the freedom and abandon of the spirit-travelers alluded to in the titles and approaches on this, the band's best record yet.