23 is one of the more enjoyable musical experiences I have encountered this year.

If there's been a better album, hip-hop or not, out this year, I haven't heard it.

Although such swaths of varied, nebulous beauty obscure Snaith's musical core--if there is one--the music is so joyful in its rag and bone cherry-picking of the best of Britpop's history that such concerns are rendered pointless.

Svennson was noted for his freethinking mixing of pop and jazz genres and styles, which is why the work on Leucocyte feels fresh and enticing for just about any audience.

The Whole Love has the band giving more than in the recent past, but the combustible musical debate at the band's core seems largely to have ceased. Wilco may still have the ability to thrill, but they've lost the ability to surprise.

It helps that Teen Dream, Beach House's third album, is the best thing the band has done. Legrand and her bandmate, Alex Scally, have been ready for a homerun shot since 2006's selt-titled debut, and they cracked this one into the stratosphere.

Maybe it's time to alter our exercitations for new TV on the Radio albums: We might not be blown away, but TV on the Radio's sonic environment is still one of the most interesting venues in music.

Yes, it feels like she's lost some of the youthful pop and punch that she had almost a decade ago, but the reason why Mirah's sincerity feels like such a big deal is because her songs are like friends.

METZ is, in short, an almost-amazing album, an album of extremely well built and executed rock songs undone by a production that all too often calls attention to itself.

The album is at once sparse yet warm and layered, lush and thick lipped, engorged with beauty. The Church have proven yet again they are masters of dreamy and dark rock, prolific and inventive.

As an album, Epic is disjointed in places, but as a collection of songs it's strong enough.

The record’s overwhelming scale cuts both ways. There are so many artists, voices and instruments begging to be heard that trimming is as much an injustice to the collective nature of the group as leaving in the excess is to the final product.

Build a Rocket Boys! sounds very much like an Elbow record, but it doesn't sound like any Elbow record we've heard before.

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.

As you listen to it more and more, the music begins to make sense, the hooks come into focus and everything appears in sharp resolution, manifesting itself in a giant pop animal created for your indulgence.

We Are Beautiful might not be the pinnacle for Los Campesinos!, but it does prove they’re rapidly on their way up.

Come for the shrill dopamine triggers like you knew you would, but stick around for the miles and miles of quiet rolling country rendered in this multitalented artist's flooring instrumental sweeps.

Favourite Worst Nightmare is tempered by a few duds -- "Balaclava" and "If You Were There, Beware," please stand up -- but more than that, it's kind of joyless.

The fundamental difference between The Monitor and the group's debut, The Airing of Grievances, and the reason why the former shines less bright than the latter, is in the attitude.

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

This may not have any of the hard-hitting jabs his best Smog records had, but I Wish We Were An Eagle is a subtler, more bittersweet heartbreak.

ike Animal Collective, Copeland's work is musician's music, geared toward the adventurous listener with a trained ear and a tendency to enjoy music as, well, an expansive, ever-shifting experiment.

An ambient record that doesn't bore or get bogged down in its insistence on fading into the background.

This is the kind of music we should be hearing all the time, instead of the deathly boring muzak we (and our ears) generally expect.

While lack of tunefulness has rarely been an issue for noise-rock fans, A Small Turn of Human Kindness's abstractness makes it a little less satisfying than its predecessor. But it's still a fascinating product of one of the more fascinating bands working in the bowels of rock 'n' roll today.

Let it wash over you, let it slowly but surely catch your attention, and steadily let the music build its case for how engrossing it can be.

The conviction in Stern's direct, bare voice is what turns the album into the kicking, clawing, emotional frenzy that we get.

Words And Music expertly explores the intoxicated love of music and the sheer joy of being a music fan: feelings so universal that they will never be confined to particular eras.