Another World is under 20 minutes long, but it’s more than a placeholder. It’s the portrait of an artist as a changeling, moving above and beyond his former skill-set.

Sparsely lit lover's folk is by no means a fresh development, but The Rural Alberta Advantage continue to take the sound in new, interesting ways.

It takes its time, but its rewards are plentiful.

Here the hairier, dronier doom aspects of the band’s sound have here largely been put on hold to focus on songs, and the results are the sort of mixed-bag of serious stunners and unfocused ideas that we might expect from a superbly talented and intelligent band trying to eke out a new path in the wake of a defining album.

Usually, by the fourth album, bands of the non-willfully-experimental type have grown comfortable with their sound. Yet, the Bronx of IV is not a complacent one, shaking out the cobwebs of inactivity as opposed to settling into a groove.

You won’t hear anything on The Rhumb Line you haven’t heard before, but that doesn’t prevent it from being one of the year’s best debuts.

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

For all its delicate psychological workings and spot-on embodiments of that feeling's senseless, aimless guilt, it's completely mesmerizing.

It's the sound of a cooking band truly cooking it in the studio. Everything sounds like it's about to jump the rails at any given moment.

With their music and attitude backing up this mature, sophisticated and affecting version of themselves, the members of Oxford Collapse stake their claim among not only Sub Pop's ranks, but as one of indie rock's best new bands.

200 Million Thousand has more hooks and is better top-to-bottom than any previous Black Lips effort.

The incredible ride finishes not with a bang but with a whimper. Preteen Weaponry isn't much more than a 39-minute sonic experiment for a band seeking a new direction, but it's such a mindfuck to listen to, who cares where it ends up?

Unfortunately, instead of being an ambitious failure, and despite all of the fantastic moments, I Bet On Sky makes the potentially more damaging fault of being "just alright."

An album adhering so strictly to a simple formula can't help but become redundant.

The album has plenty of stirring moments, but it falls short of being truly engulfing with its sound.

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.

Not that every track here needs to be radio-ready, it's just that with the themes being so dense, another morsel to take with you would have been welcome.

Outside Love is brilliant, disturbing and powerful.

As a genre that's saturated with trends, micro-trends, and anti-trends, it's rare to find someone doing something that makes a legitimate claim at being totally unique.

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.

The urgency and bone-deep brutality of The Sunset Tree may be missing here, but Get Lonely is a gentle, lucid and honest reality that works as a testament to Darnielle's keen instincts for situational observation.

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.

Because of his relatively privileged upbringing (he's from a wealthy part of Toronto), Thank Me Later is less about chronicling and rising up out of his environment (like basically every rap debut since Illmatic) and more about how Drake is uncomfortable being famous.

Where Now Here Is Nowhere was equally about force and restraint but always in separate parts, Ten Silver Drops does well to blend the two.

Axis of Evol remains yet another solid release from the Black Mountain frontman.

It's all there in those opening lines: Your familiar arms, I remember.

Everyone who likes Howlin Rain’s sound will come away from Magnificent Fiend wanting more. At just eight tracks, it’s a rare full length that doesn’t seem full enough.

A funeral is a termination, but can also be a clean slate. Lanegan completely "gets" that duality--and wields it expertly.

Credit Callahan then not just for his latest vision, but for how he done it.

The album is boastful, vulnerable and witty, usually within the course of a single song. It may be a bad man’s world, but a bad girl’s record makes it that much more tolerable.

The guitars come at you from all angles, drums bubble up and clatter like a perfect assembly line, the vocals soar or are flung in from behind. Melodies sneak up and poke you like stray branches. Grab your headphones and start wandering.

The Ruby Suns’ greatest strength is how easily they’re able to pull off this mix on Sea Lion without seeming over-bearing or preening. It makes the whole album seem effortless.

In the Vines--like Raposa and his self-proclaimed "bad year"--is something rare and curious only if you’re willing to wander through the rough patches here and there and accept a subtle discord along with the harmony.

Anyone who has found beauty in a chipped tooth or a grazed knee will find much to love here. Jewellery certainly doesn’t suffer from a paucity of ideas, and the lyrical subjects are more than a match for the band’s heterogeneous musical leanings.

Expo 86 just straight up rocks. It never lets up on the monstrous riffs it delivers in its first 10 seconds.

Father Creeper is his greatest achievement thus far, succeeding, if nothing else, as demanding listeners to enter his warped headspace.

While the unabashed pop moments on Interstellar are truly great and welcome, Rose easily proves she's capable of more daring things.

THEESatisfaction's awE naturalE is one of the most adventurous and tradition-bending hip-hop albums of the year, and further cements Sub Pop as the place for imaginative, left-field hip-hop.

The album is all over the place, with traces of Queen pop excesses flowing seamlessly with crunching, almost hardcore-punk-tinged guitar rockers and some weird stuff, too. Yet each of the tracks keeps Sloan’s Big Star-sounding power-pop roots intact.

Hebden seems to be using the Ringer material to delicately maneuver the Four Tet sound away from the folktronica tag that was foisted on previous releases such as "Rounds" and "Pause."

The band itself is top notch here.

Songs for Singles sees the Miami band continuing to experiment with upbeat, accessible metal songs, and while not fully pop yet, the addition of a more advanced rhythm section helps offset their perpetual need to drone their guitars out. The album inches the band further to reaching a goal of good pop metal that, while seemingly impossible in 2010, is a fight worth fighting.

Ascension doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it's a welcome addition to the Jesu canon.

The project is structured much like a high-end runway show, so although most songs work on their own, they’re far more revelatory as a group.

The Blue Depths can be a mesmerizing album to listen to. Tapscott's voice creaks with emotion, haunting these songs with a vital humanity that keeps their cold feel from being mechanical.

"Majestic" is a word often used to describe Mono, and this record, the band's fifth, will not challenge us to avoid using it.

Rock music's era of overarching influence on culture has no doubt passed into the historical twilight, but artistry and ambition in the form is alive and well on records like Hp-1.

The album feels unfinished, but not totally incomplete--instead, a documentation of something altogether mystical.

In the end Hospitality is a solid pop album through and through.

The album conjures up equal measures of frustration and dejection, especially as it bears all the hallmarks of a band growing in stature, who may have just delivered on all that untapped potential on a finely honed fourth or fifth record.

Milk Famous is a full-on declaration, a confident pop record that shows us this band as a collection of unique performers.

Romance Is Boring might sound, in description and on wax, very similar to the band’s work, but there’s a palpable confidence here that wasn’t present just an album ago, and it makes Romance Is Boring the key entry in an already ballooning discography.

There’s a cornucopia of sounds that definitely needs some time to be digested, but when it finally is--it’s an absolutely satisfying experience.

Like many within Iceland's post-rock movement, these musicians have not quite mastered the ability to rein in some of their more excessive tendencies. But Kurr exceeds both the promise of Amiina's distinct instrumental premise and the musical and physical landscape from which the band originates.

Meat & Bone is proof positive that music needn't be so reverent to its past.

It's the kind of release that will keep longtime fans happy, and acts as a welcoming primer to new ears, inviting them to join El-P on his side of the line before exposing them to his harsher, more eye-opening material.

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

Two albums later, on yet another ingeniously titled album, Art Brut vs. Satan, the band members have done something no one expected: They’ve turned into socially conscious critics of their woebegone generation without losing the charm that made fans love them in the first place.

Me and Armini merely falls short of being as fully conceived as the astonoshing "Fisherman’s Woman."

The songs never sound cluttered despite the cavalcade of divergent sounds that make up the album, and Pearson’s vocals are adeptly deployed as just another instrument.

While this does fall in with a pretty crowded lo-fi movement going on, Happy Birthday is also an unabashed pop record unafraid to wear its grainy heart on its sleeve.

The Heartless Bastards are much better on the alt side of the alt-country dynamic.

They act as a constant reminder of the power of music that isn't afraid to be ugly, blunt, and confrontational.

The mixture of pop and mystery is enticing.

When Machines Exceed Human Intelligence contains some of the most interesting bass-centered tracks to come out in some time, and represents a progression in the current bass scene as a whole, no matter what specific genre each track belongs to.

These lo-fi pop gems have been polished, and the result is sparkling.

The album is pure Groove Armada pop at the end, but the decision to be slightly less saccharine means that it's not nearly as disposable as some previous outings.

All of this is still quite gut-wrenching, yes, but I find Caught in the Trees to be better when it explores other themes.

Like his rhyming, his production is sophisticated, earnest, and maybe could benefit from a dose of rawness.

Muse is nothing if not distinctive, and Black Holes and Revelations is very much distinctively Muse: fantastic at points and ridiculous at others, without much in between.

On its own merits, Phantom Punch is an assured, absurdly tuneful record, and one of the best of the year thus far.

In a vacuum, Hats off to the Buskers exists as a charming, innocuous piece of work, perfectly fine for mass appeal; in the real world, Falconer and company are gonna have to grin and bear just a few more Arctic Monkeys references.

It's an interesting mix, but unfortunately, the album is never as much fun to listen to as it probably was for the Deal sisters to make.

You can hear the band rediscovering its footing as one of the strangest, funniest, and best acts of the decade.

The album's great achievement is that it melds the civic with the personal. Mo' Mega spans a bigger range in its eleven tracks than most albums twice its length.

Skit I Allt reminds you to wipe your brow and lean back as the heroic guitar returns. Sing along, the hooks are so strong! But keep the headphones on lest you actually hear your own voice.

While it would have been easy for Feel It Break to fall into new wave hero worship, it succeeds thanks to the singularity of Stelmanis' vision. Feel It Break announces her as a force to be reckoned with.

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.

Movie Scenes is further proof that Madlib is the Miles Davis of hip-hop: He's always finding a way to set the bar just a little bit higher.

Though the album doesn’t develop a theme throughout listening, the all-star analogy holds up.

Despite the occasional moment when Garden Ruin sounds like a garden-variety alt-country-rock album, its moments of pure Calexico charm outweigh its missteps.

When Oxford Collapse pull off the throttle, the results are remarkable, and the songs are perfect for soundtracking the nights the band can’t remember.

It's a restatement of relevance, a testament to strong songwriting, and ultimately, a legacy enhancer that they desperately needed.

You could never truly expect a truly cohesive album from Santigold, and she's met expectations.

The Dreamer, The Believer reestablishes Common's place in the upper echelon of hip hop.

While this record may not be one that I listen to end to end, over and over, there is little doubt that it is the perfect soundtrack to a serendipitous, still-to-come, drive into the unknown.

Though the production value of Love and Other Planets intermittently occupies the same close corners that Homesongs did, Ilham's newer work presents a concept that is far too vast to for him to have covered on his rather intimately constructed solo debut.

It's got some purely great pop songs on it, enough that in spots it rises out of that fan-only ghetto, even if other moments find it falling back in.

Though the quality on theFREEhoudini is extremely variable, fans of underground rap will likely find little to complain about, and even casual observers of the movement will be able to find several undeniably impressive songs.

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.

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.

For the most part Only in Dreams is a sound that is firmly theirs.

With Spooky Action at a Distance, Pundt proves he can walk the tightrope between listener-friendly anthems and cerebral digressions into edgier terrain with aplomb.

This clash of the sincere and the facetious that makes Beware such a disconcerting album.

Perkins has proven himself to be a versatile, surprising and compelling songwriter. On Elvis Perkins In Dearland, he walks the thin line between charming entertainer and confessional songwriter beautifully.

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.

The album is more polished and accessible than the band's previous work and other childlike plinky pop like Danielson.

Parastrophics is a capable release that can soundtrack a Bacchanalian night in the city.