If you’re already among the converted, Random Spirit Lover is a second straight masterpiece from arguably the most talented songwriter of this generation.

On almost every level, Jeff Tweedy and Co. have concocted the perfect follow-up to an epochal, career-defining record--taking greater risks and yielding deeper rewards--and finding more challenging ways to channel pain that just won’t quit.

Without relying on a crutch of irony and cynicism, they boldly risk sounding cloying in order to summon the emotional honesty necessary to create music that is unabashedly romantic and achingly beautiful.

The squeaky-clean production of Misery Is a Butterfly has been smudged, sanded, and weathered.

Finally--a Go-Betweens album with the clarinet solos, harmonies, programmed drums, and splendor this band needs. Oceans Apart really sounds bright yellow and bright orange.

The subtle backing musicians never overshadow Callahan’s reedy baritone and direct lyrics; they merely add subtle shading and light in the appropriate spots--a restraint reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s use of studio musicians on laid-back classics like John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline.

While their sound has become immensely creepier, it has also improbably become more beautiful.

It isn’t the sort of artistic statement that promises to change anyone’s life, but it’s no less a great work of escapist art, the sort of essential record I’d pick for any hypothetical list of desert island necessities.

Where Last Exit was indebted to the clubbier side of dance pop--with its tendency to wind songs around Dark’s close-clipped beats--So This Is Goodbye is a post-aught pop record first and foremost, an elegant, spacious collection of flash-frozen R&B and soft disco laments.

From Here We Go Sublime may not be an evolution for Willner, but it’s a singular distillation of his talents into one album. Mixing gauzy shoegaze, slippery ambient loops, and two-cheeks-on-the-floor bass drum bounce, the Field offers an idyllic work of startling novelty, and perhaps ‘techno’’s most widely appreciable offering in years.

This is the best pop album of the year and what Ashlee Simpson wishes to be.

Rarely has a band created a world-space so monolithic yet provided a listener with so many easy routes to the interior.

Boxer is a National album through and through but blessed with a restraint and self-assuredness of a band on top of its game, resulting in a startling masterpiece on par with Turn on the Bright Lights, Bows & Arrows, or any other austere tribute to urban alienation you care to name.

The Sunset Tree is one of the most volatile, affecting and coherent records he’s made yet.

Whereas before Embrace always harboured that tendency to fuss over minutiae, to pore over every detail with such attention that betrayed self-consciousness, their fourth studio album, Out Of Nothing, finally sees them free of their own fastidiousness.

The feeling I'm left with, after 'Your Hand In Mine' ebbs away, is that I may never need another instrumental album like this again. The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place has already provided what may be the ideal version. And for that, it is absolutely essential.

Her adventurous and, yes, massive, persona is allowed to wander wherever it wants on The Cookbook, be it avant or common.

Up In Flames is a record in love with music made by a music lover, futurepsychenoisebeatpop that reaffirms how much fun music can and ought to be.

You may not get to sing along, but this is not ambient music; it is immersive and involving.

Most of Boy in Da Corner's most compelling moments come from this uneasy interaction between irrational youth and ultra-rational mechanized society.

A full realization of a band at the top of their game, filled with intricate guitar pop of the highest order.

While there is lots of good, even great music out there, not much of it even begins to touch Neko’s passion.

In a year that’s produced first-rate albums by OutKast and Lucinda Williams, Bubba, a self-proclaimed redneck from rural Georgia who most people pegged as a probable one-hit wonder three years ago, has beaten the odds and made both the hip-hop and country album of the year.

The naysayers do not understand. Their expectations hamstring them.... Like the glass sculptures featured in the artwork it is precise, transparent, dangerously fragile, and ominously lit. 100th Window is a masterpiece of its kind.

There is a clear passion and enthusiasm in Grohl’s instrumentals and a potency and power in the performance of every singer.

Burn, Piano Island, Burn is an album that must first be listened to twice: once to wrap your head around its peerless vigor and skull-rattling force, and again to revel in its restless creativity.

Cast of Thousands is a great record, beautiful and emotionally powerful as well as musically inventive... a refinement and extension of their vision that will emerge as one of the best records of the year.

There seem to be enough ideas, stories, counter-melodies and references here for three albums worth of material - if for that reason alone, Hobo Sapiens ought to be one of the avant-pop templates for years to come.