To me, Medulla is an experiment in transforming the primal power of the human voice into a 21st century context. It's an amazing effort, and it's one of the best albums of the year.

Perhaps All City’s most pleasing triumph, for fans of Northern State’s earlier stuff, is that the colloquial character of the Hesta and co.’s voices is in no way diluted by the more polished music accompanying it.

Ms. Yamagata has moved beyond the slightly jazzy overtones of her debut EP to grandiose, ready-for-radio singer/songwriter pop for the ages.

I feel patronising calling it a rebirth, return to form or a self-rehabilitation from the brink. Let’s just call it evolution.

Listening to these four discs, you can really picture an entire nation of college students and twenty-somethings promoting their own gigs, designing their radio station playlists and folding their own record sleeves while staying up late to watch 120 Minutes.

This is a return to the Wu sound; in-house production, more Clan cameos and less material dictated by current trends commercial.

Recast[s] her matchless mountain holler and ever-sturdy songwriting genius in the milieu of gut-bucket blues riffs and blistering rock guitar, making Lynn sound not so much reinvigorated as reimagined, given a raucously purposeful, wildly authoritative new playground for her still-terrific proto-feminist (even in 2004) tropes.

There’s an obvious self-assurance on AWOBMOLG that’s been increasingly evident on his recent EP releases; a sense of things coming together and evolving into a sound that seems unhurried, unprompted and, best of all, natural.

On Sung Tongs, the group has deftly combined all the traces that ran through their earlier work into a vibrant and beautiful collage that flows as smoothly as Here Comes the Indian, with all the mood of Campfire Songs, and even more pop hooks than Spirit.

Whilst the songs on No You C’Mon don’t flow together as smoothly as those on Aw C’Mon, a number of them are of a similar ilk; lush, concise modern country that only Lambchop can do, the sound of a band from Nashville rather than a Nashville band.

Mike Skinner’s taken a big risk in doing this, but he’s found the bizarre and beautiful meeting point of The Specials, Danny Rampling and Serge Gainsbourg. A Grand Don’t Come For Free is a remarkable record.

It acts as a perfect counterpart to Rejoicing in the Hands, featuring the same elements that made its successor such a valued release, while incorporating enough new ideas to make it much more than Rejoicing in the Hands: Part Deux.

With a more succinct drollery and a better sense of studio control, Cee-Lo Green has outdone his fellow Atlantans [OutKast] on Cee-Lo Green is the Soul Machine.

Pyramid is not Songs: Ohia but the musical equivalent of A Season In Hell, not something one can take in often, but which is beautiful for the fact that it was completed at all.

It's crisper and clearer, but simultaneously thicker and murkier than before. The album isn't just dense, it's bloated—in the very best sense of the word.

The record is sprawling and beautiful, a genuine pop masterpiece through and through.

Far, far better than it has any right to be, an album that sounds like a natural progression of the band’s career and one that, if they’d made it instead of San Francisco, might just have held them together for a bit longer.

This band is so exciting it’s almost unbearable.

The Grind Date is as notable for what it lacks--skits, filler, bullshit--than for what it has.

Although at times M83 evoke Jean-Michel Jarre or Air, this is far from being an album of Franco-synth by numbers; it is the layered, hypertextual futurism of My Bloody Valentine and Brian Eno which seeps through the electronic Gallic gauze as the most palpable influences.

I was a huge fan of Low before A Lifetime Of Temporary Relief, but the perspective it casts both by amassing so much of their beautiful music and by casting new light on the people who make it make this box set utterly essential.

It’s hard to imagine many other bands talented enough to even poorly imitate this.

It all sounds nice enough to start with, but as you hear it more and more you love it more and more, the simple charms showing themselves to be more and more complicated but no less delightful.

There isn’t a single mis-step on Last Exit.

A wonderful album stuffed full of sentiment, emotion and melody--and traverses the bridge between teenagerdom and adulthood with a moving and thrilling honesty.

The effort that Cogleton and his band have put into God Bless Your Black Heart is impossible to ignore.

He has captured a sound that few current artists challenge, and none have mastered to such a degree. Quite simply, Ta det Lugnt is one of the best releases of this year.

Disparate though its individual elements may seem (and they certainly are), the sum of the parts is remarkably cohesive.