If Oh Me Oh My was Devendra’s stunning introduction to the wide musical landscape, then Rejoicing in the Hands further marks his emergence as the most unique and important new voice in the music today.

From a Basement on the Hill is a far better album than it has any right to be, with its bizarre sequencing and improbable ambitions.

In Rainbows, then, is Radiohead as straight and lean as they’ve ever sounded.

The ridiculous in-the-red ruckus keeps you from noticing how hokey and contradictory the lyrics are.

If this isn’t a breakthrough album for them that takes them to the top of the heap, seeing them showered with money, women and limos, well, then the consumer and music fan is not doing their job.

It’s easy to get over-eager about a decent album that appears after some significantly less magnificent efforts, and perhaps that’s precisely what I’ve just done. But I don’t especially care. What I hear throughout this release, and what I’m latching so strongly onto, is my own imagined version of what a Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds record should be like.

Fishscale intermingles skewed narratives, expert guest choices, exquisitely conflicting production, and a concept and focus—the drug trade is the near exclusive subject mater—that, while somewhat reductive in scope, sharpens the album into an immense, furious, and focused album.

It’s a swaggering, spitting, utterly contemporary album of politically dissident, sexually forthright Anglo-Sri Lankan dubstep bhangra hip-pop IDM in which M.I.A. stars as protagonist, antagonist, chanteuse, MC, exotic schoolgirl tease, graphic artist, chastiser of the immoral, and fun-loving London-living party girl. And all in under 40 minutes, too. It’s special. We’ve not heard it’s like before.

Vernon’s music is stripped-down, uniformly quiet, and confessional, his clipped, cracked, Will Oldham-inspired lyrics not evidence of cabin delirium, but the work of an artist warmed by a creative glow that only pure isolation (read: freedom) can fully render.

It’s easily the gentlest, brightest record to be associated with the Animal Collective.

Throughout The College Dropout, Kanye subverts cliches from both sides of the hip-hop divide, which again isn’t unprecedented, but still refreshing and revelatory coming from someone who could have just as easily stood pat on his massive Midas-producer stacks.

Significantly altering the sound that won him critical praise and sold a quarter of a million albums takes some nerve. And that's what Showtime is about: Dizzee's newfound confidence.

This is, quite possibly, one of the finest releases of last year, and certainly one of the most overlooked.

Frankly, the results are incredible.

The listener who comes away from the two-hour experience of …And Their Refinement of Decline without becoming a bit misty at least once is too hardened for my friendship.

The silent partners in LSF, Butler, Haynes, and guitarist Seth Jabour, all turn in their best work, making Friends the band’s most propulsive and moving offering yet.

Short of getting into a time portal and hurling yourself back to the late 70s, this is the closest you will get that sound in 2004.

Gala Mill realizes rock polemicist Joe Carducci’s ideal of real-time give-and-take as fully as many of the SST releases he touts in his 1990 book Rock and the Pop Narcotic.

While they’ve enlarged their presence on record, they’ve also peopled their songs with themes and accusations more resonant than Funeral’s mournfulness.

This tapestry of homemade instruments gives the mythology of Konono a potent, raw edge, and the ferocity with which they play them only further substantiates the feeling that the music has been pushed into a raw, indelibly pure zone.

Mainstream and casual fans will remember them best for Things Fall Apart, but probably only hardcore fans will be able to see the value and dedication that much of Phrenology holds.

An album of quiet, introspective folk music.

While Seven Swans is possibly a better record than Michigan, with such an overtly Christian sheen, it will be interesting to see if the liberal music press gives it as much praise as it deserves.

In a voice that shifts from pout to growl in a beat’s time, M.I.A.'s verses and hooks are as mercurial in tone as the backing tracks.

Even if the album sounds more restrained, there is nothing holding back the quality of the material.

There’s a cohesion and a simplicity to this collection that makes it a must for any fan of the label.

Yes, of course, it’s a total homage to his favorite music—but it’s an extraordinarily moving one, both emotionally and physically.

Perhaps the greatest expansion in Herren's sound is the range of emotion conveyed in One Word Extinguisher.