They were unadulterated shredders, too, as Capitol's extensive reissues of Siamese Dream (1993) and its predecessor, Gish (1991), remind us in bountiful fashion.

House of Balloons is a gorgeous album that pairs moody beats and samples with morbid lines about drugs and late-night encounters, all of it caulked with sex.

Despite the deceptive pop-song outlines and strong grooves, just about every piece emphasizes the rich weave of voices, and on originals like 'The View from Blue Mountain' and 'Twilight of the Dogs,' Douglas extends forms you think you know to take you someplace new.

Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage fails by making the obvious choice at every turn.

Amid the carnage and the stink of loss, PJ Harvey creates inspiring beauty.

w h o k i l l may be strange on first pass, but only by its uniqueness, a music whose microgenre would disappear in a whiff were Ms. Garbus to have never stumbled upon it within her.

The sweetest instrument, however, is Wyatt’s voice, whose fragile, high, quavering tone is honest to the core.

It's at once majestic and gentle, a deep breath and a sigh that declares Vernon's transcendence of the turmoil and technique of his unique breakout record and establishes him as an artist who knows exactly what he's doing. Hallelujah.

The rotating cast of vocalists and the Saturday-night spirit of the instrumentation are together more welcoming than anything the DFA has dropped in years.

Reissued last year, the debut Icky Mettle had their most celebrated pop songs ("Web in Front," "Wrong," "Plumb Line") but the follow-up Vee Vee was just as great, and thicker.

Halcyon Digest is the perfect LP to spin twice, love unrepentantly, and walk away from. This refreshing tonic (poured from the cash bar of overrated newer bands) is straight from the heart of Mr. Bradford Cox, poet and purveyor of Deerhunter's zen pop psych.

Compared to 1996's Harmacy, Barlow's maudlin tendencies are relatively reined in throughout Bakesale's 15 straightforward rockers.

Eschewing fleshed-out pop maps in favor of shiny fragments works oddly well for this duo, especially given the breadth and depth of the subject matter.

Cosmogramma is decidedly more, uh, cosmic, than his 2008 "Los Angeles," in its atmospheric spiral away from the beat and toward a more free-flowing collage of instrumentation.

Koi No Yokan is not only the year's best metal-rock-space-pop album--it's also the finest Deftones album, front to back, to date.

On Shields, they achieve a fluid synthesis: Rossen and Droste still share vocal duties, but they often tag-team the same track, trading off lines and writing melodies for one another's voices. Their styles coalesce so smoothly, it's often difficult to tell where one singer-songwriter starts and the other ends.

The Truth Is Here is his second perfect disc in that many years and just earned a spot in my Top Five Alive column.

One of his best, no doubt, and arguably one of the best-sounding records so far this year.

Yet as welcome as it is to have Newman’s acerbic wit back, it remains a singular pleasure to listen to a simple, devastating ballad like 'Losing You,' which is wrapped up in sympathetic strings and absolutely devoid of irony.

On I See the Sign, even the quietest moments sound bold.

Diotima is poetry, classical allusion, the consideration of platonic love and our place in history. It is searing shards, intricately arranged, forward-moving, stretching to infinity--lurching, faltering, and then thundering for passages that stop time and levitate your world.

Like a perfectly attired woman, the National are fleetingly alluring, never gaudy, subtly enchanting.

Rook is flush with the hallmarks of Shearwater’s style, from high-wire drama to near-hymnal stillness. Although its songs aren’t as uniformly good as those on 2006’s "Palo Santo."

The music here is visceral enough that it holds its own in the legacy of the project.

Anyone expecting a return to the slick cinemafunk of ’90s Portishead will be taken aback by Third, but though the album never reaches the eureka moments of old, it’s a welcome step into new territory and a more than satisfying downer dose to set against the onset of sunny days and ice cream.

Rock-stardom is not necessarily what you hear beckoning on Sub Pop’s 20th-anniversary reissue of Bleach, which comes with a sludgy live set taped at Portland’s Pine Street Theatre in 1990. In a way, though, that only makes this program of lumpen lumberjack-metal moves more interesting.

Although a three-song offering that sounds like something scraped together using leftovers from a four-year-old album may seem a letdown, it's not, if only because, in those four years, many have tried to mimic Burial's sound but to no avail.

From the ironically melodic “Death Penalty” to the militaristic “Rearview,” this duo have executed one of the greatest roughneck opuses this side of last century. Let’s hope it’s not a one-off.