These are eight rip-roaring, drag racing anthems mashed together with blood cakes and shards of bone.

The music is great, but it's through his lyrics that Beans really heads out into the stratosphere.

Beach House 3 is a strong, strong effort: universally pleasant in the same way as its antecedents, but given a thorough sonic update so as to keep pace with modernity.

It is an excellent album that has taken them seven long years to finally get to, but those are seven years that have been evidently well spent: After years of mediocrity and being, to some degree, marginalized -- just when the world needed them -- The Roots are back like never before.

Each offering here is meter-perfect and crafted instinctively to flat-out destroy the boundaries of rock music.

Austere without the compulsion of self-restraint and experimental without the drag of formlessness, The House confirms Porches’ primacy as indie-dance mavens.

There are few surprises, but each element finds its own breathing room such that the layered space of each track is fully audible.

A resonant narrative of apocalypse and transformation.

It's got more of an arc and sense of unspoken redemption than most contemporary albums that parade themselves as such. It's also one of those rare albums that starts out great and gets better over its 45-minute length.

Mediation succeeds not only as a stunning instrumental performance, but as an hour of personal storytelling.

A transcendent accomplishment.

In synthesizers, Matmos have found their hearts; through old Cluster records, they’ve created one of the most pleasant surprises of the year.

What falls from the mouth is indeed valuable, in the case of Fear of Men.

It's hip calcified, transformed from posturing into legitimate and exciting experience; it's the channeling of well-defined musical expressions into a more powerful, unified direction.

This is intensely human music.

This is a rare combination of talent, vision and sound.

Every member of this band is wholly present and firing on all cylinders here.

CSS's music is almost immediately infectious and surprisingly poppy.

If you get a kick out of The Fucking Champs riffing on Bach with "Air on a G String," you're on the road to Panda Park.

Security is absolutely accessible, with a broad, potentially surprising appeal for those willing to listen.

All hotly (strangely this descriptor seems almost an understatement) anticipated albums should deliver so profoundly.

Explosions In The Sky continue to tap into this special vector of imagination, emotion, and possibility, making everything that much more vivid.

A great hip-hop album, an accomplishment that whipper-snappers in both hip-hop and the pop-music world at large would benefit from attempting to emulate.

Even with all of this depth, Push The Sky Away finds Cave doing more with less lyrically.

It seems to have brought a band who had so long mired itself in total darkness into the cleansing light of day, and in both cases, the results are awe-inspiring.

An album which will force even the most hardened listeners to throw in the towel.

Nary a fragment of the 10 compositions sounds even a bit out of place; new ideas are explored, and not at the expense of the listener; and, perhaps best of all, a mongrel of a talent finally lets his instincts to ROCK REALLY FUCKING HARD take over.

For going on 20 years, when Xiu Xiu have put out an album, it’s one of that year’s best. It’s no small thrill to see this trend continue.