In the end, Junior Boys' improved skills at constructing pop songs within their fantastic sonic template is more than enough to make So This Is Goodbye one of my favorite releases of 2006 so far.

Biophilia the "Bjork album" stands with the best of them.

The music here speaks for itself, whatever else Ward might be trying to say through it.

What makes a Wolf Eyes album worthwhile is less the raging skree than their keen application of dark, delectably uncouth fragment. Your head can still wade in this bracken, even if it may not be as tumultuously roiling as it once was.

Another solid release.

He might not be making sounds for fighting the many injustices of our current place and time, but Unseen in Between is nonetheless a solid compatriot against the confounding effect of going forward among them.

While the album isn’t exactly synergistic in its coupling of the two singers--neither Kurt nor Courtney achieve their lyrical or musical apex here--Lotta Sea Lice nevertheless intimates an unrelenting kinship between its two auteurs.

For anyone who found themselves begging for more than five songs, you will be happy with this new album; the distance traveled from Young Liars is not so drastic as to alienate anyone.

Crackles with sparkling guitar work and [is] simply a great, fun, rock n' roll album.

Cripple Crow finds Banhart doing what many didn't want him to do or thought he couldn't do: make a pretty lackluster album.

Last Summer sounds good; next summer could be even better.

Distortion does not reinvent the wheel of alternative rock, but it may have just started it spinning again.

Finding new ways to speak old truths. I think that’s why we may be here. I think that’s what Phil and Julie find as they wing and waver their voices around the songs of Lost Wisdom pt. 2.

Aesop has tremendous control for a syllable-stuffer; he's Kweli with restraint, knowing when to rein in the racehorse flow and slow down for emphasis, never loosening his grip long enough to stumble over the vigorous drum-driven beats, which - to the benefit of Aesop's gruff narration - are simple and unobtrusive and angry and allow whatever he's talking about at the moment ... to sound not only compelling, but also hard.

The result is an exuberant, almost joyful record brimming with sly cynicism and a newfound fondness for whoa-oh refrains and handclaps.

Admittedly, Beautiful Rewind isn’t Kieran Hebden’s magnum opus, but it’s an album that succeeds at both moving the listener emotionally and, like much of the producer’s impressive body of work, inspiring him or her to literally and physically move.

Over and over, listen after listen and Half Free just plain sends. Mastermind Meg Remy’s first album for the vaunted 4AD label is bursting with vivid, cracked imagination and cool mastery of slippery pop allure.

Overall, it's Boards of Canada trying new things and experimenting outside of the box that they built for themselves; commendable and quite addictive.

Yesterday and Today, the sophomore effort from The Field (nee Axel Willner), can be easily understood as part of the tradition of moody follow-ups a la In Utero: a pairing of a signature sound with willful experimentalism.

Exploding Head is a solid album that spits in the face of any sophomore slump expectations.

This is a dynamic, densely-packaged slab of rock ’n’ roll, which not only stands alongside the titans of the genre, but gives Kylesa a name of their own.

On Punk Authority, Pete Swanson distills punk as a generic signifer and punk as an ideation even further.

On their latest effort, no track is longer than 5:45, and they kick the whole thing off with arena riffage and a song about bears.

Middle Cyclone still stands out as another strong entry from a woman who is more than proving her mettle as a revered indie veteran.

Its funereal funk can be hard to shake off; its catchiest hooks stain and discolor.

Grizzly Bear are an Animal Collective that decided to go more intelligible and accessible instead of running naked through the woods on five hits of sunshine acid while screaming in tongues.

It is the right kind of unsettling to get your feet and heart pounding with the full power of your soul in total awareness of the moment. Embrace the darkness and appreciate the light.

All told, Western Teleport is an absolute victory lap for the punchiest axis of his 2005 sound

Although it isn’t as full-fledged or layered as a full-length Aphex work, it’s full of minor miracles, advanced lessons in acid appreciation and stirring little lines of drum poetry.

Age of Transparency is heady and dizzying, even more unpleasant than Anxiety at times, but it’s keyed in to the zeitgeist in a way that feels genuine, constructive even.

As ever with free-improv records, the level of control is remarkable.

While Nothing Was The Same won’t do anything to win over Drake’s detractors, doing pretty much nothing new for the rapper except bringing in more drill-style hi-hats and scaling back the obsession with 808s.

The elusive details in the songs here are what bring me back, haunted.

Get Color is exactly what a sophomore release should be: a deepening of and expansion upon the promise laid out by the band’s first record.

So come now fans of insidious and wily (yet cerebral) rock, Liars have delivered just what you need... even if you don't realize it yet.

There is just something so appealing about such guileless, honest music, music that sounds like it was easily made, and that makes it look so easy to do.

With Sarah Davachi’s baroque venture on Pale Bloom into the sensuous folds of light blooming into light, one can hear unfolding this always light and lightness.

With Personal Record, Eleanor commits even more strongly to straightforward, sentimental, and concise songcraft.

The more populist material that makes up All the Way is stripped of any comfort such familiarity may provide by Galás’s jarring reinventions.

The Alternative To Love to be a quality rock album that covers several genres in influence and doesn't deserve to be punished for not being as good as its predecessor.

Fuck Death will blow your mind.

The Wild Hunt is a very good record, but it's not perfect. The album's second half, though unarguably beautiful, runs together like an extended 60s folk mix.

One can’t declare Autumn of the Seraphs, Pinback’s fourth full-length, any better than their first, second, or third album.

Sad music has never sounded so uplifting.

If Melnyk’s technique hasn’t changed, he is breaking new conceptual ground.

Imagine my surprise to discover that Teflon Don is not only not atrocious, but it may also actually be one of the better rap albums of 2010.

The faithful will be rewarded with this immaculately recorded set of live versions, while the release could provide a solid introduction to those who've yet to discover the virtues of having heavy, emotional music that still manages to let you fill in the blanks.

It’s not so easily classifiable as “country,” but easily classifiable as really great pop music.

There is something martial, something insistent, to Compassion. True to his aims, Barnes has created something that denies passivity.

Dedicated isn’t a perfect album--it’s overlong and occasionally concedes too much to chart tastes to be interesting. But by the time Jepsen takes a bow following bonus track “Party For One,” you’re reminded once again of her generosity, of all the space she’s cleared for strength and weakness, for personal epiphanies and communal release.

At 35 hefty minutes, Dedication is Zomby's most complete statement to date. But, much like the man, it offers a number of details in one hand while obscuring other crucial signs with the other.

As a whole, Limbo, Panto’s uniqueness translates to something remarkably special and substantial rather than mere luster.

Rausch is a portrait of nature as the birthplace of modernity, and the birthplace of modernity is here.

This rocks.

Each sound swerves about unpredictably, as free-willed as particles twisting through a vast nothingness, powerful and intricate in their brutal simplicity.

Rather than attempt to recruit other players and resume business as usual, Broadcast subsumes House’s spectral compositions within a framework that suits every one of the duo’s strengths. If there’s anything scary about this at all, it’s the ease with which they’ve made the corpse of pop songcraft climb from its grave and walk anew.

100 Days is a straightforward progression of rhythm and blues, but on the gut level, well, words like "modern" or "derivative" become fairly worthless.

It's Dirty Three as they've always been, testing their limits, but still producing some of the prettiest and most artful music around.

For new listeners, this is the most accessible Sand album to date, but for veteran Sand nuts, this may be... well, just different.

This album sounds in many ways like an amalgamation of her previous work.

It’s a soothing cushion of chaos, like a bloody valentine, a buzzing saw, and an amazing star exploding into particle dust.

The solution to enjoying this album, then, is to not ask it to provide heavy drama, high art, or fiery revolt – it's just pop music with a slight twist, and it's first and foremost about having a good time inhabiting glamorous guises and histrionic voices.

Earth's greatest strength is also its structural weakness; to continually enact the tremulousness of all origins is to refuse to get going, to depart

This is frivolous, immaculate music.

Truelove’s Gutter abandons the lush strings and complex production of previous work for a more straightforward style, and the results bring to mind the honest, plainspoken albums that Cash and Jones recorded in the mid-70s.

It’s not an incredibly remarkable record, but when a band is this consistent for this long, it’s hard to fault it.

It’s a gracefully self-contained ecology--a sonic environment rich with empty and warm spaces, within which the listener is urged to breathe more easily and share in a queer feeling of belonging.

Downright seductive.

Double Cup sounds like an album Rashad has been gearing up to make, but instead of abandoning the footwork style he has championed throughout his career, he’s scoping its potential on nonconformist terms. And from the perspective of the listener, it’s an absolute treat.

It’s precisely because of the transience and mutability of Open as a whole that its fleeting moments of splendor prove all the more affecting and beautiful, despite the possible contention that--because of the often contradictory accompaniment--these might not be moments of splendor at all.

On top of being instrumentally impressive, One Life Stand is Hot Chip’s most emotional release.

Filled with quirky and inventive pop songs packed with sultry harmonies and an immense level of musical intuitiveness.

What makes The Historical Conquests Of... a great album and not just Ritter’s foray into stylistic versatility is the integrity of his musicianship. The album is thorough; it is complete.

Glass Boys is the best album Fucked Up have released so far, by virtue of it being the “laziest” collection of their career.

@#%&*! Smilers walks its own path as a uniquely beautiful addition to Mann’s already impressive catalogue.

The spacious long-form approach on these eight tracks really showcase Schott’s insistent, tactile, and conversation-with-yourself lonesome performance style. It’s great loner music, for those who own this about themselves but are ever casting a tentative eye toward the throng.

As an unsettling exercise in pop terrorism, The Horror is a rare treat.

This is a profound and giving music.

Despite possessing a somewhat dour countenance, the main effect of this record is a sort of replenishment.

The music tries to express what words can't, which makes this Animal Collective’s most combustive, "live" record yet.

Here’s Yo La Tengo as embracing, alienating, and prolific as ever, with another strong new album, Popular Music.

That Toro Y Moi's new record Underneath the Pine is distinctly a product of his songwriting, without sounding exactly like his 2010 debut, suggests that chillwave may still have some legs to it after all.

Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard it before... it’s taking drugs to make music to take drugs to, or something. But it’s still pretty damn fun, and Black Mountain do it with a higher idea-per-song ratio than most of their fellow fetishists.

True Minds continues a proud tradition of celebrating dead ends and lost causes.

Self-referential, unified, and insanely catchy, American Idiot's positives outweigh its clichéd delivery and ironic medium for corporate America critique.

Anti-Pop Consortium are still vital enough to keep the momentum they lost, in dreadfully untimely fashion, when they inexplicably broke up in 02.

As far as songwriting goes, i follows the typical Magnetic Fields album standard of several great songs balanced with a couple unremarkable ones, with the rest being simply really good.

Trials and Errors could be looked at as vindication for Molina given his choice to move on from his Songs: Ohia days; but as an essential live album, [it] leaves much to be desired.

Known for their micromanaged and micromanaging tracks, it’s fascinating to see that even their words about themselves are efficient, each phrase and constituent particular effervescent in their appearance and disappearance, yet wholeheartedly lunging themselves into place, forming a whole crystalline and formative structure.

TMLT feels like the Titus Andronicus record par excellence, it pushes and shoves at the boundaries of what such a record could or should conceivably sound like.

Heavy and heartbreaking, teeming with a warm, analog energy, Snow looks backward at each defining element that made the band so memorable to begin with. But like many of the best moments, maybe you just had to be there.

Fair or not, An Imaginary Country can best be described as middling: competent, but certainly not what we all were hoping for from an artist whose work up to this point has been so unequivocally stirring.

Abyss neatly encompasses the totality of her career, synthesizing the artist’s prolific catalog into her strongest and most ambitious album yet, a cavernous chasm filled with beauty, brutality, and endless possibility.

Garden of Delete is the exceptional post-performance of the readability conjured in the wake of OPN’s work, and as a result, it critiques experimental culture’s desire to fetishize.

Fearing that these songs were indicative of indie-pop conformity would not only be ignoring the group's rich and varied history with melody and rhythm, but also underestimating the ingenuity and convictions that Longstreth has consistently boasted throughout his recorded career.

There’s a newfound purpose to his dilettantism, one that invests the album with more weight than anyone had any right to expect.

Nouns sounds as homemade as something released on a Warner Music affiliate could be. It’s crafted with a sense of pleasant haphazardness, gelling into one of those rare situations where everything that is thrown at the wall sticks.

Maybe that's the key to the whole album, how it can seem to be a blog-fisher one moment and slap you upside the head another: it dissolves before you actually know what hit you. But for a lot of us, that's all the more reason to dive right back in.