A magnum opus four years in the making, We Love Life is, like This Is Hardcore's epic cold sweat, a disco-nnection record, well stocked with mis-shapes, mistakes, misfits. But Pulp's glamorama has never tingled so invitingly, thanks to the full-body massage administered by producer Scott Walker.

The man has an uncanny ability to transliterate the sounds only record collectors can hear--early Thin Lizzy, for instance --into a passionate ache anyone can love.

Arab Strap mix the stoic, set-permanently-at-dawn folk whispers of last year's Elephant Shoe with the beat-friendly sense of their best early singles: "The First Big Weekend," "(Afternoon) Soaps," "Cherubs." The music sheds its amateur charm for the sound of a band in control of its art and its drum machines.

When talking about an album as multilayered, thematically diverse, and sonically rich as OutKast's Stankonia, though, the best thing is to boil it down to its essentials, its influences, its approaches. You know, the uppercase conceptual stuff. This album, the acclaimed Atlanta duo's fourth and best, contains so many hummable hooks, so many snap-your-head beats, so many break-'em-out-and-talk-about-'em metaphors, that it's easy to get lost in the sauce.

The voice you hear on "Love and Theft" is not that of the cocky young rock star who wrecked folk by simply strapping on an electric guitar, nor is it the vengeful and crotchety man who dripped Blood on the Tracks. This Dylan is older, wiser, and grousier, but sweeter, more sanguine if still unsettled too.

Blacklisted is soaked to the bone in rueful wit, luxurious miserablism, and morbid cold sweat—c&w virtues too often reduced to self-pity by lesser latter-day sweethearts of the rodeo.

Some of the best country rock in over a decade.

Collins's way with a hook has blown up into a stack of tunes that stick, ranging from cranked-up faux-arena rock to spine-shaking rhythm and staccato bounce.

Yes, it's as good as the last one, maybe better.

Like a great romance, it's consistently lovable even when stupid or frustrating, and its best moments are absolutely breathtaking.

Album number five dwarfs its predecessors because the members have started treating this group as the sun around which their musical projects must inevitably revolve, and the home to which they must return.

SFA uses 21st-century tools to achieve pop timelessness.

Fey, coy, yet rich and deep, track after track on Broken by Whispers emits an exacting, well-crafted melodrama. Subtle electro touches only add to the wondrous acoustic guitars, wondrous and breathy declarations of love, and wondrous early morning seaside atmosphere. Those who balk at dreamy-boy nakedness will want to skip the bathos, but such people are called Americans...

Phrenology reveals pulsating growth--a surprising bump on our skulls that some didn't feel before, while others banged their grapes wishing for it.

The mightiest alterlatino album in many years. The sound is more rock-oriented and vibrant, and the band has actually learned to write songs.

The most penetrating and engaging album of their career...

The album's darn spooky good... Shelving the old Green Day wall of guitars (Dookie and Insomniac) in favor of the youngest (and best) Pete Townshend mod-clanky buzz opens up the band's sound dramatically; it's airy and spacious, lots of room for the vocals. The whole thing breathes with neat ambiences.

A flat-out incredible live recording... it's Underworld as nonstop high, a disc that for 75 minutes keeps seizing and re-seizing the air.

A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a Scar will be the album of the Indian summer, warm and wistful all the way through.

Where Dre twists Prince remnants to his own astroboyish amorous ends, Big Boi holds up OutKast's P-Funk revival tent.

Original Pirate Material is England's first great hip-hop record mostly because it isn't a hip-hop record. It's hard to say exactly what it is.

When Dizzee thinks very deeply--worrying about growing up, about those around him who won't grow up, about dying before he grows up--he sounds like, what else can we call it, the real thing.

Funeral is a remarkable record, hard to hear at first, then hard to stop hearing.

Try This dares Pink's huge but hardly guaranteed audience to hear the world her way--without wasting one moment on indulgent experimentation, rote grandstanding, or retreats into conformism.

What makes Antics such an improvement over Bright Lights is how capable Interpol have become at complementing Banks's lovely ambiguity with an increasingly precise post-punk throb.

Whatever it was supposed to achieve originally, right now SMiLE sounds like a beautifully modulated, funny, sometimes unintentional meditation on a failed United States and counterculture, and the lost paradise, real or imagined, of Southern California, and the collapse and reinvention of the male ego.

The ever increasing variety in Eminem's voice (drawled Southern-bounce cadences, impatiently curt throaty staccatos, flat Beck-like deadpans, crying and screaming) somehow feels completely conversational, and the musical backdrop (calypso/Caribbean, Gothic etherea, jiggy disco evolving into P.M. Dawn) is frequently, of all things, beautiful.

The music turns Aja's fusion-pop mode jumpier and snappier, sourer and trickier and less soothing--postfunk, whether anyone will admit it or not.

Youth & Young Manhood is 2003's finest rock debut.

Kaiser Chiefs flow so well that even given the nonstop electro-like riffs, hooks, and knowingly cornball solos played by guitarist Whitey, the songs as a group can over-egg the pudding as only powerpop can. But as a record-making matter, Employment is nearly without flaws.

Part of what makes Of Montreal notable is the quantity of things Barnes does impeccably.

This time everything has coalesced and expanded, double the propulsion, twice the emotional range, the beats doing the ping and the boomerang.

Previous albums have never quite captured those onstage moments when the power they generate seems to catch them unawares, but on The Woods you can hear not only the deliberation in Weiss's eyes as she ponders the exact placement of beat and crash, or Brownstein's bedroom-mirror rock-star poses, but also the stunned grin Tucker can never contain after emitting her most gravity-defiant shrieks.

Each of these songs offers more exquisite details than I could earmark in twice this space, many of them literary, which the English prof's dropout son rightly claims as his calling. But secret brilliance is more likely to emerge from the sops to his hip-hop base.

The title track and "Waltz" bookend Extraordinary Machine. Both excel, set to Brion's signature command of crisp, idiomatic, Van Dyke Parks-influenced Hollywood symphonics. But the Elizondo-Kehew tracks top them.

Easily dance record of the year, Confessions is an almost seamless tribute to the strobe-lit sensuality of the '80s New York club scene that gave Madge her roots, which she explores with compelling aplomb.

The stupendous Destroyer's Rubies, recorded with a full, swaggering band, is maybe his best and certainly his least theoretical album.

Fagen's triumph of rendering post–9-11 New York most recalls how perfectly Steely Dan caught LA on 1980's 'Gaucho.'

No, local slump-spotters, this isn't the Yeahs' Room on Fire. Far from it.

Ghost's Fishscale is the most creative album to come out of New York hiphop since his own 2000 Supreme Clientele.

Make no mistake: Hell Hath No Fury is a major event.

A Dante-channeling journey through the many diverse facets of hip-hop.

A masterpiece showcasing Thorn's voice, songwriting, and taste.

Listening to this thing is like watching a pitcher throw a no-hitter.

Rook is great, with an emotional clarity and narrative acuity that makes it one of the year's most rewarding listens.

The resulting, mercifully final product is, as you might have suspected all along, fantastic, by turns triumphant, defiant, and gleefully crass.

Their stupendous debut full-length, The Fool, triangulates Moon Pix–era Cat Power's ghostly, morbid, gorgeous bedroom folk with the Slits' lithe, muscular post-punk.

It remains to be seen if The Lady Killer will continue his hot streak, but it should-it's one of the best records of the year, and also his most commercial, and that's not an insult.

Kanye is rapping and singing better and with more tenacity than he ever has on Fantasy, but also less often, wisely allowing others to speak for him-every single guest artist on this album senses the moment and rises to the occasion.

this time, she has found a middle ground therein, an appropriately murky backdrop as she channels another of her early inspirations: Bob Dylan. Like vintage Bob, Shake pores over history's indignities with a fine-toothed comb.

Vernon seems torn between selling his lyrics and using his voice as just another emotional cue in the thick mix. But if you're looking for an album to get lost in, who knew a guy previously feted for stripped-down "realness" would provide the year's best?

Take Care is a carefully crafted bundle of contradictory sentiments from a conflicted rapper who explores his own neuroses in as compelling a manner as anyone not named Kanye West.

A&C really cook, no matter how low-key or deliberately trivial they're sounding, and this is one way that they (usually, not always) avoid being camp or kitsch or cute.

Chambers's two solo records are more fun than a barrel of Foster's, mostly because she doesn't sound daunted by the history of the music.

It's like each song on the album has the dynamics and reach of a DJ set, ramming David Bowie and Fats Domino into K.C. and the Sunshine Band, then gluing it together with full-throated sugar-pop harmonies and a rhythm section worthy of the Beatles at Hamburg's Star Club.

A swell record: personal but easy-going, distinctive, with a lot of picaresque personal narratives occasionally conveyed through exaggerated fantasy elements.

Their catchiest, most compelling record yet.

From giddy choruses to whistling hooks to sensual trip-hop to desperate rockers to Velvets chugging to smoky chanteuse atmospheres to guitar workouts over austere-then-soaring strings to dance remixes waiting to happen, these are expert songsmiths showing off their craft, more impressively than ever before.

Had little, lyric-less Out Hud arrived in 1993, their recombinant shoogity-oogity would have eliminated the need for a Tortoise, and I never would've had to pretend Iannis Xenakis was "interesting" or take that junket to Nobukazu Takamura's ostrich farm.

A shiny little appliance that fragments its 11 tracks into nearly as many subgenres, doing away with the seamless sprawl of their earlier records.

Stag is a diverse non-Indigo mix (the only song that makes me go hmmm starts, "She brings me Spanish clementines, I eat them by the waterside"), intermingling Ray's canny ear for melody with a lo-fi, raw sensibility and attitude aplenty.

Filled with startling jump cuts and puzzling reverberations, The W is the best-produced Wu-affiliated album since GZA's 1995 Liquid Swords.... Eight years after their first single, it's a thrill to hear Wu-Tang sounding so unhinged. But it's also a pain in the ass. With nine voices, nine styles competing for your ear, even the most carefully crafted Wu-Tang album flirts with chaos, and the listener is left to separate milestones from mistakes. The W bursts with inspiration, but what does it all mean? You can't help wishing there was someone in charge.

Confidently ridiculous and matter-of-factly wise, the 6ths record is a lovely collection of songs about pining, yearning, coveting, aching, "kissing the bottle wishing it was you." Needless to say, it's also quite funny.

Macy's decision to team with [producer Dallas] Austin this time around gives her anarchic brilliance just the right creative counterbalance.

Painful as the backstory gets, the work itself remains lovely and luxuriant.

Sure, Fever's brushed-steel Eurodisco is old hat, Munich '77 via Paris '98. But mainlined along FM frequencies, it sounds totally 2002.

His Cupid's-arrow vignettes reach deep into the fictional dream through heedless genre-bending, ingenious rhyme and incongruous simile, bleary-eyed dislocation and straight-faced melodrama.

The music is always full of life, and Slug's white-boy flow is brassy, deft, and one-of-a-kind.

All That You Can't Leave Behind returns to the grand gestures of old. Practically every song a potential hit single. Soulful, exuberant, at peace with its own clichés, this is one U2 record that will never be called antianything.... Call it their R.E.M. album, monster rock filtered through a sophisticate's restraint.

Everyday has at least six tracks more beautiful than U2's "Beautiful Day"; the album, needless to say, kicks All That You Can't Leave Behind's behind.

Musicology is noticeably spare and controlled. This development gratifies its admirers, and rightly so.

Agreeably pervtastic.

Sensitive ones will fall in love instantly; Fat Beats futurists might wait for the Jay Dee remix due later this year.

Percolates the same melancholy satisfaction and nervous maturity, entropy and growth, in and out--but with an urgency and impulsiveness that risks upsetting the balance.

Confessions is a top-of-the-line pop-soul showcase that... manages to be commercially savvy without coming off as too desperate.

This perfectly pitched record reveals that these hardworking brothers' valiant quest for independence shall be rewarded.

album hits people who love the sound extravaganzas of overdubbed guitar symphonies, can't hang with the folkiness full-service singer-songwriters inevitably preserve, and expect melodic flair and beats, yet sometimes want to hear words.

Thematically it's a less ambitious record than Pelo (and in terms of scale, Pedals), but listen to it as the Navins' Exile in Guyville and its truths are heartbreaking in their weary familiarity.

This is the funniest hard-rock album I've ever heard; also, the hardest-rocking funny album I've ever heard, since if you take away the jokes you've still got the power of the music.

The new album is looser in the rhythm, has less wall of slash, relatively more lilt and funk, and more variety in the sound ... but in general the music is too diffuse.

It's a hilarious critique of right-wing reactionaries, hypocritical lefties, hyper-commercial consumerism, and the slave-service industry. Like if someone smoked a lot of weed, and turned Fast Food Nation into a hit Broadway musical.

Don't misunderstand. I Am Shelby Lynne is a standout... Still, if the range of reference marks Lynne's hard-won liberation from cookie-cutter Nashville, there's a different sort of plasticity to this sound, which may explain why it broke not in the heartland or on VH1, but the U.K.

Too mischievous for Led Zeppelin's Valhalla and too self-aware for Bal-Sagoth's Magic Kingdom, Wonderful Rainbow conjures retarded unicorns, copulating robots, and head-banging ogres in one technicolor beat.

All in all, expertly wobbling prog metal, constructed out of as few chords as possible.

While the acoustic simplicity of Reckoning seems thin at first, particularly beside Revelling's sensual, bombastic joy, the croons and ballads grow on you, if not for their melancholy navel-gazing, then for their languid, old-school folksiness.

Neither a straight feminist critique nor a tribute album, Strange Little Girls is rather a nuanced exploration of the dualities of love and aggression.

It's not stretching to suggest that they've complicated house music's ease so effectively that Kish Kash often resembles, well, postpunk.

Although sometimes her reliance on mood threatens to get the better of Worldwide Underground, Badu remains faithful to the old school of flow, a blend of drums and rhythm designed to service soul's best instruments: its vocalists.

There's no great leap forward--or backward, depending on your theory of pop--of any sort here.

In the beginning, Neubauten's music sounded urgent and vital, created out of necessity; now it sounds effortless and natural, moving forward because it has no other place to go.

Merges jazz, pop, and the conservatory in a heady and original way, accessible and seriously playful.

And though it's as good as, if not better than, its predecessor, the album's not bowling people over, either. Maybe its rap-folk hybrid is just too much of the same. Or maybe we just can't identify with the first-person "Black Jesus" like we can the third person of yore. Because maybe this album's greatest strength is exactly what's holding it back: the narrative.

The record is a female country album for people who dislike female country albums. It's not too smooth, too shrill, or too Stepford.

This is Blige's most rhythmic album ever, and even the ballads that can drag r&b down here bristle with bumping beats.

It's a pastiche festival that works in the interest of groove every bit as hard as it does for knowingness and yuks.

[A] marvelously sophisticated, extremely political album.

Tortoise may be the only band that can match the everything-mashup steez, sonic skills, conceptual ambition, and breakbeat heat of the Roots.

The carping is intercut with elegiac little pauses that align Blink 182 with a branch of punk rock you could trace back through the Replacements and Ramones Leave Home, to the more ethereal of early Who songs.