2006's uncanniest country record.

2008's You and Me arguably represented a high-water mark in the Walkmen's sturdy career; the new Lisbon does nothing to erode that goodwill. On the whole, it's less raucous than its predecessor.

Eye Contact delights with its danceability and synthetic pleasure, but it's frontwoman Lizzi Bougatsos who holds the jams together.

Some of the best country rock in over a decade.

Blueprint is the antidote to 12 months of Kanye overexposure. His gritty beats pour sand in West's glossy modernist Vaseline, and his rhymes have the anti-anti-intellectual attitude of a loudmouth braggart you'd be proud to have on your quiz bowl team.

New Amerykah seems adherent to the old "cohesive studio album" mold of the soul/neo-soul eras.

Majesty Shredding is the band's first new studio album in nine years, vigorous and kicking, much more so than you'd have right or reason to expect out of a band this deep into their career.

West presents Common with a real challenge: rich rhythmic compositions that demand equally vivid verses. The elder MC responds with sharp Polaroid poetry, and the result of their collaboration is an uncluttered journalistic counterpoint to the rambling memoir that is The College Dropout.

The best song on the Drive-By Truckers' new 19-track monolith, Brighter Than Creation's Dark, will remind you why you like them; the album's worst song, which is in fact the worst song they've ever done by a substantial margin, will teach you to love them again.

The result is a collection of songs where the choppy, dreamy prog of "Glass Tambourine" can exist within a few tracks of the pogo-inducing "Short Version" and still come off as a cohesive, energy-rush-inducing whole.

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.

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

The songs are still structured with minimal vocals and long repetitive jams, but they seem more crafted this time, not just meandering soundscapes.

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

23 is exactly what we've come to expect from this trio: a tension-filled exploration of the human psyche, blistering but still atmospheric.

That's Black Up's predicament: It wants to be experienced viscerally, but it's being stripped of life by over-intellectualization.

If Eminem is hip-hop's Elvis, then Bubba is its Gregg Allman, the white boy embraced by lowdown Little Africa, especially fellow musicians.

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.

With Weather, Ndegeocello shows how she's poised to follow Animal Collective down the rabbit hole and into a promised land of greater musical freedom.

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

There's nothing wrong with singing witty lyrics fast and loud; there's just nothing very special about it.

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.

You Are Free demonstrates a subtle, hopeful change in sentiment--a relief from Cat Power's melancholy.

He sounds as genuinely hurt and confused as any of us, but if he's gained any insight into that hurt or confusion, he's not about to express it.

After myriad delays and label woes, it's clear the interminable wait for new material was worth it.

Destroyer simmers with life in all of its noisy, tuneful excess.

He's always here to try to twist reality's wires some more, just so, and leave a little room to move.

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

The singer's Mancunian bleariness is such that the bittersweet barfly sing-along 'Grounds for Divorce' rings effortlessly real, while the quasi-spiritual questing of 'Weather to Fly' gets reined in by the sobering image of "pounding the streets where my father's feet/Still ring from the walls."

Listening to it from start to finish is so bracing it's overwhelming; it sounds like what it would feel like to drink six cups of black coffee chased down with a bucket of ice water.

The Magic Place, Barwick's first release on Asthmatic Kitty (after two self-released albums), trails a dreamlike reverie across its 45 minutes.

With any luck (and some marketing muscle), this excellent album will find the Dashboard Confessional fans it deserves.

Bloc Party borrow the soaring melodic guitar lines of Television and sinuous noodling of New Order and the Cure to add a lushness that makes these songs sonically beautiful as well as rhythmically aggressive.

The Stage Names shares the frenzy of pre–"Black Sheep" songs like 'The War Criminal Rises and Speaks,' and if it isn't as monolithic as the album that spurred the band's rise to "Believer"-subscriber prominence, it does contain several fine examples of hyper-articulate hysteria.

She has a huge talent for drama--when to build, when to break, when to whisper or coo or yell, when to camp a while in a looping melody and when to move on--and the album's 37 minutes feel majestic and unhurried.

While Where You Go may not be his masterpiece, as a distillation of the space-disco aesthetic, it's unparalleled.

The rest of the band plays straight man, setting up Berninger's punchlines and peeling him off the floor at the end of the night.

II Trill, is psychologically up-market, with genuinely well-appointed guest spots (that Webbie and Lupe Fiasco both sound comfortable on the same album speaks volumes) and hungry young producers offering their best tricks.

Everything Russell recorded is worth a listen, but while 'Close My Eyes' will likely soon stand alongside 'This Is How We Walk on the Moon' and 'That's Us/Wild Combination' as one of the most instantly pleasing songs in his discography, this collection only occasionally captures him at the height of his powers.

The new album isn't terrible, just dull.

The studio scrubbing leaves no noticeable film; even the effects--like the spacey guitar that launches "Gravity Rides Everything"--ring true.

It's easy to hear what Iyer means when listening to Solo, his latest disc. For sheer cohesion, it tops Historicity, and since he's alone at the piano throughout, his reflective streak is telegraphed.

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.

Now 62, the mighty reverend may not be able to make you spontaneously combust like yesteryear, but damn if he can't still get you in the mood with his third batch of love songs for Blue Note.

It's all very outsized and uppity, falling right in line with the current dictum in dance music that every song must be able to be mashed up with both Kanye West and this week's indie-rock star.

In terms of sheer intensity of sound, it's as if the Comets of old have been miniaturized and are looking up at you from inside a Grateful Dead lunch box.

The record sounds like it came a year or so after Endtroducing--which is to say, it goes a little deeper in summoning Gothic textures and awesome drum samples, and arrives as a delayed, well-fitting follow-up to a landmark.

If I like them because they remind me of eating bad bathtub mescaline in the woods and listening to Cure singles, well, that'll do. You might like them for completely different reasons.

Armchair is a bit more accessible and less subtle [than Eggs], less of a single statement, but with more individual standouts.

James Blake's most compelling moments come when you can't tell where he stops and the machines begin.

It's long and boring and preachy.

Subtract [a few tracks] and Los Lobos could've made this album if they, too, got John Cale to produce. That's a compliment to all involved.

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

Nas doesn't ruin a decent beat, but rarely is he able to improve one.

Tindersticks' trajectory, in fact, does have its affinities with R.E.M.'s: an unfairly maligned Difficult Third Album clears the decks and the lead singer's nasal passages, and what's gone from the later work, however accomplished it may be, is that startling strangeness, the rare, eerie thrill of hearing something that sounds only like itself.

If much of Anniemal isn't vibrant enough to move physically or resonant enough to move emotionally, its peaks suggest a worthy midway state.

For a band about whom most of the talk (pro and con) has focused on their unrelenting giddiness, Los Campesinos! have produced a debut that's surprisingly muddled emotionally.

The pace isn't all breakneck; vocal approaches range from blanket chanting to raucous call-and-response, and some stretches are plain-gasp--pretty.

Wilco's ideas are unremarkable, but are worked out with intelligence and striking conception. And as it happens, the new organic emphasis tables some of Wilco's lamer stylistic obsessions.

Searing white light and scrappy vocals are replaced by the druggy stomping and weighty grooves of '70s cosmic metal, yet the band's alluringly youthful braggadocio remains.

Fauna's first half is cosmic pop turmoil of the highest degree, as only a master songwriter could create.

Like Rubber Soul and Revolver, or Bowie's Low and Heroes, Deserter's Songs and All Is Dream function as bookends rather than as separate works, though the latter, recorded under the cloud of [intended producer Jack] Nitzche's absence, does strike a few too many morose chords.

The affecting style that made them the most imaginative revivalists of their generation has been replaced by half-assed and half-hearted prog rock.

It's... really different. And oblique oblique oblique: short, unsettled, deliberately shorn of easy hooks and clear lyrics and comfortable arrangements. Also incredibly beautiful.

Music breaks down neatly into three discrete sections, on which I'll hang the very technical names the dance part, the good part, and the dirge part. The good part, so named because it's really good, accounts for half of Music's 10 songs, conveniently nestled into tracks four through eight inclusive, so you can play that section over and over again without interruption.

A song or two will keep you warm and contented, but take in the full album and April will smother you worse than a down comforter in July.

The Gaslight Anthem's profound affection for and commitment to their forebears are just as present as they were before, but only here does the band sound as eager to bury as to praise them.

RJ and his sampler wander the record crates of shared memory, and come up with progressive rock and Northern soul songs that have little to do with anybody's idea of revival.

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

These guys were rubbish as careerists, essentially banishing much of their stronger material to the depths. So think of The Power of Negative Thinking as the great unveiling.

Street Horrrsing is, to your dad's ears (unless your dad is Lou Reed), a whole lot of noise. But what virtuosic, complicated noise it is.

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.

The enjoyable What I Do is similarly assured and clunker-free, but it also returns to the emotional compression that Drive often detoured.

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.

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.

Wisely, The Golden Age is less mediated, its variety achieved through smartly arranged curveballs like the Calexican waltz 'I Know That's Not Really You.'

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.

Sure, the novelty helps, and if it recurs too often, the glee of hearing Nelson and Marsalis mesh will diminish. But hearing once how they play with and against each other is a real treat.

As usual, the excellent mix--opaque but sunlit--helps; as usual, we eagerly await her next album.

The result's a bit grungy, sure--but there's also an undercurrent of dark, sinister country and blues that suggests they're not just rehashing old times.

Coldplay's new record is a little edgier, trancier, and more conversational than their last. It is called A Rush of Blood to the Head, and in waves and swells of major tunes and frisky then looping time signatures, that's just about the effect it has.

Though there's little of the powerpuff zoom associated with the New P's here, uptempo grins like "On the Table" make denying the pleasantness of it all impossible.

As profound as anything in his oeuvre.

Whether it inspires bosom-heaving, jersey-rending, or chopper-flagging, Explosions in the Sky will have true believers again faint with praise.

Beautifully engineered, Circus sounds chocolaty and recombinant even when it doth protest the Enlightened Guy angle too much.

The last 10 or so minutes of the CD veer between bursts of riff noise more smoothly recorded than expected and washes of music to watch soft porn by, indicating the charm of being proudly abrasive and busy is wearing off.

A superbly sequenced set chock-full of clever entendres, oozing with existentialisms on par with those of Buhloone Mindstate and De La Soul Is Dead.

Too bad FM radio still has its head stuck up its pre-1980 ass, 'cause the album is so FM—so non-single-driven AOR—but in such a cool robot-from-the-2004-future-sent-to-save-rock-in-the-past sort of way.

DITC will still melt your speakers. Jack Endino's clean yet full-tilt production fills out the sound, but it's drummer Des Kensel's ability to push forward and hold back--not simply pound monochromatically from start to finish--that truly creates the thriving, volatile atmosphere here.

No surprise, Ribot's versatility as a guitarist is the main draw here.

The production style displays unique shadings and shifts in sound, suggesting an attention to sonic detail emblematic of a drummer with the deep musical (especially jazz-related) knowledge that ?uestlove owns. But this may also sustain the most oft-heard complaint against the Roots: the seeming inability of their lead vocalist, Black Thought, to unfailingly deliver "hip-hop quotables."

Like all of her wordplay--as written, sometimes spontaneously spoken, and occasionally sung--it fits.

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.

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.

LaVette sings Scene as if she's been backed into a corner and relishes the sensation.

Strangely, what the sloppier approach really does is highlight bandleader Murray Lightburn's wondrous voice.

The most disappointing aspect of this record is that Beck has fallen into the trap of confusing earnestly repeated clichés for personal lyrics.

Of course it's a gimmick, but about half of it works anyway.