For all its flaws and excesses, Cruel Summer is an order of magnitude above the dreck of 808s and Heartbreak (2008), and if it doesn't outshine any of Ye's other solo works, I'd argue that it's a deeper and bolder album than last year's Watch the Throne.

There's no doubt that I Bet on Sky is a very good record. But at this point, the second honeymoon is over, and there's a barely perceptible distance growing.

This is the best rap album of 2012--not just because of champion verses and immaculate drops, but because they recognize that the most brilliant foreground only shines against a well-defined backdrop.

He, like his album, works best in its woozier, hushed moments.

It is a stubborn, patient sharpening of their craft.

King Animal bucks the trend by being reasonably good. It is unquestionably a Soundgarden album, and far better than anyone had a right to expect.

Maybe it lacks the frenetic energy of Night Falls Over Kortedala, but I Know What Love Isn't is a great record in its own right, a showcase of Lekman's prodigious storytelling gifts that also makes an effort to connect those stories, and that music, into an emotionally resonant whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The titles and lyrics form a kind of manifesto of loneliness, elevating self-doubt and even insecurity into badges of honour. He struggles but, with the music growing all around him like a protective cushion, we only hear the sound of a deep, blissful sigh.

Provider, though lovely, and featuring two outstanding acoustic songs in "Asa" and "Rivers of Gold," is not nearly the radical, aesthetic departure described in some initial reviews.

This is a majestic, ambitious record, and the best thing an already incredible band has ever released. The rest is noise.

There's nothing but clouds on Occasion for Song, but rather than uninviting it's eminently listenable; an unflinching, graceful, truthful exploration of how to go on living when you've lost a friend, of how to recognize a world that suddenly seems that much darker and less hopeful.

Specifically though, Rebirth absolutely boasts some of the best tunes that Cliff's recorded since his string of successes surrounding the international releases of The Harder They Come.

Total Dust is a very nice record with a good melancholic mood.

Despite its democratic structure, Unsound suffers from a curious sequencing problem, or what we around here like to call Channel Orange-itis--but few bands of their vintage continue to write songs this prolifically or professionally.

Om certainly absorb religious images from every corner of the Old World with a certain reckless abandon, but despite a wandering path that would find most lost in appropriative disrespect, it all seems to melt effortlessly together into the band's unique tapestry of the void.

They have it in them to write great pop music or truly important experimental music, but Dirty Projectors have to decide where they want to end up before they start.

Channel Orange is going to be the standard to beat for some time. And it might very well be the best R&B album of our young decade.

Funny, relevant, incisive, compassionate, and even profound-this is the stuff a Great album [is] made of.

Coleman's exploring, surely, but he never abandons a sure-footed consistency, and the record works wonderfully as a whole.

It works, but it doesn't make sense, and can't be explained. It can only be heard.

It's not his best record by any stretch of the imagination, but it's one I'll reach for more casually and consistently than his recent stuff.

Over five years and around an international filming schedule, Riz MC has managed to use his credentials to mount a dazzling attack on what he sees going on in Farringdon Road, and has emerged with the kind of crossover masterstroke that could outshine the National Curriculum.

There's lots to love about WIXIW, but it is all so much the band's own creation that anything less than experience falls severely short of capturing it.

Taylor and Goddard's pop impulses and the dance music they've always been exploring have finally cohered, yielding a collection of songs with the potential to be as efficient on a dance floor as it is in a bedroom.

No amount of production dross can obscure the fact that Clockwork Angels still constitutes the strongest collection of Rush songs since the mid-'90s.

The result is predictably less than comfortable, though certainly not in a difficult, experimental way.

It is the best Swans live record in that it distills the essential loss of agency one is meant to endure as best as two little discs can manage.

Zimmerman's toned-down delivery and seeming refusal to belt out his lyrics, combined with the slow, slow sprawl of the tracks herein, make Dub Egg an exhausting and arid listen, even when its tracks are so individually satisfying.