So the news is good. They didn't sell out, they didn't run out of ideas, and they were able to find still more places to yell "Whooo!" Go buy this now.

On A Grand, everything Skinner does is in service to an infinitely satisfying and resonant whole.

My only problem with the album is that it begins to devour its own tail about halfway through, at times sounding tedious, or worse, precious.

Like The Fiery Furnaces' Gallowsbird Park, or Interpol's Turn On The Bright Lights, Funeral is a debut record that simply refuses to be ignored.

An album that's both effortlessly confident of its sound and monumentally fearless of introducing cohesive surprises.

Halfway through the album, it's clear that this is a glimpse into the future of pop music.

What worries me about the obviously talented Junior Boys is their tendency to round their corners. The music is so safe, so pleasant; it's not hard to imagine it in the Starbucks CD rotation without raising an eyebrow.

Perhaps the best overall representation of Belle and Sebastian’s distinctive brand of indie pop.

The 10 tracks are hands down the most irresistible pop music you'll hear this year.

Better than anything they've recorded to date, Hypermagic Mountain approximates the swelling energy of Lightning Bolt's live havoc.

Rejoicing in the Hands finds Banhart developing past his early lo-fi recordings in favor of a crisper, more succinct sound that highlights his intricate guitar picking.

Although an extreme statement, it is a major stylistic step forward for the band and pays off great dividends to those so inclined to follow them into The Woods.

Cave's songwriting chops and incisive lyrics have, if anything, grown stronger.

Arular is what The Coup’s second record set out to be but wasn’t: Party Music, both for the warehouse hedonists and the basement dissidents.

Guthrie successfully matches his idiosyncratic lyrics with subtle, layered arrangements lush with strings, crisp guitars, and shifting song structures as likely to burst into anthem or lilt towards confession.

What sets Franz Ferdinand apart is their unapologetic adherence to the pop formula.

Worthy of any superlative you can throw its way.

It is Stevens' creepier qualities that make him a cut above the average singer-songwriter.

It is every bit the equal of recent pop classics like the Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin, Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, or The Shins' Oh, Inverted World.

There's nothing Herren can't and won't do on this record.

Quicksand/Cradlesnake establishes Califone as an ambitious band with the songwriting chops to back up its penchant for studio strangeness.

The mish-mash of moods and modes leaves little from which to gather a theme.

You really don't know what you're dealing with until you sit down and take in the freewheeling beauty of one of the year's best.

An exceptional testament to James Murphy, both as a musician and producer.

By album's end, two coming-of-age stories are complete: the boy has grown into a black sheep man, and the literate musicians have become a hell of a rock band.

Sure, with so much to hear and such a range of styles, the album can take a couple of listens before it starts to bloom. That said, after these requisite spins, one can't help but admire how smoothly Feast of Wire glides from track to track, style to style.

Sounding like a lost classic from Britain's 1979 art-punk scene, the Futureheads' debut is an assured masterpiece of twitchy, nervous pop.

Possessing a richly elastic set of vocal chords, Bird is in league with such silver-throated singers as Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright, but he rarely if ever over-emotes, a common criticism leveled at Buckley and Wainwright.

Stripped down and folky... there's no denying Oberst's presence as a major artist who continues to evolve and explore his craft with each release.

The subtle mix of acoustic instruments with warm electric washes gives Holopaw's songs a surprising amount of depth.

There's just a little more space on this record for the songs to build and breathe. Twin Cinema is the first New Pornographers record you'll want to sit through from beginning to end.

Happy Songs is epic and subtle, technically savvy and emotionally charged and visceral all at once -- in short, it's a summary of everything that is great about Mogwai's music.

[A] sonic sheen (and the punchy rhythm section) gives the songs an immediacy that the previous reunion records have lacked.

The years are beginning to show on Smith, especially on the opener, "Green Eyed Locoman," but his backing band hasn't sounded this energetic and enthusiastic in years.

A bipolar rock opera for the ages.

Albini captures a recording full of heart, a sound quiet and full, rough and clear.

Lookaftering sees her trading the overly twee vibe of her debut for a darker, more mysterious and mature sound.

There have been releases that have excited me so far, but none that have completely recharged my faith in intelligent rock music. This is the first essential album of the year.

Comets on Fire have also learned to harness their dynamic range, an important step for a band that pummels the listener with a seemingly unending freakout.

The album, impressive in its scope and sense of adventure, is a further reinvention in Björk's already massive discography.

When the compositions behind the words are as dull and lifeless as the album's core ("This Bum's Paid" and "Hair Dude, You're Stepping on my Mystique") the results are utterly disastrous, relying too heavily on tried dissonance over unimpressively staid tempos.

Although Lost and Safe would be a crowning achievement for any band, The Books show no sign of running out of beautiful musical ideas to convey.

The album doesn't break any new ground for the band, but finds Burma at the top of its game, mixing artful music, intelligent lyrics and controlled sonic mayhem.

All eleven songs on Gimme Fiction are immaculately crafted, concise pop gems.

It's on the sonic departures, though, that Feels strikes its most resonant chord.

Lidell has created an album of flawless, imaginative, and radical funk grooves.

As you're listening, the songs begin to sound more and more like play-acting, as if Malin's trying to sound like his heroes more than he's trying to create anything that's all his own.

The group's cohesion is the cornerstone of the album; no one instrument stands out, while each contributes equally to the whole. And it's the trio's loose arrangements and subtle interplay that leave center stage to the thoughtful and provocative lyrics.

Bright Ideas has an air of excitement and energy about it, and contains some of McCaughan's strongest songwriting to date.

It has an appealing gentle earnestness that most pop music lost somewhere in the past few decades.

Their sturdy, inventive debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary, draws further, fresh blood from the indie rock stone.

Faking the Books loses some momentum beneath a glut of precious, minimal electro-ballads that dot the album.... But the album succeeds brilliantly on the louder numbers.

So New York. So everything. So new. But yet, so much like the hippies saying, "Man, if we could only get Nixon to smoke pot, then we'd have world peace, man."

But despite its flaws, or perhaps because of them, this remains organic folk-pop at its bewildering best.

This is a great band's most fully realized and mature album in a career already dotted with highpoints.

A good album that finds Oldham retreating from the layered solemnity of his most recent releases in favor of a mood that is as intimate and delicate as it is bittersweet and biting.

Part of the reason this record succeeds is that they haven't tried to replace Coxon, but rather rely on their remaining strengths like inventiveness and songcraft.

The Sunset Tree may just be The Mountain Goats's most poetic, coherent work.

A record of remarkable beauty.

The abject despair of The Mess We Made can become tedious, and, more than most artists, Elliott depends on a listener who is willing forgive him his lack of subtlety.

Fans will eat up this new record, as the songwriting rivals, and often exceeds, the best of Crooked Fingers' prior curious work.

Bright Yellow Bright Orange is a much better album than Friends of Rachel Worth primarily because it largely abandons the formers' modern rock ambitions for a reflective and more natural folk-rock sound.

There's a layered, almost psychedelic feel to a lot of these songs, suggesting that Beam may not be the died-in-the-wool folkie some might have pegged him as.

The record's disparate experiments are unified by an overriding darkness, the black light Albarn shines on the dancehall. It's this unusual tone that makes Demon Days intriguing long after it's ceased to be novel.

You're a Woman, I'm a Machine might be the best party record on this side of '79 that your local abandoned warehouse has ever seen.

The album's last third slows to the glacial pace of 2001's Covers Record with underdeveloped song fragments rendered in a numbing, spare style. But the album's first half more than makes up for it with Marshall's inimitably concise songwriting painting roses on demons and frowning children alike.

The album is harsher, darker, and just plain louder than Low have ever been in their 10-year career.

A luminously lovely solo album.

A stunning bit of psychedelic folk-rock.

Love Songs for Patriots picks up exactly where American Music Club last left us: producing uniformly excellent music filled with heartbreak, loneliness, and - yes - politics.

De-Loused in the Comatorium is a musical gem that captures the soul of Mars Volta in a way that soundly delivers on the hype.

It's every bit as good, if not better, than their first.

Part of the problem with Alligator is that it echoes so many other records, but part of its satisfaction is that it sets itself apart so well.

If you like your indie rock sweet and sophisticated with undertones of despair, you'll want to cuddle up with Universal Audio.

These are songs about horrible times in horrible lives; hearts are rotten long before they break and the sounds they make are awful and haunting and beautiful.

Fennesz does an excellent job of balancing the IDM portions of his sound with more challenging layers of material, making music that is both individual in approach and eminently pleasing to hear.

While all of the sounds that made their debut so compelling are in place here, Broadcast has also branched out, employing a looser approach to strong structure.

[Kasher's] ability to toss off seemingly effortless melodic hooks makes one wonder just what kind of water is in Saddle Creek.

30 minutes of bluesy punk-rock raunch.

It might not be the underground hip-hop record of the year, but it is easily on the short list.

While the music is as delicious and diverse as ever, the Decemberists' meal ticket is Meloy's unmatched lyrical prowess, which borders at times on mod-Shakespearean.

Unfortunately the band sometimes overdoes the sweetness and ends up being too precious.

Aside from the added guitar riffs and post-punk tones, Stars stick with a lush string section and neatly placed horns throughout, and their romantic appeal stays largely intact.

Snaith simply dictates the flow of emotions and events on this record, with the kind of command presence rarely seen.

Tanglewood Numbers, musically at least, is Berman's most fully realized album.

An uneven mish-mash of musical ideas that is only occasionally thrilling.

On songs like "In the Afternoon" and "Time is Running out," Maclean fails to add even a shred of feeling to his chilly IDM clones.

The flaws in A Ghost is Born are almost as interesting as the album's considerable triumphs.

Fans of dream pop and chamber pop alike will find a lot to enjoy on this one.

Are you worn out by your Travis and Coldplay CD's? In the market for some new Brit-Pop? Clearlake creates songs with equally appealing melodies to the aforementioned bands, while eschewing the relentlessly anthemic quality that occasionally mires the genre.

Humming By The Flowered Vine takes the rootsy sounds of classic country music (incorporating Hank Williams, Lucinda Williams and everyone in between) and plops them smack dab in the middle of Manhattan.

Suckfish is pure audio porn.

It's a crackling, concise collection.

Sonically, it's well-tempered between its beat-driven and its acoustic pieces; lyrically, a unique, personal pain drips out from Stewart's whispered vocals, providing the driving force of Muscles' challenging, diverse ensemble.

Malkmus' songwriting is back from blandland, the backing Jicks rock, and the production got it all on tape without screwing it up.

The Wedding is a worthwhile gamble and a record like no other in the Oneida catalogue. Which, come to think of it, makes it a lot like every other Oneida record.

Some songs are sloppily stretched out and others simply half-finished, but the ample charms of Doherty and Barat are just enough to rescue any of these lows.

A true supergroup -- a set of songs that might be superior to either group's work separately.