It’s the density of wit, ideas, and verbal invention that makes this one of the year’s defining hip-hop releases, whether Chance is rapping about God’s cell phone battery, racial politics, or merely unleashing thick clusters of rhymes.

Fucked Up's real appeal is simple: guitars, three of 'em, though it can seem like thirty.

A warm, evocative pop-soul-jazz album that comes straight from the heart.

Tell Tale Signs makes plain that Dylan knows the caprices of the world he lives in, now more than ever.

As usual with T.W.O.D., these songs are only as good as their grooves.

Singer Franklin James Fisher, whose multi-instrumentalist duties include everything from Rhodes to cello to sampling, is a perfect gospel shouter for our times, staring down darkness as he dances at the edge of our shared oblivion. The result is a genuinely new way to mangle the blues.

We relate because we root for her, because we listen with affection and identification. We’d all rather see her in a crown, running this nothing town. But the most striking thing about Happier Than Ever is that she’s refusing to coddle her audience, refusing to protect us from her darkest moments. It’s a high-risk move.

He's often thought of more as an instrumental virtuoso than a singer-songwriter, but here he excels at both.

Their closing chorus, “Womanhood is not an easy walk/And we cannot keep subjecting them to oppression,” highlights the sense of purpose that governs the entire album. It’s that spirit and the Amazones’ powerful performances that makes Musow Danse one of the great pan-African consciousness LPs in modern history.

It’s hard not to wish for a few more moments like that on There Is No Other, where old-school songcraft takes precedence over the album’s bravely collaborative spirit. But Gidden’s new album, yet another fine entry in her outstanding current run, is ultimately the most distilled and sui generis display of the unique artistry that defines her still-blossoming career.

It works well as a very basic introduction to Factory's better-known groups: Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays.

Ultimately, this is a set of odds and ends, inspired freestyles and funk jams; many are likely Butterfly outtakes, albeit none with the laser-focused resonance of "The Blacker The Berry" or "Alright." But there's brilliance in even Lamar's cast-offs, and an intimacy here that makes this more than just a gift for his ravenous fans.

Bejar stacks rainy-New York sax magic, sad-astronaut strings and hippie jazzbo grooving to make songs that are as wryly hilarious as they are weirdly affecting.

On his most legible album, he’s actively engaged in dismantling what it means for rappers to go in, and to evolve as artists. Without punchlines, hooks, eccentric beats, and flashy flows, he finds ways to astound and delight, avoiding gimmicks as well as grandstanding.

Seven years later, they've released a 94-minute follow-up that explores even wilder styles of mordantly nutso android bleat.

A buried-treasure mother lode. ... He's in peak lonesome-guy mode on the never-released failed-relationship chronicle "Give Me Strength." Another previously unheard song, "Hawaii," is a spooky mysterious-stranger ballad.

It's the best thing they've ever done, more than exceeding their usual quotient of fire guitars, killer choruses, and crafty rock-history updates. [Feb 2022, p.72]

Their third and best full-length.

A set that's seamlessly transporting, front to back.

Tickets to the show may be sold out until approximately forever, but this album is an excellent replacement.

Delivered from DeMent, whose voice has never sounded more curious and committed (listen to her phrasing in the last verse of “Warriors of Love”), these messages of spirit-rising and movement-building feel less like MSNBC screeds than warm invitations toward a righteous calling.

It's as inviting, immaculately produced, jokey and unsettled a record as any he has ever made.

Kendrick has never been one for subtlety, and the vulnerability at the core of Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers brings out moments of his reflexive overreach.

As on Weld, Way Down in the Rust Bucket showcases a reconvened band that sounds newly motivated after increasingly sluggish and creaky shows in the Eighties. They’re not yet the smooth-galloping machine they would become on the full-blown tour, though. What we’re hearing is the musicians feeling their way.

From her luscious, aching croon, and her ensemble's solemn high-mesa twang and groove..., you'd never guess she wasn't covering Patsy Cline standards.

1998's Mermaid Avenue let the artists rewrite themselves, too: Billy Bragg, the British folkie agitator, turned goofier ("My Flying Saucer"), while Wilco turned rootsier ("California Stars).

It comes down to the songs, and these are the most intense he's ever written, one instant classic after another.

The music isn't always as dynamic as his thoughts, opting for a mostly mellow mood that matches the LP's carefree samples of surfing documentaries, but doesn't always capture their freewheeling individuality.

It's his best album since 1990's The Rhythm of the Saints, and it also sums up much of what makes Simon great.

Third is an unexpected yet totally impressive return.

Burke is the rare singer who makes songwriters sound wise beyond their words -- he finds ache lying dormant in unlikely places and manages to pinpoint, with GPS accuracy, the murky emotional terrain within the lyrics.

Many of the songs, which she recorded with longtime collaborators John Parish and producer Flood, recall the downtempo energies of Let England Shake and her quiet 2007 album, White Chalk, and like those albums, the music here excels in its otherworldliness.

The best moments on Daddy’s Home highlight those jagged borders and contradictions. Clark’s howling vocals and delightfully angular synths on “Pay Your Way in Pain” make it one of the strongest album openings of the year.

Austin's favorite trio dishes out eleven helpings of diverse alt-pop on what may wind up being the finest record of its ilk all year. Charged by song sculptor/frontman Britt Daniel, this start-to-finish triumph never underachieves even if it has an effortless aura at times.

Late Registration is an undeniable triumph, packed front to back, so expansive it makes the debut sound like a rough draft.

The music is more rousing than ever; the power chords and hair-metal wanks spiked with singalong chants and new instrumental flavors.

Beginning with a feedback overture and ending with full-on instrument destruction, the live set is a snapshot of a menacingly feral band about to become a beast.

Lyrically and sonically, the National's seventh LP plumbs anxieties more deeply than ever. The result is a disarmingly potent album, not just emotionally but politically as well.

Despite the anger and bitterness, Hail to the Thief is more musically inviting than Radiohead's last two outings.

Songs for Judy lets us join Young in experiencing rock’s new world disorder.

Rather than feeding into speculation about the ever-expanding scale of the genre and what peak he’s out to conquer next, he chooses to lean back and have fun with a loose, leisurely set of 23 songs, his longest tracklist ever.

It's ironic, though, because the xx have never been so unguarded, either emotionally or in their musical ambitions. The result is as haunting as ever.

Her tenth album returns to the dazzling synth-pop of albums like '1989' and 'Reputation,' with lyrics caught between a love story and a revenge plot.

On just seven songs that run a little over an hour, Deafheaven have finally achieved what they’ve been striving towards for the better part of a decade: true post-metal fusion.

Too young to have experienced the era he holds so dear, Pecknold has found refuge and inspiration in the echoes.

At its reckless best, which is a lot, Mezmerize is thrilling confrontation, a graphic reflection of a nation tearing itself apart in anger, fear and guilt.

Le Bon is one of indie music's more beguilingly brilliant artists, as her sixth LP attests. [Feb 2022, p.72]

Like the other two [albums], it's speaker-blowingly brilliant. [11 Aug 2005, p.70]

McBryde's got a big, vibrato-tinged alto, biker-chick style, and she wrote or co-wrote everything here, including "Dahlonega," with a sharp eye for piercing detail. She has a serious gift.

Folk singer Mark Kozelek's remarkable sixth album as Sun Kil Moon feels less like a collection of songs than a series of eulogies delivered in real time.

As a whole, the collection is as indispensable as Either/Or. [31 May 2007, p.96]

This collection (or any compilation for that matter) can’t come close to defining who Cornell truly was. He was multi-talented and a cipher; in some ways, he was impossible to know. But most of his truth appears to be in the music. The challenge is putting the puzzle pieces together.

Subtlety and simplicity also define this set of acoustic songs. But like the verse, the terms understate the power and beauty of the subject at hand.

The music by bands on this kind of eternal blissful bummer trip walks a fine line between bewitching and dire; in the case of Mogwai, it's usually the former.

Streetcore continues the band's lightly amplified muscular-acoustic sound.

The fourth album from Detroit's Danny Brown is the year's most thrilling cry for help.

Her own voice just grows stronger, literally and figuratively: On "Wild Fire," advising a lover or frenemy to "stop playing that shit out on me," she's a wordy folk-soul queen of entirely her own making.

Her latest firmly establishes her as a singer-songwriter to be reckoned with.

The tricks and miracles of Things Have Changed are manifold. Half of its 12 tracks restore life to songs that were dead-on-arrival on Dylan albums from 1979 to 1989; the rest reshapes more essential parts of the legend.

Megan’s own flow is musical enough to offer its own hooks without outside ornamentation. A track like “Body” shows Megan’s pop strengths as she stretches the title into a stream of ody-ody-odys so bouncy you can practically see booties popping to the beat.

Newcomers will hear a seductively pretty indie-pop record, while their still-ballooning cult can marvel at the sound of their iridescent melodies turning autumn-gold.

Already a front-runner for 2009's most gushed-over art-rock record, the third disc from this Brooklyn quartet has a sound that is completely its own.

Ultimately it’s the spirit of adventure that runs through the entire enterprise that makes the diversity feel perfectly coherent, and timely. The future, after all, belongs to the young.

It's at once attention-deficient and micromanaged, exhilarating and aggravating.

She perfects [her] approach on this set of elegant synth ballads, confiding hopes and heartbreaks in tones that command attention without ever chewing the scenery.

Both a love letter to Wilco's dedicated fans and a definitive live statement from America's foremost rock impressionists. [3 Nov 2005, p.88]

Not since Bob and Doug McKenzie have two jokers nailed the clod-metal aesthetic so accurately: Nearly every lyric here comes straight from your high school's bathroom wall.

His tunes are full of warm, woozy singsong charm.

Her unusual harmonies with Plant on "Highway Song" and the hypnotic "Ohio" match anything from his celebrated Raising Sand LP.

Another baffling, winning, neopsychedelic recording.

Though hip-hop gets more melodic and vocally expressive every year, Pusha keeps his cadences steely and his bars hitting like haymakers, maintaining that ice-cold Nineties feel even when he’s taking on modern troubles.

Twenty years after their debut, Yo La Tengo are in full command.

The only thing A New Career in a New Town is missing, at least for the diehard fans who would buy a lavish box set like this, is more of everything – more rarities, more photos, more stories. But that's also precisely why this period in Bowie's career remains captivating. There's enough curious music here to last several lifetimes.

Shaw tries to sing here and there (notably on “Driver’s Story”) but Dry Cleaning’s words and music seem to work best together when they’re working independently of each other. The band’s peers in the sing-speak/post-punk group Wet Leg do a better job overall of conjuring joy from the marriage of poetry and music but what Dry Cleaning do feels unique.

Raw-hearted bursts of bald guitar churn backing lyrics that hunger for meaning in terms that'd be corny if the music didn't hit so hard.

There's emo in the tortured lyrics and E Street Band in the arrangements, both appropriate for a Jersey crew. And the sizzling, storage-locker production makes it all sound like a cage match.

Everett demonstrates disarming wit, tear-stained awareness and heavenly loser love.

Virtually all of these songs and recordings have held up beautifully. [28 Oct 2004, p.104]

What gives the album life, though, is Nastasia's airy, intimate voice.

The lyrics on Old Ideas reach for the stark power of prayers, hymns and religious riddles.

Fist-pumpable rock with brains, heart and words worth coming back to. [5 Oct 2006, p.69]

Shepherd is among London's most sought-after DJs, known for marathon sets that span everything from disco's deepest cuts to feel-good hip-hop. But here he steps away from those club sounds in favor of a fully immersive experience that's unbounded by genre.

Neko Case's clarion pipes remain the calling card, but on her 8th studio LP, between lyrics and vocal arrangements, they've never channeled more imagination or sense of purpose.

What makes this more than glib is a golden-era songwriting craft evidently shaped by Tillman's tenure with Fleet Foxes, and his unsparing self-examination.

With its sturdy songcraft and mostly straightforward arrangements, Two Hands is not a revelation so much as a reinforcement and welcome reminder of Big Thief’s greatest strengths.

Hard to stomach. [19 Oct 2006, p.134]

It's sometimes silly but also undeniably soothing.

Home Video is her greatest work yet — a cohesive and poignant collection of tales from her teenage years in Richmond, Virginia. These stories are woven like a quilt, with several dark patches reminiscent of her hero Bruce Springsteen’s The River.

In short, it’s Björk at her absolute Björkiest.

The energy never sags and ideas never flag.

June has never sounded more fully and thrillingly herself than she does on her latest album, The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, which merges pop ambition, folksy open-heartedness and blues wisdom.

With her third record, Miranda Lambert remains country's most refreshing act, and not just because she makes firearms seem like a matter-of-fact female accessory.

Unlike past efforts, where their narratives relied on a heavy dose of dark humor, the songs on Interstate Gospel convey a much more intimate personal urgency. The result, from the housewife harmony blues on “Best Years of My Life” to Lambert’s haunting post-divorce balladry on “Masterpiece,” is a sharply-rendered sketch of bruised hearts and shaken souls that amounts to the group’s most moving work to date.

On This Stupid World, the forlorn ambience is more lived-in and close-to-home than it’s ever seemed in the past. ... A record like this makes easing towards the abyss feel a little less painful.

There's plenty of intellect on Tomorrow's Harvest but not nearly as much soul; like an intricate artifact found preserved in a glacier, this album is impressive to behold, but cold to the touch.

On Love in Exile, they’re confident enough in their abilities to merge and meld into something simpler but no less impressive. No definitions required.

This Is Why is Paramore’s excellent foray into post-punk, riddled with a new set of anxieties — from witnessing global events to dealing with entering your thirties.

Strange Mercy is visceral, vivid stuff: When Clark announces, amid a Roxy Music-style glam racket, that she's seen the northern lights ("Northern Lights"), you'll swear you can see them too.