Essentially, you get one disc on which Godspeed You Black Emperor tinkers with their sound a little bit, and one on which they deliver exactly what you've been expecting. That's a good mix.

While The Argument may not be as bracing as their groundbreaking work from a decade ago, it crystallizes the strengths of four musicians hitting every mark.

Their expanded sound, with its explosions of noise and romantic swells, deserves reconsideration by fans and skeptics alike.

Can Our Love... is a minimalistic jewel, a soul wonder and an anomaly in a pop world.

They now trade in a world of startlingly bleak, matte-black liquid-crystal experimental pop perfection pitched somewhere between John Cage's frightening austerity and the bittersweet squall of Swell Maps. Art-pop doesn't get any more accessible than this.

Revealing itself slowly, like the mythic tales acknowledged by the album's title, Folklore is certainly Sixteen Horsepower's most stunning and accomplished work yet, and an easy nominee for one of 2002's best.

This is not a happy album, but it might be a great one, taking the Western swagger of Dog in the Sand into bleak and stunning territory.

Though sampling has been done to death, the stealthiness which which Deakin and Franglen incorporate their borrowed material will be required study for wannabe producers and hop-headz; in that regard, it's on a par with the seminal Paul's Boutique.

As spectacularly successful as the Tindersticks have been in their tribute to the horror of Trouble Every Day, I'm hoping for a lighter confection from their next collaboration with Denis -- something more along the lines of Nenette et Boni.

Madvillainy isn't really an inaccessible record. It may take a couple of spins for you to get involved, but once you've passed that initial adaptation, it stays with you.

Ghosts of the Great Highway easily ranks among the very best of Kozelek's dense discography, and it seems fair to suggest that it will become the measuring stick against which any future non-Red House Painters material is compared.

In a hip-hop world ruled by clichéd production and watered-down beats, a sound so simultaneously funky and strange is, to say the least, a welcome change.

Metric take rock 'n' roll to a smarter, more sophisticated place than do most of today's American bands.

Pawn Shoppe Heart is the most electrifying album to have trawled its way out of the Detroit gutter in ages, effortlessly showing up [The White Stripes'] White Blood Cells in the process.

Even taking into account his work with the Replacements, this is the album on which every song is truly worth hearing.

The bottom line is that QOTSA turns in another genre-demolishing, hard-as-titanium album in Songs for the Deaf. This is not your father's metal. It's better.

It’s quite a feat to create an album that is not only haunting, but uncompromisingly beautiful and utterly serene.

As good as Loss was (and make no mistake, it was very, very good), Us improves on it in virtually every way.

Rounds contains a new underlying sonic scrape that is brisk and windy and distinctly more dynamic than Hebden's previous, more placid outings, but the signature dense soul of his work is the same.

Man-Made is among the finest collections of pop songs any of us will hear all year.

No, it's not the new White Stripes record -- it's something infinitely better.

Hayden has released an album of magnificent proportions.

Skimskitta is a beautiful album. It is warm and enveloping. It is full of shadows but flashes with brilliance. It is oblique, yet often familiar. It is intelligent, inventive and inspiring. And it is very hard to put into words.

The band has revealed a seething, visceral, rocking side of their music.... a shimmering Album Of The Year contender.

A winning combination of hip-hop beats, horns, strings and cinematic soundscapes, the album is spiced with precise scratching and effectively abrupt changes in direction.

Haunting, gorgeously inward-looking, yet laced with memorable melodies, Feathers is Dead Meadow's strongest work ever and an early contender for one of 2005's best records.

This is sensual, prophetic, dense and romantic, sumptuous and altogether eerie.

An exciting return to the days of the imaginative songwriter.