While many rock and electronic groups amble pleasantly along without a musical thought in their heads, country's combination of tradition and musicianship just keeps producing albums, like Chinatown, of a really tremendous caliber.

It's classy, but also honest. Not a single emotion seems overplayed or exaggerated; you'll dance and sway to it because each song feels as organic as life, and the life it documents is nicely lit.

After a couple of trips through Trust, you might feel like I did -- uncertain whether you'd just had the best sex of your life, witnessed an astonishingly moving church service, or attended the funeral of a life-long friend.

This is the smartest fun music (and the most fun smart music) I've heard this year.

The Wrens experiment with sounds and textures you don't normally hear in so-called "rock" records, but unlike many groups, they manage to do this in a way that attracts attention without upstaging the actual music. And the songwriting just keeps getting better; there isn't a lackluster track in the bunch.

Again raises the standard for thoughtful, well-crafted pop.

As spiritual as Talib Kweli, as musically complex as Mos Def, as joyfully syncopated as the Roots, Power in Numbers sets the standard for intelligent hip hop.

Woman King's songs are decidedly textured, rich with rhythm and reason, myth and melody.

Yours, Mine, and Ours is a fantastic album. In fact, it's one of the best things I've heard so far this year. On the other hand, I can count at least three other albums that bear the Joe Pernice stamp that are better than this.

Call it the exclamation point on Gibbard's stratospheric year.

Heart is an exceptional sophomore effort, bursting at the seams with pop content, but the prism through which it travels bends it, taints it and humanizes it in ways that are at once soul-clenching and unpretentious.

Aside from being a strikingly orchestrated affair that ranks among Quasi's best work, Hot Shit! is the fully-realized version of Quasi that Coomes has envisioned since the beginning.

Not only has Grohl released a fantastic album, he has done a wonderful job giving several aging metal vocalists another fifteen minutes of fame.

The Shins' second effort sparkles with a clarity that was not always evident on their debut and energizes with a spark and an enthusiasm that previously seemed forced.

Team Boo is Mates of State's best album to date.

Naturally, this much theatrical -- but never facetious -- pomp and prettiness can be heavy, but it's never overbearing. Surprisingly, given the album's gravitas, it's relatively easy to enjoy in a single sitting. And another after that.

The Instinct is a showcase for an amazing voice and a band that knows how to build around it.... One of the best albums of 2003.

Wonderland is the sound of a band embracing and then discarding its past in order to forge ahead into a new tomorrow.... Undoubtedly one of the group's finest recorded moments.

It is infectious in the best and most viral sense of the word -- the songs get under your skin and thrash around.

It's hard to imagine a band coming along this year with a better or more enjoyable debut.

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.

Recorded with an ear for detail but guided by a loose hand, this is the most open, welcoming Cat Power album yet.

Indolent, perturbed and volatile, Amazing Grace finds Pierce checking his wide-screen Spectorian visions at the studio door; he has opted, instead, for a coarse mix of electrified Southern gospel and somnabulent balladeering that has produced the most urgent Spiritualized album since Electric Mainline.

Love and Hate sounds fantastic, alternately steeped in warm, old school funk and terse, bubbly electroclash.

While it delivers the triumphant rock 'n' roll thrills and oddball incantations promised by the GBV "brand", the most surprising thing about Earthquake Glue is that, at a point in his career when his inventiveness really should be waning (along with his libido and his prostate), Robert Pollard's creative spark seems brighter than ever.

It's rare that a band can recreate such a broad measure of emotions with such a soft palette.

A gorgeous work of art.

Whether the band is shakin' its collective art-rock ass to syncopated beats or barreling through treble-infused dueling guitar throwdowns, there's never a dull moment here.

It's powerful, clever, and you can dance to it.

The relentless sweetness may be off-putting to some... but it'll be difficult for all but the most jaded listeners to avoid being charmed by Of Montreal's appealing melodies and whimsical innocence-recaptured lyrics.

The group has created an album filled not only with the timeless pop hooks you have come to expect but with the anthemic swagger that is the hallmark of many of the great rock recordings of the last 30 years.

Waiting For The Moon is a welcome and singularly strong addition to one of the most impressive catalogues in modern music.

It's as important to women in hip-hop as Joni Mitchell, Madonna and Sleater-Kinney were to their respective genres.

The complexity and depth of the songs has increased; the band sounds less like they're trying to channel The Pixies, and more like they're reaching toward the sublime.

One of the few discs I've encountered that not only attempts to be something more than a simple album, but succeeds.

Perhaps there's nothing here as immediately catchy as "Tally Ho!" or "Getting Older", but the latter-day Clean are still amazingly good.

This is great stuff, and a significant advance over both of Comets on Fire's previous albums.

A Healthy Distrust is impressively fluid; Francis fuses his experimental leanings and newer mainstream hip-hop allowances with ease.

The question is not whether Medúlla is brilliant; insofar as this can be objectively asserted, it most certainly is. The question is really, Do you like Björk? Do you like her a lot? Obviously, a Björk a capella album is going to be lost on you if you never really liked her vocal style in the first place.

No more fancy studios, no more high priced producers; this is truly GBV as nature intended -- reckless, hook-laden and drunk as hell.

While the music behind the lyrics doesn't exactly bristle with innovation, it's the best blend of acoustic and electronic instruments I've heard.

Everyone Deserves Music excels beyond simple good intentions because Franti and Spearhead are also at peace with their musical influences.

Intentionally or not, it creates a sort of natural, autumnal closure -- like a gorgeous, lazy, completely uncommitted fall afternoon delivered in three- to five-minute slices.

As you've come to expect, a small amount of the material sounds utterly fantastic and there's a solid chunk that's barely audible, but whether it's delivered with a coating of fuzz or a liberal gloss of studio sheen, Pollard's gumdrop melodies and fantastical lyrical phrasing keep us coming back for more.

The Real New Fall LP is as solid and interesting as anything the group has released in the last ten years.

While everything here is generally good or great, Hello continues the trend of most other Half Japanese and solo Jad Fair releases, in that the slow, Jonathan Richman-like songs shine most strongly.

Nothing's Lost is slick and rich, packed with melody and rhythm.

Vocalists Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan connect with their audience with the breathy ease of scenester storytellers, sketching out their tales in economical but well-chosen strokes, and the tunes behind them, invariably elegant, are often deceptively cheeerful.

With Teeth's biggest surprise is how immediately gratifying the majority of its songs are.

Despite the obviously electronic origins of most of the sounds, there are clearly thinking, imagining humans behind the scenes; this is about as un-clinical as electronic music gets.

Father Divine is that rare album that's conscious of its diversity without being pretentious about it

Their strongest effort to date.

Write good songs. Record them simply. Don't preach. There's a concept that works.

Though it isn't the staggering atom bomb that was Turn on the Bright Lights, Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid is intermittently brilliant and wholly accomplished, establishing Elefant as more than a flash in the pan.

The Double combine unsettling electronic noise with simple, enjoyable vocal hooks to create a rickety, rattletrap pop collage that's too undeniably ear-catching to ignore.

It is refreshing to encounter an album that does a number of different things well rather than sticking to a tried and true formula.

The Posies' latest effort offers five power-pop gems that match the best efforts of this veteran Seattle band.

If Kurt Cobain had been popular in high school, Ronald Reagan had funneled billions of dollars into improving America's inner cities and the Chemical Brothers had found fulfilling positions in video rental management, all albums might sound like 604.

The album sounds full whether you're in the next room or sitting right beside the speakers. Details -- a horn here, a steel guitar there, a lilting piano figure that appears out of the ether -- fill every cranny in a sound that's still as spacious as Giant Sand's Southwestern soundtracks.

Homesongs is his minor key playground, filled with masterpieces in the making. All you have to do to enjoy them is slow... down...

Electric Version does little to alter the successful New Pornographers formula. It's a longer, louder and (most importantly) more assured album than its predecessor, but if you liked Mass Romantic, you won't be disappointed. And if you disliked Mass Romantic, you may have a difficult time telling the two albums apart.

What this strange cast of characters eventually creates is a groovy mish-mash of up/down tempo breaks, hip-pop sound collages and the odd bout of guitar-driven frenzy that, while nearly impossibly to dance to, manages to expose most other DJs as the talentless, not to mention painfully derivative crate-raiders they truly are.

Rarely has rampant misogyny and self-hype sounded as fantastic as this.

The more I listen to The Sword of God, the more I appreciate Quasi’s ability to create smoothly flowing, catchy songs without sacrificing their trademark complexity. My only problem with this album is that the whole package is just so drenched in irony...

Lacking the full-on roar of Motor City compatriots like the White Stripes and the Go, the 'Wings employ a more classic pop-oriented approach to their songcraft, resulting in songs that replace the aforementioned groups' immediacy and vigor with simple restraint and cultivated sophistication.

Zoomer has a warmth and spirit that makes the work endearing as actual songs rather than chunks of carefully manipulated data.

While my inclination is to recommend A Feather in the Engine to everyone without reservation, the disc is actually best suited to more advanced listeners -- that is, those of you for whom sing-along pop songs are not a prerequisite for enjoying an album.

[A] decisive step in a darker, weirder direction.

Darnielle's willingness to throw himself so completely into collaboration is what makes this effort such a triumph.

What’s Next to the Moon is Kozelek achieving the impossible; he has actually managed to make AC/DC sound romantic.

One of the most playful end-of-the-world concept albums ever created.