Guillemots are constructing their own universe and inviting interested parties to join them within it. I can’t remember the last time a band did that so effectively and so invitingly.

Not every classic song from the era is here, but yes, if you do choose to own only one Tropicália disc, then this should be the one.

A complete album of epic scale, musical significance and a highly prescient lesson in listening, participating and challenging.

He exudes a level of charisma matched only by Ludacris on a global scale.

There are thirteen tracks here spread over 50 minutes, but not once does the quality or pace dip below thrilling. Every track is bursting with ideas and inspired moments.

They’ve cleaned up their grungy guitar lines (thank you Sub Pop), reworked a few of the best songs from their early EPs, and the result is undoubtedly the best contender for the Arcade Fire/Broken Social Scene-helm of 2005.

Savane stands out both as Ali Farka Touré’s masterpiece, and as one of contemporary African music’s finest achievements to date.

Before The Poison isn’t flashy, and it’s likely to get overlooked, but it may just be the single best album Marianne Faithfull has ever put her name to.

Battles unite process and expression, making playing that’s as quantized and mechanical as Kraftwerk sound as wild and urgent as Albert Ayler.

I've listened to this album more than anything else released this year, and I still don't feel like I've fully explored its depths.

It’s a swaggering, spitting, utterly contemporary album of politically dissident, sexually forthright Anglo-Sri Lankan dubstep bhangra hip-pop IDM in which M.I.A. stars as protagonist, antagonist, chanteuse, MC, exotic schoolgirl tease, graphic artist, chastiser of the immoral, and fun-loving London-living party girl. And all in under 40 minutes, too. It’s special. We’ve not heard it’s like before.

Oh No is, if anything, even better than their debut, which now feels like it was trying a bit too hard. Everything feels more natural this time, slightly less polished but still as forceful and hooky.

You could of course, if you like, rip the best tracks from each album and burn them together into some kind of RIAA-baiting SuperLoveBoxxx CDR that creams all opposition with its x-ray vision, amazing strength and ability to leap multiple genres in a single bound, but that would be missing the point.

While they’ve enlarged their presence on record, they’ve also peopled their songs with themes and accusations more resonant than Funeral’s mournfulness.

It could be the soundtrack to death, love, pain, strength, joy, suffering, courage, despair, and faith all at the same time.

An astonishing act of rejuvenation and reclamation, the album may just be the group’s best to date, and solidly reestablishes Eleanor and Matthew as progenitors of brilliantly exciting, mind-scrambling pop.

Valende is really a more significant album than a lot of people seem to be giving it credit for being, and one hopes that it will be remembered as such.

There is a contingent of hip-hop fans who have been impatiently waiting at least since Madvillainy for a record rooted in tradition that offers something just a bit more skewed and challenging. Abandoned Language is that album.

Ultimately, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead displays a type of artistic growth almost alien to the genre.

The genius of Wearemonster is that Mueller takes the clarity and mobility of house and synergizes it with the overabundance of melodies, textures, theories, and arrangement schemes found in IDM.

Hayes’ performance on this album is so stellar one wonders why others don’t shoot this high.

With Game Theory, the Roots have finally delivered on nearly every once-broken promise.

Miranda Lambert is at a very rarified place right now, turning her songs into vehicles for a persona that transcends background narrative and personal history. This is Jagger, Bowie, Debbie Harry, and early MJ territory.

Never in his career has McCartney seemed more serious in tone and more aware of the play of his lyrics as poetry.

Wilderness is Prewitt’s most accomplished solo effort to date. He has craftily corralled the large scale orchestral sweep of White Sky, but kept the intimacy of the guitar/voice confessionalism of Gerroa Songs.

This is a quietly pulsing release, alive with simple pleasures and celebrating events like hanging out and running into people you know.

I always felt as if those moments of triumph in the band’s music were the focal points, the “good stuff” you waited for and wanted to arrive and then stay forever. This time around though, they appear to have taken a backseat to the band’s darker impulses, and staggeringly, Takk sounds all the better for it.

In a voice that shifts from pout to growl in a beat’s time, M.I.A.'s verses and hooks are as mercurial in tone as the backing tracks.