A manically strange, darkly and violently beautiful, and deliriously pop album.

What really makes Wincing the Night Away succeed is how the Shins’ moneymaker templates evolve into more complex tapestries. In a manner similar to the New Pornos, the third album becomes the most successful due to an implied heft that comes from a concerted effort to sound like a band rather than a singer-songwriter vehicle.

Despite the chill of "Dormant Love," A Vintage Burden might just be the best summer LP you’ll hear this year--perfect timing.

Stillmatic features the best rhymes from Nas since his debut, Illmatic, and possibly the best rhymes of the year, rivaled maybe only by Ghostface Killah’s Bulletproof Wallets. Nas rhymes wonderfully on every song, dropping knowledge like.

Out Hud’s shift to house-pop may not be the group ‘coming into its own,’ but it does throw aside the burden of influences that S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D. had attached to it.

The quality level is almost inhumanly high, and the range of the tracks here gives you a better idea of what the band is like than any of their individual albums.

It's one of the few Europop albums that not only deserves worldwide domination, but also has a really good chance of achieving it.

No Shouts, No Calls isn’t just their most song-based work, it’s also their most romantic.

If you come expecting a great album full of hit singles, you won’t get it. If you come with an open mind, what will greet you is the opening chapter of a tale about a girl living through music, remembering through music, exploring her art and herself, starting out to create something special and different.

A diverse batch of songs that she brings together as a consistent set, showcasing Yearwood as not just a fine singer, but also a just-gets-better-and-better artist.

Musically, at least, it’s the most accomplished thing he’s ever done.

Every moment screams to be played a little bit louder and a little bit longer; because Playing the Angel is just that good.

Labor Days is a wonderfully complex piece of work.

Each song glows with infinitesimal joys, tiny pointillist production flourishes noticeable only under close scrutiny. But in rounding out their sound, they brought the viewer close enough to see the brushstrokes and the smudges.

Few albums made in recent memory sound this harrowing or this painful, yet even fewer have such a true sense of catharsis.

None Shall Pass may or may not be the best album in Aesop Rock’s discography, but it might be the most fun to listen to. Call it his San Francisco Renaissance.

Nick Franglen and Fred Deakin rarely miss with this album.

In Rainbows, then, is Radiohead as straight and lean as they’ve ever sounded.

Like Blueberry Boat, this is a triumphant album of good bits.

The compressed, cleaned-up ferocity of Hypermagic Mountain is a leap of refinement in every way, a sign that the band, while lushly unripe, is ripening gracefully.

An excellent album.

Most of it... feels as weighty and emotive as Sleater Kinney, or as seductive as Mary Timony in the mid-90s: fully-formed, feminine indie rock.

As an album, WIW seems to have sprung fully-formed from a single night’s restlessness; often more organic than much of his debut, but still with a steady electro-backed pulse, its pacing and sequencing flow like water beneath a frozen creek, barely seen and mostly imagined.

The Greatest isn’t perfect, but its stumbles are neither intrusive nor damning.

With the multifarious tributaries flowing effortlessly into the whole, I Thought I Was Over That has a diverse coherence that is hard to define and establishes itself as a distinct entity in its own right.

With Phantom Punch Sondre Lerche finally makes good on the promise of his talent; he’s mastered and polished his intuitive gift for melody and arrangement and rightly applied it to his most natural musical inclinations.

Fury is a twelve step sequence of poisonous, caustic, and lithe rap.

The fact that Hot Chip can take all these conflicting moods, string them together, and make of them a satisfying whole is testament to their understanding of the classic rubric of the pop album—an identifiable, unique sound that has enough room to allow for variety and enough consistency to keep the listener's attention.