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.

Pagode will probably be the best love album of the year (and maybe one of the best, period) because Zé has always understood that you can explore feelings without just expressing them.

A wild and beautiful ride.

If you’re already among the converted, Random Spirit Lover is a second straight masterpiece from arguably the most talented songwriter of this generation.

On almost every level, Jeff Tweedy and Co. have concocted the perfect follow-up to an epochal, career-defining record--taking greater risks and yielding deeper rewards--and finding more challenging ways to channel pain that just won’t quit.

Without relying on a crutch of irony and cynicism, they boldly risk sounding cloying in order to summon the emotional honesty necessary to create music that is unabashedly romantic and achingly beautiful.

The squeaky-clean production of Misery Is a Butterfly has been smudged, sanded, and weathered.

Finally--a Go-Betweens album with the clarinet solos, harmonies, programmed drums, and splendor this band needs. Oceans Apart really sounds bright yellow and bright orange.

The subtle backing musicians never overshadow Callahan’s reedy baritone and direct lyrics; they merely add subtle shading and light in the appropriate spots--a restraint reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s use of studio musicians on laid-back classics like John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline.

While their sound has become immensely creepier, it has also improbably become more beautiful.

It isn’t the sort of artistic statement that promises to change anyone’s life, but it’s no less a great work of escapist art, the sort of essential record I’d pick for any hypothetical list of desert island necessities.

Where Last Exit was indebted to the clubbier side of dance pop--with its tendency to wind songs around Dark’s close-clipped beats--So This Is Goodbye is a post-aught pop record first and foremost, an elegant, spacious collection of flash-frozen R&B and soft disco laments.

From Here We Go Sublime may not be an evolution for Willner, but it’s a singular distillation of his talents into one album. Mixing gauzy shoegaze, slippery ambient loops, and two-cheeks-on-the-floor bass drum bounce, the Field offers an idyllic work of startling novelty, and perhaps ‘techno’’s most widely appreciable offering in years.

This is the best pop album of the year and what Ashlee Simpson wishes to be.

Rarely has a band created a world-space so monolithic yet provided a listener with so many easy routes to the interior.

Boxer is a National album through and through but blessed with a restraint and self-assuredness of a band on top of its game, resulting in a startling masterpiece on par with Turn on the Bright Lights, Bows & Arrows, or any other austere tribute to urban alienation you care to name.

The Sunset Tree is one of the most volatile, affecting and coherent records he’s made yet.

Whereas before Embrace always harboured that tendency to fuss over minutiae, to pore over every detail with such attention that betrayed self-consciousness, their fourth studio album, Out Of Nothing, finally sees them free of their own fastidiousness.

The feeling I'm left with, after 'Your Hand In Mine' ebbs away, is that I may never need another instrumental album like this again. The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place has already provided what may be the ideal version. And for that, it is absolutely essential.

Her adventurous and, yes, massive, persona is allowed to wander wherever it wants on The Cookbook, be it avant or common.

Up In Flames is a record in love with music made by a music lover, futurepsychenoisebeatpop that reaffirms how much fun music can and ought to be.

You may not get to sing along, but this is not ambient music; it is immersive and involving.

Most of Boy in Da Corner's most compelling moments come from this uneasy interaction between irrational youth and ultra-rational mechanized society.

A full realization of a band at the top of their game, filled with intricate guitar pop of the highest order.

While there is lots of good, even great music out there, not much of it even begins to touch Neko’s passion.

In a year that’s produced first-rate albums by OutKast and Lucinda Williams, Bubba, a self-proclaimed redneck from rural Georgia who most people pegged as a probable one-hit wonder three years ago, has beaten the odds and made both the hip-hop and country album of the year.

The naysayers do not understand. Their expectations hamstring them.... Like the glass sculptures featured in the artwork it is precise, transparent, dangerously fragile, and ominously lit. 100th Window is a masterpiece of its kind.

There is a clear passion and enthusiasm in Grohl’s instrumentals and a potency and power in the performance of every singer.

Burn, Piano Island, Burn is an album that must first be listened to twice: once to wrap your head around its peerless vigor and skull-rattling force, and again to revel in its restless creativity.

Cast of Thousands is a great record, beautiful and emotionally powerful as well as musically inventive... a refinement and extension of their vision that will emerge as one of the best records of the year.

There seem to be enough ideas, stories, counter-melodies and references here for three albums worth of material - if for that reason alone, Hobo Sapiens ought to be one of the avant-pop templates for years to come.

Played start-to-finish, New York Noise begins to cohere into a joyously multi-hued mass, where hip-hop is a natural cousin of atonal noise, where minimalism becomes the perfect complement to funk, and where not even the skronked-out mess of DNA or the melodramatic ultra-seriousness of Glenn Branca can get in the way of a good party.

Queens Of The Stone Age are the greatest heavy rock band on the face of the planet and soon everyone will know it.

The most wildly inventive, exploratory, unafraid, surprising, nonsensical, and flat out funkiest single I’ve heard all year.

Hole’s original précis was to become something like Sonic Youth crossed with Fleetwood Mac, and America’s Sweetheart is the closest she’s come to creating that vision.

Soul Journey might sound downbeat and lonesome, wistful and dusty, but this is gospel music compared to what went before.

They rock hard and fast and damn the stylistic similarities, because they have as much energy and explosive tendencies that even the Stooges themselves showed back in their heyday.

The net result is an amazing pileup of discount psychedelia and stoner rock grind, with ample doses of ecstatic amplifier brutality thrown in to explode any ham-fisted accusations of classic rock necrophilia.

Such are The Clientele’s gifts that its hard to believe The Violet Hour is only their debut album; few bands with more impressive vintages and prolific back-catalogues have managed to make records as touching, cohesive and deeply seeped in their own character as The Clientele have here.

In its ambition, emotion, aggression and intelligence, Kick Up The Fire, And Let The Flames Break Loose is a work of sheer bloody genius.

The Eraser is a triumph.

If The Unfairground doesn’t quite qualify as a "stunning" return to form--"stunning" never really being Ayers’ stock in trade--it certainly represents the delightful and unexpected renaissance of a perennially undervalued artist, whose quiet but significant influence is long overdue for re-assessment.

Edan has lowered his tone, beefed up his content, mastered an independent, creative production style and crafted a concise album that makes a strong stab for early album of the year bids.

Each of their albums so far has been misleading because none of them have really caught what Embrace are about properly, who they are. This New Day, warts and all, finally does that.

If Louden Up Now was the sound of !!! trying to integrate their fusion of conflicting ideas and failing admirably, Myth Takes is the band not giving a damn and succeeding improbably at something even more interesting.

Whereas the somewhat timid and searching De-Loused in the Comatorium was all about surprising audience, critic, and probably the band itself, Frances the Mute is a self-assured organic animal that should come as no surprise to anyone.

Simply put, either you’ll love this album or not “get” it. It’s too good an album for you to not like if you understand it.

Snaith’s newest album, Andorra, merges "Milk’s" heady sense of immediacy with a clear and consumable swiftness.

Noah’s Ark proves, again, that the Casady sisters are perhaps at the forefront of the overlabored ‘freak-folk’ scene.

Their previous efforts have now paid off, culminating in a condensed treatise of confusion, longing, and maturation.

Current yet sounding potentially classic already... Reznor forces himself further into the mainstream with With Teeth--but on his own terms.

It’s still identifiably Low, but richer and more diverse than before.

Feels is a near-stunning album a notable amount of the time.

The National are able to pack as much power into the songs on Alligator as any of the more heralded indie-rock bands working right now, only The National have taken the common influences and grafted them into something altogether fresh and remarkable.

It’s the band’s throatiest, most pressing and urgent release to date.

While Ys is ridiculously overwritten, over-performed and self-contained, her fables always sublimate into the hot fog of real emotions just before they calcify.

Bows and Arrows is an album of grandiose pleasures, the sound of a band not just making good on the promise of their debut, but expanding every which way at once, merging distinctive songcraft with decadent theatrics, and tethering themselves to a confidence that they, unlike others, will survive the sea-change of a deflating scene.

This is their radio-rock record, and it's not a tribute, it's as close to the real thing as they've come since they actually had a chance at radio play back in the '90s.

Aerial isn’t perfect, but it is magnificent.

Throughout The College Dropout, Kanye subverts cliches from both sides of the hip-hop divide, which again isn’t unprecedented, but still refreshing and revelatory coming from someone who could have just as easily stood pat on his massive Midas-producer stacks.

The debut album was good, but this is better. Much, much better; the kind of record I will happily and willingly return to long after this review is dead and buried.

Here are nine really communicative almost-pop songs, subdued but no less ambitious follow-ups to similar tendencies on 2005’s The Runners Four.

Jones simply feels more involved in the music on 100 Days.

It doesn’t matter how well you can thrash or shred if it doesn’t sound good, and rarely does a section of Bang Bang Rock and Roll sound as if it wasn’t well thought-out and created with the intent to entertain.

Watch out for this guy’s next album, because I can guarantee it will contain a Top 40 hit. Go ahead and listen to him now so as to impress your friends later.

This is the Prince album we wanted Musicology to be.

There is very little on Operate that sounds like anywhere Gomez have been before.

Ce is Caetano Veloso's 40th album—and the first in many years to make the hairs on the back of one's neck stand up.

Features some of Madlib’s most difficult and most accomplished production work to date.

Spirit If... may be the second-best record any of those associated with Broken Social Scene have issued--whether together, apart, or kind of both.

This debut will not be the record of their career and leaves me wanting more already, but it is the right record at the right time and a stupidly profound and convincing debut that is up there with the best releases of the year thus far.