Close listening is rewarding--the boys have a knack for crafting intricate songs that lean heavily on texture and subtle interplay--but perhaps a bit too gentle.

More than with either Mutations or Sea Change, you can hear Godrich’s rich instrumental layering beneath the rhythms.... Still, at fifteen tracks and over an hour, perhaps Beck needed a stiff editor more than the comfort of a familiar producer.

THS’s move toward a purer aping of classic rock is mostly welcome and largely successful; the fallout is the loss of the band’s snaky, blunt riffing, their wit dissipating into a pool of honest rocking.

This collection actually betters the previous one in terms of diversity, but unfortunately it also gives you the sense that you’ve heard it all before.

The Dears are now less idiosyncratic but have successfully made the kind of straightforwardly satisfying album that you'd expect from a band on their second decade.

Tempting as it may be to assume that beefing up their sound would have automatically made the Decemberists markedly better, the truth is that these strides may have at least partially come at the expense of the things that always made the band so singularly compelling.

Unfortunately, the magic of [the] first three songs is never captured again.

The majority of Nastasia’s guitar-and-piano bit parts are full bodied and masterful, overshadowing many big-footed leading ladies’ recent folk releases.

For Hero: For Fool is a complete work from artists working at the top of their game.

As beguiling as much of Under the Skin is, these songs would benefit from the Mac’s supple, still-underrated rhythm section.

Beach House’s debut is consistently candlelit, worn at its lacy edges, and at once vertiginous and embracing, somehow residing both at the hearth and on an icy precipice.

Unlike its Fridmann-produced predecessor Dreamt For Light Years employs a stripped-down approach more akin to its debut.

Knives is a quietly simmering LP.

Human Animal comes off as a less directly brutal assault than its predecessor. It sounds a hell of a lot better cranked to ten, though, its contours more explicit, the sounds sharpened to a steely point.

Release Therapy may not be the mature Ludacris record it purports itself to be, but that isn’t to say it doesn’t have some jaw-dropping confessional moments.

As an introductory My Morning Jacket mixtape, Okonokos is top-shelf.

The songs here are superb, the arrangements and production nearly perfect, and Jackson’s singing is the best of his career.

Rather than winning over new converts, AWOO’s main achievement might be to delineate, skilfully but inescapably, the outer boundaries of its creators’ artistic reach.

Ben Kweller may not sum up Kweller, but it’s a worthy personal statement from a popster whose chops keep getting better.

It’s been years since he sounded this responsive and attentive.

Fiasco is actually an absolutely dazzling emcee and a genuinely nuanced personality, and both of these things are incredibly rare in hip-hop in 2006.

TV on the Radio have crafted a work of immense, cataclysmic, almost overwhelming power and righteous fire.

The transition from tracks to songs forces the group to rein in a style that needs to be no-holds-barred. When Basement Jaxx uses this restraint to their advantage... it’s easy to buy the direction they taken. When it doesn’t, Crazy Itch Radio just makes the group appear dense.

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.

Pieces of the People We Love is a great funky dance record with guitars, and not much more. Luckily, it doesn’t need to be.

No dispute: Usher, Beyonce, Christina, Britney were just keeping the seat warm: The King’s back on his throne.

Mostly though, it’s status quo.

Buckner’s interest here is in a wallowing mouthful of atmosphere—dominant drums, throbbing guitar, and a fair amount of piano. This has always been the case, but the compositions are seamlessly edited and cleanly brought from instrument to recording.

An album of many highlights but not much visceral or emotional impact.

The language barrier and discord makes the record incomprehensible, but nearly everything is still as intoxicating and entertaining as hell.

Electric Six make junk music for junk times, and they’d be nigh-unbearable if they weren’t so much fun.

Beyoncé has a presence, a character which is totally unique to her, and B’Day’s utterly imbued with it.

A masterful record.

Gala Mill realizes rock polemicist Joe Carducci’s ideal of real-time give-and-take as fully as many of the SST releases he touts in his 1990 book Rock and the Pop Narcotic.

It’s an intriguing and thoughtful and occasionally lively record, but it’s not the rollicking, randy good time some folks would lead you to believe.

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

Wu diehards will see it as a 35-minute core of classic Method Man, while critics should view it as a 60-minute behemoth that's a marked improvement over Tical O and Judgment Day, but still padded with pointless skits and Charmin-soft rap & bullshit.

There’s an attention to detail and storytelling nous built up by those previous concept albums that makes further listening and exploration of Happy Hollow that much more rewarding.

Meaty and encompassing, Future Crayon rarely misses, even if it fails to measure up to the band’s sublime full-lengths.

You could spend an age listing and describing the musical wealth of Damaged... Better just to listen to it, soak it all in, than fail with words.

Get Lonely doesn’t have the full force of any albums in the Mountain Goats catalog.

An immediate and combative disc that blurries up a litany of angers over surprisingly versatile layers of pop-punk guitar thrusting, The Body, The Blood, The Machine is a focused tantrum, irresolute in its actual stances, but pissed and rambunctious enough to overcome its vagaries.

While most of the tracks on The Shining lack the abstract ideas and flow of Donuts, it’s still an admirable record.

While sometimes Classics sees the group straying from their conceptual center, it’s never without Ratatat’s unmistakable identity and indelible gentle humor.

It offers in personality and atmosphere what it lacks in originality.

A truly soulful pop album, at least for one disc, Back to Basics is one of 2006’s best when Linda Perry’s fingerprints aren’t present.

With no foil to Barat’s grumpiness and bitterness, it’s therefore difficult to see anyone getting nearly excited enough to love Dirty Pretty Things as much as many loved The Libertines.

Avatar shows Comets capable of a level of sophistication and skill previously unconsidered.

The question with Christ Illusion, as with any post-Seasons album, is simple: could these songs make it into Slayer's live set? The answer is yes, and more than the usual one or two.

Crucially, he shows all the sides of his personality, making this one of hip-hop’s most well-rounded albums of recent vintage.

ABO keep the music tight and enclosed to match the lyrical mood, making Derdang Derdang a succinct, purposeful statement.

The first chunk of Putting the Days to Bed consists of the kind of big-chorused, proudly conventional pop songs summers are made of... Elsewhere Roderick's voice and lyrical acumen fail him.

With its laptop beats and closely mic’d intimacy, White Bread, Black Beer conforms to the dictates of a creator with endless time to play all the instruments and no one to please but himself, regrettably.

Underneath the big production, Steele writes some great melodies, and that’s the real reason that his sometimes dubious experimentations pay off.

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

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

Despite [some] fine moments, occasionally Van Occupanther can feel a little too slick and one-note.

Like everything this band's made, it's long, sloppy, and uneven, but at this point that's the idea: here are a bunch of people who kind of know each other sitting down with some guitars.

It’s hard to imagine The French Kicks making a great album, given their limited changes so far. That doesn’t change the fact that Two Thousand is a very good one.

Lots of handclaps, woo woo backing vocals, and laughs amid funny observations about contemporary urban hipster life reveal an assured and charming debut.

If Cut Chemist can recreate the effortless fusion of the album's second half, perhaps someday he can make an album worth listening to from beginning to end.

That’s not to say the album is a disappointment (it isn’t) or not great (it is, mostly), but after hitting their creative and commercial peak with Absolution and its subsequent breakthrough stateside, Black Holes and Revelations clearly reveals itself to be a transition record.

Fans of â??classicâ? psychedelic music will find few greater pleasures this year than Happy New Year.

Anyone expecting a pared down, contented Sufjan can bugger off. If anything, The Avalanche chases his caprice and whimsy further down the rabbit hole.

The Eraser is a triumph.

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.

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

Fundamental offers pleasure as rewarding as The Magic Mountain or Glenlivet 18--indulgences best enjoyed as you approach the half-century mark, when your imagination is keen to leisured elongations of familiar tropes or newly appreciative of exotic sumptuousness.

She’s found the perfect collaborator to match her voracious appetite for all things pop.

Leaving Songs sounds a lot like a Tindersticks album, one that eschews their more baroque offerings for mature balladry.

Brightblack Morning Light is an album that knows no restraint, and its palpable excess are the perfect fit for its first-light sensations.

News and Tributes is a solid album, and its high points are worth listening to over and over. Unfortunately, some of the weaker tracks were given primetime slots.

An excellent album.

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.

Lif’s greatest strength remains his pissy paranoia.

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.

A little bit of kitsch is important... Begin to Hope has enough of it to stand out, and enough ethics to keep the whole thing grounded.

At times, as with Segundo, it’s tempting to just let Molina pull you under.

BYOP’s debut cascades on itself. Its compulsive, one-sitting punk is delivered with absolute self-conviction.

The Exchange Session’s second volume retreads the same path that Hebden and Reid took earlier, but they truly go places this time around.

For those of you familiar with the band’s debut, 2004’s Tiger, My Friend, I can make this simple: The Only Thing I Ever Wanted is just as good.

It’s a passionate and at times painful aural experience as a whole, but it’s one that has to be taken from start to finish.

Citrus is an outstanding record because it doesn't fixate on what makes great shoegazer music but what makes great pop music.

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

His effort to make the most tense, uncomfortable record in the world has resulted in something that actually feels pretty straightforward, uncomplicated, and digestible.

Those voices alone are enough to devastate, and they’re the reason this album deserves mention among the year’s best.

The Obliterati succeeds in proving that Mission of Burma is not only capable of a comeback and a return to form, but also has exponential potential to evolve and thrive as a working band.

The excessive genre-bending of their debut has been exchanged for a dilettantism honed to a much sharper point.

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

This is a solid, sturdy set of songs befitting their rootsy-but-not-exactly-honky-tonk settings.

Sharp, intelligent, and (most importantly) highly enjoyable, Enemies Like This is probably the height of the group’s creative abilities.

It’s an album that leaves you both soothed and disturbed, lulled and shaken by the group’s masterful blend of the comforting and the uncanny, slightly dazed as if returning from time travel or a knock on the head.

The songs... are as wonderful, as creative, as exquisitely saddening as ever.

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.

With “Crazy,” the duo hits its apex without really shrouding the rest of the album.

Smith’s abrupt changes in tempo, volume, and instrumentation are alternately inspiring and disorienting.

Just Like the Fambly Cat, even more than Grandaddy's past works, carries the weight of death.

Springtime is... the unveiling of a toothier sound that better reflects both Holland’s bloodiness and booziness.