Eyes Open is composed of broad, obvious songs with broad, obvious hooks, aimed straight for the hearts of as many people as the band can manage. All of this would be bad, horrible even, if it didn't work. But it does.

OK, it all gets a bit samey in the middle section. But Jake Kelly adds some nice instrumental flourishes, and Dawson once again proves winning and convincing as a simple troubadour who’s not a simpleton.

It's tightly focused, beautifully written, and totally without filler.

Daedelus does with electronic and Latin music here what he and others have already done with experimental hip-hop: boiling genre to an essence and re-imagining it with novel or illuminating instrumentation.

Mostly, the band sticks to their strengths, making music for a party that ended sometime in the 90s, with the occasional reggae inflection to differentiate it from previous albums.

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

Song-for-song, they haven’t made an album this misstep-free since Vs.

The poetry is too good, the gloom too cached in symbolism and fine melodies to feel trite or melodramatic.

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

It's an album that has far more potential for emotional resonance than musical discovery. The arrangements contain few surprises, and the handful of simple acoustic performances quietly outshine the more elaborate productions.

The Boss’ most lively release since Born in the USA.

While the "darker follow-up to the breakthrough album" angle was an unavoidable cliché for Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday does their part by giving the more aggressive workouts a stronger sense of purpose.

A Blessing and a Curse easily qualifies as the Truckers’ most straightforward album.

Bitter Tea is probably my favorite Fiery Furnaces album to date, but it isn’t without snags.

One of the biggest surprises of the year.

These are songs that veer to and fro, frequently sounding as if they’re nearly about to run off the rails.

It is intermittently thrilling, the first record since Perfect to show any of that record’s gleaming promise, but it is nonetheless brought aground by some of the same problems that dogged the last two LPs.

At its best, Calexico does expand, opening the range of sounds to provide for new colors of expression; when it doesn't work, that open sound means a turn toward the basic, allowing prettiness to get in the way of sonic content.

There’s a lingering sense that the product at the center of all the hubbub remains something less than its lofty reputation.

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.

This may be far too soon, more reflex than action, for the band to properly capitalize on their start.

In Colour trades much of the punch from their first self-titled full-length for a more tender (is that even possible?) and reflective muse.

Morrissey doesn’t have that much to say now, but it’s never really been just about the words. And when everything fits into place on Ringleader of the Tormenters, he can deliver those sweet-nothings with such panache that it doesn’t really matter anyway.

Except for Ghostface, he's probably rhyming as well as anyone around right now.

There’s a cohesion and a simplicity to this collection that makes it a must for any fan of the label.

Thanks to some subtly disquieting diction it’s almost as disturbingly memorable as a cuddly cartoon blood orgy.

The music from the Envelopes’ first LP, Demon, is so loose and frivolous it feels like the Swedish group wasn’t even aware that the mics were hot.

In small doses it’ll absolutely cure what ails you. Unfortunately, taken in one album-sized chunk, the effect tends to wear thin—a doubly damning criticism since Dancing With Daggers is only ten seconds shy of being thirty minutes long.

The few tracks on Show Your Bones that sound like they might have fit on Fever to Tell clearly constitute the new album’s weaker links.

Fishscale intermingles skewed narratives, expert guest choices, exquisitely conflicting production, and a concept and focus—the drug trade is the near exclusive subject mater—that, while somewhat reductive in scope, sharpens the album into an immense, furious, and focused album.

Even on the tracks with mediocre melodies and concepts, T.I. plugs away at the beat and never loses control of King.

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.

They’re good at what they do, but what they’re doing is painting-by-numbers from someone else’s book.

The combination of Treacy’s back-story and the complexity of My Dark Places makes it hard to live with at times; it is a supremely disquieting record.

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

An immensely pleasing and happy album.

A bit uneven.

They sound laid back. They sound like they’re having a blast. They sound, well, loose.

This is the Prince album we wanted Musicology to be.

A remarkably notable debut.

For fans of indie-rock with a poppy slant, Stars of CCTV is an absolute necessity.

Mercury Rev... mostly eschew their distinctive brand of chamber pop, scaling back the saturated psychedelic orchestral flourishes for something a bit more terrestrial. In doing so they’ve fashioned the perfect complement to Dunger’s emotional voice and poignant songs of love lost.

Cuts Across offers a surprisingly persuasive clutch of rock ‘n roll that beg for barnstorming live performances.

[A] lean, effective debut.

That’s why there’s no cacophony and very little white noise: the finished product is essentially of a common mind.

His wheels may not leave the traction marks they once did, but the evidence here suggests the ride isn’t over yet.

Axis is an easygoing, engaging listen, an album whose relative triviality easily forgives its flaws.

I wouldn't want to call it a "return to form" because Lil' Beethoven was actually pretty good, but it certainly perfects that album's aesthetic and infuses it with some of the giddy energy of the earlier Sparks stuff.

Sure, the songs are serviceable, even great at times, but if you take away the new instruments, the tracks are spitting images of their younger brethren.

The album achieves a great deal of its success from the relaxed collaboration, but it does suffer from it, as well. Reid and Hebden interact so casually that they don't find the friction to really propel great improvisational music.

Witch manage to do a lot more in forty minutes with little more than a bunch of badass riffs and a decent rhythm section than most metal bands these days can do with seventy minutes.

Kotche delivers on all accounts, tastefully propelling the music into timelessness, nearly filling the shoes of his faves: The Band’s Levon Helm, Beefheart’s Drumbo.

The Maginot Line has a title almost as dreary and foreboding as The North Sea had, a sense of vast futility and inescapable fate, and like that first album, the title belies the often bright and sparkling parts of the music.

Some of the sonic twists and turns that Delays pull on You See Colours--the multi-tracked vocals, the airy guitars, the pulsing synths--are jaw-dropping.

Pencil Ne-Yo in as R&B rookie of the year--and don’t be surprised if no one trumps him before 2006 is gone.

If you’re so inclined toward this type of music, you’ll assuredly love Precious Memories. But if you think you’re not, you may be surprised.

What makes OK Cowboy worthwhile is not a greater emphasis on the chilly tones that made Vitalic’s initial singles so impressive and characterized some of his savage DJ sets, but the demonstration of a surprising degree of variety and even humanity within those seemingly narrow colonnades of rising and whiplash synths over soulless, mechanical drums.

Right now Elbow are hitting an emotional pitch no one else is managing; one more personal and more potent than those that might be considered their competition.

Its lack of focus often mutes its attempts to strike hard.

Bejar is so wound up in his own idiosyncratic mythologies, so hopelessly himself that some fans have already said it sounds like a greatest hits record; appropriate that a meta-rocker’s final frontier is his own reflection in the mirror.

It doesn’t try to scrape the lofty heights of the two or three masterpieces in Heasley’s catalogue, but by not making the effort, it doesn’t sink as low as his least impressive stuff.

A subtle improvement on the band’s debut.

Congotronics 2 sticks closely to the sonics of the first volume, possibly because the bands do actually sound similar, or possibly because the bands have been recorded in similar fashion.

This increased humanism lends Fleischmann’s compositions an evolutionary sense of dynamism, thawing out his stern soundscapes.

Unfortunately, Now is the Time! short-circuits early, leaving us with an empty gimmick and a few good synth-zapped riffs.

It is a measure of Albion’s strengths that it can make itself heard above the crumpy distortion and shrill feedback generated by its author.

Young for Eternity is the record that US labelmates the Von Bondies should have made to follow-up Pawn Shoppe Heart, and the album that the White Stripes should make period.

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

It's a smooth, cohesive ride that never lapses into boredom.

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.

It's not as much a progress as DCW, but it's easily its equal.

At 14 tracks long, Orton could have trimmed three or four cuts and left a near-flawless, efficient package that was all killer and no filler. As it stands, it is merely excellent.

Of the album’s 13 tracks, not one feels like filler.

When RJ sticks to the bounce aesthetic and Acey keeps his writing lucid and/or topical, the record becomes the most listenable of the emcee's recent output.

Idols is not quite “country” enough to tackle the road to the prairies, but the headspace of the album is clearly in a place with plenty of room to breathe.

It's like a medicinal tonic cleansing your system of the toxic effects of 10+ years of boring, bloated rap full-lengths.

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

Even if [some] of it gets a little one-note, it's an addictive note.

An endlessly enjoyable sophisticated pop album.

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

An album of rich country, folk, and gospel music.

Whether it’s the end of an era, the beginning of a new one, or just a lucky break in what looks to be a still-incessant deluge of output, From a Compound Eye bypasses the earlier seven LPs-plus released in his name to mark the emergence of Robert Pollard as a solo artist proper.

A highly enjoyable album... one that’s louder than the Liars, more fun than the (new) Strokes, and ten times more dynamic than the Arctic Monkeys.

Cash takes time to recapture these relationships through simple, detailed moments; at times with grief, and other times with the joy of their memory.

Fun and frequently powerful.

Like every East River Pipe album it’s blemished by imperfections, but Cornog’s lonely, home-recorded drabness goes beyond the "sun, sun, sun" of other retro-oriented musicians to remind us that sunlight reflecting off slabs of urban concrete remains as bleak in 2006 as it was in 1974.

First Impressions of Earth is the first pretty good album of the year.

This is probably the least fun of all his albums, but also among his most rewarding.

The Breakthrough is easily Blige’s finest full-length since ‘99’s Mary.

Only half of these tracks provide truly valuable alternatives to Guero songs.

So what if the Darkness are nothing but a bunch of playacting nancy boys. They have an outstanding penchant for hooks [and] write witty and possibly sometimes moving lyrics.

Above all else, Shakira shows that highly individual, original pop songwriting can co-exist splendidly with commercial interests, and on both of those scales, this album is something of a triumph.

Standing out might be the biggest obstacle facing the bulk of Right About Now's 12 tracks. It's significantly shorter than Kweli's best album, Train of Thought, but has far fewer shifts in sound or mood to keep it interesting.

The result is in some ways immensely pleasing (at its best the quality here is easily the equal of the songs from the proper album), but at seventeen songs and a full hour in length Oh You're So Silent Jens suffers a bit, predictably, from too much of a good thing.

For longtime fans, there’s little reason not to buy this. For newcomers, Peel Sessions might not be a logical starting point, but you’ll still walk away understanding why Galaxie 500 are still revered.

Less sparse than open, the songs resist the build-and-release structure that most other Montreal acts utilize, and they also refuse to ride a groove or play with distracting orchestration.

Summer succeeds largely because it forces Oldham’s songs into unfamiliar positions.

Easily her finest effort since Ray of Light.