Far more than someone like Beth Orton -- who seems positively conventional in comparison -- she's creating a new paradigm for singer/songwriters, with electronics an integral part of her sound, rather than an afterthought.

Banhart's music is utterly unselfconscious and poetic.

Though Onoffon doesn't quite top Burma's 1982 masterpiece Vs., it manages to sound like the more-than-worthy follow-up they could have cut a couple years later ... only with two decades of experience and musical detours informing its nooks and crannies.

Its quietness and moodiness make Summer Make Good Múm's most demanding album, but also, fortunately, a rewarding one too.

It ranks high among his finest albums.

Yet another triumph for the Beta Band.

Not surprisingly, Trampin' is a largely political album, but it is far from a didactic one.

A listening experience that is singular, startling, and soulful.

Between Here and Gone quietly demands the listener's attention and dives deeply into a labyrinth of emotions before emerging as a validating, affirmative, and instructive experience; it is an album not only to experience, but to hold on to.

The album feels more slapped together than their debut.

This bold recording is a jazz record made with care, creativity, and a wonderfully intimate aesthetic fueling its 12 songs.

What sounded austere on Fan Dance sounds simple on A Boot and a Shoe, and it's the differing inferences of those two adjectives that makes all the difference.

The brilliance of Van Lear Rose is not just how the two approaches complement each other, but how the record captures the essence of Loretta Lynn's music even as it has flourishes that are distinctly Jack.

Make no mistake, this isn't the second coming of Purple Rain or Sign 'o' the Times or even Parade -- in other words, it's not a masterpiece, more like a more confident and consistent Diamonds and Pearls without the hip-hop fixation -- but it's a strong album, one that impresses on the first listen and gets better with repeated plays.

Even though Underneath is a little too polished and Pro Tool-ed, that pop sensibility still rings loud and clear throughout the album, and track for track, it's likely their strongest album, even if it lacks glistening highlights along the lines of "Mmm-Bop."

The band's sound is both fresh and nostalgic, and so pretty that it seems overly harsh to criticize them too much at this point. It's just that Ratatat is good enough to suggest that, with a little more diversity, the group could do even better things.

Inches is an ambitious concept, but the band's success with it is another example of Les Savy Fav's mix of intellect and volatility.

It's partly a party album like 2001's Bulletproof Wallets, but freer, more inspired, and tempered with pure street tracks that were missing last time round.

With rugged guitar riffs and solos and Finn's half-sung, scratchy voice, the Hold Steady mostly succeed, easily recalling the classic rock of early Bruce Springsteen or the sincerity of latter-day Hüsker Dü.

Electronic elements balance out the harsh guitars with regularity, resulting in a handful of full-blown zingers.

While not a terrific album, the good often outweighs the occasional filler.

The Runaway Found is an incredibly focused first album, giving evidence of how serious the Veils are about composing a stylish, quality sound.

Moorer, besides being good at penning lyrics, is smart enough to write catchy hooks.

After a few listens Walking With the Beggar Boys reveals itself as a near perfect little pop record.

It's this prolific, homegrown vibe paired with a knack for downright catchy pop that makes Lone Pigeon Scotland's answer to Ween.

At times, the intense-yet-underdeveloped feel of Lay of the Land makes it a claustrophobic experience, but its quieter moments, such as "No Questions" and the angular finale "Fog," still throw off sparks while allowing a little more breathing room.

It's All Around You soon becomes just another Tortoise record, so close to previous records in composition and execution that it's virtually deja vu for any listeners who know the band well.

That isn't to say that The Curse of Blondie is a classic Blondie disc, but it's the first good one since at least Autoamerican, and features one of their best-ever singles in "Good Boys."

Amounts to little more than the sum of its inspirations and coy references.

Imagine Bauhaus' "Terror Couple Kill Colonel" massaged by classic 4AD discord and you have the mysterious blend of On! Air! Library!

Most of the blame for Neighborhood Watch has to go to the previously invincible Alchemist, whose productions are front-loaded on the record. Unfortunately, his beats aren't rugged or hooky, just astonishingly weak.

Despite some slightly draggy moments, On My Way is still another solid effort.

Even though this album isn't as immediately or showily brilliant as The Moon & Antarctica, Good News for People Who Love Bad News reveals itself as just as strong a statement.

If you know Sexsmith's work, then you already have a good idea of how good this album is, and if you don't, this is a fine place to get acquainted.

Of Montreal's most focused and powerful sounding record yet.

Final Straw is another strong slab of emotion and invigorating energy from a solid band that mixes its influences into an always heady sonic libation.

Aerosmith sound reinvigorated, even liberated from the need to have a hit power ballad, and they tear through these 12 songs with an energy they seemed to lose sometime after Pump.

A heartfelt tribute that's among Clapton's most purely enjoyable albums.

Without strong rhythmic or melodic hooks, the album's slow grooves blend together and Jackson disappears into the productions.

Muse continue to make unrelenting hardcore art rock; Absolution is a tad cheesy, a bit too grandiose in its ambitions, bursting at the seams with too many ideas, and thus exactly what any Muse fan craves.

Gracious and redemptive, it is a rapt, quiescent masterwork.

Alternately too predictable and too quirky, Panic Movement reveals the Hiss as an ambitious band that can't always deliver on its goals.

Captures different shades and moods of the band's thus-far five-year career quite nicely.

Onelinedrawing, in general, may be a bit too saccharine for some listeners, and it lacks the classic power pop levity of a Brendan Benson or Weakerthans, but The Volunteers is a wildly inventive record that can stand tall beside earnest peers like Saves the Day's In Reverie.

The album's soft-focus allows Blonde Redhead to explore its relatively newfound romanticism more deeply than before... but with less tension between the fragile and harsh aspects of the band's sound, its soft-focus occasionally drifts into lack of focus.

Without a deft rap to go over these tracks, many of them merely drift over the listener.

Strictly for the devout fan base.

Our Endless Numbered Days is very subdued, thoughtful, melodic, and downright beautiful album and the new sound is more of a progression than a sudden shift in values, production or otherwise.

Like a guided tour through the last 20 years of guitar rock.

Overall, Jem's songcraft is only ambitious in relation to a genre often defined by a "blander is better" pleasure principle.

Madvillainy's strength lies in its mix between seemingly obtuse beats, samples, MCing, and some straight-up hip-hop bumping.

Not what you'd call an enjoyable listen, but one to be respected anyway, and also one that worms its way into your head.

A genuinely moving and wickedly fun record.

Like faith, these songs require patience, as their almost mantra-like arcs take their time to fully form.

While obviously talented and often inspired, it is unclear if the Bad Plus are avant-garde enough to appeal to hardcore jazz fans, or pop-oriented enough to grab the attention of rock listeners.

In the end, while not the perfect album that Aveo's talent promises, the removal of a couple songs would render the entire thing striking and mesmerizing, and when held to such a high standard, you can't ask for too much more than that.

Perhaps this isn't quite as strong of a selection of songs as Got No Shadow, but it comes close, and the music simply feels right.

Even in its louder moments, Milk Man is a surprisingly subtle album, and one that takes Deerhoof's music in quietly exciting new directions.

Despite some tedious melodramatics, Fall Back Open is a decent sophomore effort.

While it's not perfect -- occasionally the album's heady, indulgent feel tends to make it drag -- Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes is still an impressive expansion of TV on the Radio's fascinating music.

2004's early front-runner for art rock album of the year.

Franz Ferdinand reveals more depth and more new directions than their previous work suggested.

Once again Cee-Lo has recorded a peerless album, except this time he's recorded one that should connect, or at least deserves to.

If the music on Schizophrenic was as awkward as Chavez's singing and stance, it'd be an easy album to dismiss, but what makes it so frustrating is that he has a lot of good music on the album.

By combining elements of metal, pop, jazz, and electronica, the Cooper Temple Clause create a broad album that is subtle and meticulous as well as driving and bombastic.

Panda Park is uplifting, mesmerizing, glittery, and unapologetically psychedelic while sounding rooted in both '70s prog and skewed latter-day punk rock.

By not just defying but denying the expectations about what their music should be like, the Liars have created one of the most fascinating, confrontational albums of the 2000s.

Andy Barlow's productions have been defanged; no longer surprising and innovative, they exist as merely proper frameworks for the songs.

Like Springsteen, Phillips centers his songwriting in a kind of mythic America, an approach he used as well in his former band, Grant Lee Buffalo. But it is an approach that works only if the songs and the characters in them are believable, and Phillips' carefully considered, ornate lyrics often work against that believability.

Like Aretha Franklin, Linda Jones, and Otis Redding, Staton's voice is the sound of emotion being ripped from the human heart and offered, bleeding and broken, pleading and yearning, to the listener.

Like the best Indigo Girls work has, All That We Let In continually dwells on the dynamic of internal, emotional tumult and outward-looking, world-wondering fervor.

While Trans Am's need to express their political views and their cliché-busting approach are both admirable, unfortunately their ways of expressing their dissent aren't all that inspired.

She's in Control is dirty late-night fun simply because it has fun.

Like an ambitious version of the Scud Mountain Boys, they manage to appear out of nowhere in your living room, play an intimate set, and invoke every ghost from a 20-mile radius through your front door before leaving as quickly as they came.

The glimmers of vitality lurking around the edges of the album tend to make it all the more frustrating -- just a few more distinctive songs would've gone a long way towards making this a really solid album instead of just an intermittently entertaining one.

Much like the musical equivalent of Todd Solondz or Harmony Korine, Xiu Xiu set out to disturb their audience in pursuit of higher artistic goals.

It is sort of a bad sign that a band's debut is plagued by filler.

Aw C'mon is lovely, compelling, mysterious, and confounding.

These two discs would have made for a fine double album, and if Lambchop have chosen to regard them as two separate entities, that just means they've released two of the finest albums of 2004 instead of just one.

A soft and amiable album that frames Jones' "soft-focus Aretha Franklin" voice with a group of songs that are as classy as they are quiet.

Get Away From Me is an exciting debut that could become a cult favorite among pissed-off girl-women of McKay's age; if she can focus her creative energy without sacrificing any of the bite of her debut, she'll become an even more impressive talent.

Despite Lucky's glossy, easily digestible tendencies, it still burns bright with the usual Etheridge fervor.

As rewarding as it is unpredictable.

May well be the best album of her career.

She winds up with a processed, affected record halfway between Live Through This and Pat Benatar or possibly Billy Squier.

Prior to this album, we were more than aware that West's stature as a producer was undeniable; now we know that he's also a remarkably versatile lyricist and a valuable MC.

Far more interesting than any of their other records, or their peers'.

A tremendous return to form.

Hypnotic Underworld is a new high-water mark from one of rock's most interesting bands.

But even though the group perfectly defines the way that so many British art-school bands have sounded since the late '70s, in Electrelane's hands it still seems fresh.

Bows + Arrows may not be a drastic change from Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone, but their music, built on loud guitars and organs and strange reflections and remembrances, is so unique that drastic change isn't necessary, and simply having more of it around is more than enough.

It may not be country, but that doesn't matter; When the Sun Goes Down is winning, sturdy mainstream pop.

If judged merely on a sonic level it's one of the more interesting, detailed adult alternative records of recent years. But that pompous narcissism is his Achilles' heel, the thing that keeps wary listeners at bay.

Each of these compositions reveals not only an imaginative use of trace musical elements, but also a maturing sense of how to arrange them.

Often sounds virtually identical to a generic dance record circa 1992.

They have smarts and energy to burn as well as a bunch of songs that are right up there with anything Interpol, the Rapture, or Hot Hot Heat have done.

Listeners who expect a batch of immediately compelling music from any Herren material will be sorely disappointed here; Apropa't pulls way back from his upfront Prefuse work and delivers a record of music so sparsely textured it barely raises off the surface.

Fortunately, Air learned from their mistakes -- or, at least, their limitations -- leading up to the recording of third album Talkie Walkie, and the happy result is a solid middle ground between both of their previous records.