Beauty & Crime is, without reservation, the defining creative moment of Suzanne Vega's career thus far.

Teenager can stand as the group's crowning glory to date.

Their heavenly mix of mix of giddy silliness, pop smarts and pop culture overload makes Hey Hey My My Yo Yo a fun-filled, joyride from beginning to end.

Kala nearly makes "Arular" seem tame in comparison, magnifying most of its predecessor's qualities as it remains bracingly adventurous.

Liars wanders wherever it wants to, touching on noise, prog, hard rock, punk, industrial and other styles the band has flirted with in the past, as well as a few uncharted ones.... In a lesser band's hands, this kaleidoscopic approach could be a muddled mess, but it makes for Liars' most entertaining album yet.

Andorra may be a bedroom record, but it certainly doesn't sound like a bedroom record; it has the energy and intensity of group participation, and that makes it Snaith's best yet.

Young Modern is a highly ambitious work that happily jumps from glam rock to sweeping orchestral pastiches and almost everywhere in between.

By far the tightest record SFA has released since "Radiator"--boasting no song over five minutes and four clocking in under three--this is a concise, song-oriented record, which is somewhat ironic since it began its life as something as a concept album.

A fascinating musical ride that defies any attempt at categorization.

Porcupine Tree makes a triumphant return to experimental, non-linear style with 2007's Fear of a Blank Planet.

Simian Mobile Disco's debut is a dance record that shows a surprising amount of subtlety and flair.

He does his best job yet at balancing smarts and accessibility.

The Shepherd's Dog goes a long way towards validating all the attention I&W have been getting; it's their best, most diverse and listenable record yet as Beam and co. take another leap away from the lo-fi one dude in a bedroom beginnings of the group.

This album was well worth the wait and should win over some new fans and please the old ones too. Best of show.

Sojourner is an aptly titled monolith, one that invites fans of Magnolia Electric Co. with a "thank you for believing," even as it urges them to take in more of the picture than ever before.

This stands as a very good album by Keyshia Cole, also the point where Cole's voice grows from an occasionally powerful emotive device into a versatile instrument.

Civilians has as many stories attached as any record Henry's written, but they're so finely crafted now that the singer almost disappears in their flickering appearances on the wall of the mind of the listener.

In Rainbows will hopefully be remembered as Radiohead's most stimulating synthesis of accessible songs and abstract sounds, rather than their first pick-your-price download.

Night Falls Over Kortadela is witty, pretty, silly, and wise; and filled with instantly memorable melodies, thrilling moments of surprise in the arrangements, and laugh-out-loud lyrics.

There's a real fire to his writing here, turning Revival into a missive as immediate, effective, and telling as Neil Young's "Living with War."

It gets better with each listen, and stands so far outside the realm of anything her better-known peers are doing today that it's almost scary.

Play It as It Lays is, without doubt, the record where Scialfa gives us the full fruit of her exceptional gift as a writer, a singer, as an artist.

This is the kind of album you can live with and hear new things in with each listen, and proves that the album is an art form that still has plenty of life in it.

Pink is easily the most cohesive, adventurous, and straight-ahead rocking recording of their 12-year career.

It's an awesome thing, this album, and anyone, virtually anyone who encounters it will be in some way moved by the impure music it contains.

It can be inaccessible and terrifying all at once, but in a genre overly saturated with formulaic groups, Ire Works is a true standout.

If you can appreciate the style of dubstep employed by Burial, it's easy to fall head over heels for Untrue, an album on which there are absolutely no mainstream-crossover concessions, no ego trips, and no willful stylistic variation--an album where the music, a singular style of it, takes center stage with no distractions or sideshows, where there's never the urge to skip to the next track, because they're all part and parcel of the greater whole.

We All Belong is a little bit cleaner and dressed a little bit nicer than "Easy Beat," but the rustic appeal of the music still comes through loud and clear.

Alone will stand as an idiosyncratic gem in his catalog, showcasing him at his eccentric best.

The newly varied arrangements, moods, and textures of this album, from the mournful piano-led cover of the Kinks' 'I Go to Sleep' through the horn-based R&B swing of 'Electric Bird' to the sarcastic bounce of 'The Girl You Lost to Cocaine,' make Some People Have Real Problems Sia's most engrossing and satisfying album yet.

DYLRM should be a mess, but the band has crafted a wintry, nuanced, and bold collection of epic songs that integrate the sweeping theatricality of Arcade Fire-era indie rock without all of the insularity.

Less than three weeks into 2008 it's hard not to escape the feeling that with this disc we may already have the best album of the year.

Really though, just about any song could be singled out for praise. It's that strong of an album, strong enough to satisfy a desire for tattered glamour, for dramatic, inspired and powerful guitar rock that kind that only maybe the Bad Seeds at their best could once conjure up.

This should have been the album where the Mars Volta either wore the formula down to nothing or abruptly turned in a different direction, but instead the band created an album that nearly perfects what they've been working toward.

Fully realized debut albums like Vampire Weekend come along once in a great while, and these songs show that this band is smart, but not too smart for their own good.

Crow hasn't been this free or fine since "Sheryl Crow," but there is an emotional directness on Detours that makes this a progression, not a retreat.

So even when Lucky tries to turn down the glow, it still radiates with the oomph of a solid power pop release, making Nada Surf's fifth album a fine finale for a weekend well-spent.

It's a consolidation of Mould's considerable strengths, an album that showcases his gifts as a writer and record-maker, one that touches upon almost every phase of his career, yet it's filtered through a maturity that feels vital because of its unadorned honesty.

As for this being a Shelby Lynne record, its quality and confidence is unassailable.

Immediately moving and yet rather bewildering, New Amerykah, Pt. 1 is an album that sounds special from the first play, yet it will probably take years before it is known just how special it is.

It's an album meant to be discovered and lived with, revealing its jokes and its beauty over time.

They're old-fashioned, but in the best sense: they're in it for the long haul, which the superb Warpaint proves beyond a shadow of a doubt.

What it all comes down to is that Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is a Bad Seeds record that ups the ante once again.

Midnight Boom is the Kills' most consistent, varied, and inventive album yet, and proof that passion and creativity trump cool any day.

Recommending this album seems too light a course of action; requiring it may be more apt. Consider Hold on Now, Youngster...highly required, then.

What really puts the album over the top as something else is not just its ideas-stuffed brevity (46 minutes in its original form), but its material not made explicitly for the club.

Neon Neon has created an album that isn't so much a straight-up replica of '80s excess as one that puts all of that indulgence into perspective, both emotionally and musically.

Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings is a rock record in the grandest and most polished sense of the word: it wears its lineage proudly, and imparts emotions directly and brazenly honestly no matter how pretty or shiny the picture is.

Kozelek is simply continuing on his way here, but that said, to stand apart from all the superlatives and just get lost in his creation here, he has made the best record of his career.

Everything about this album shouts masterpiece, a set that will thrill listeners for years, nay decades, to come.

Culture clashes never sounded so good.

Here, the sad sounds aren't quite so soothing, but that human element of Portishead gives them a sense of comfort, just as it intensifies their sense of mystery, for it is the flaws--often quite intentional--that give this an unknowable soul and make Third utterly riveting and endlessly absorbing.

Robyn defines what she's all about. Even if it took a few years to put together the label and album (and a few more to get it released everywhere), this is the pop tour de force that Robyn has always had in her.

Bittersweet and poignant, The Evangelist is Robert Forster's most fully realized, seamless, and masterfully articulated solo record yet.

Silver Mount Zion were already way ahead of many of their contemporaries, but 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons sees them blazing past even further, up and away, to some unexplored, perhaps dangerous, but tremendously exciting new horizons of artistic expression.

The Old 97's sound youthful and newly energized, having returned to Dallas and relocated that beloved crossroads between twangy country rock and tight, economic power pop.

Thing of the Past succeeds on three different fronts. Certainly, excellent song selection is one, inspired musicianship and arrangements another, but the actual sound of the recording is equally important in putting Thing of the Past across.

Mudhoney remain bloody but unbowed, heavyweight champions of fuzz and feedback, and on the evidence of The Lucky Ones, no one with any sense is going to challenge their title anytime soon; they built this strange machine, and they can drive it better than anyone before or since.

To be sure, In Ghost Colours is a triumph of craftsmanship rather than vision--a synthesis and refinement of existing sounds rather than anything dramatically new and original--but it is an unalloyed triumph nonetheless, and one of the finest albums of its kind.

59.59 is an astounding album, quite unlike anything one's ever heard before.

Tindersticks have never failed to satisfy anyone looking not only for sadness but also those looking for albums that make you feel and songs that will stick with you for a long time. The Hungry Saw is classic Tindersticks.

This is a stunning set, with lots of lyrical meat to chew on, and music to give one chills.

A cheerfully restless record, one where all the parts don't fit and it's better because of it, as it has a wild, willing personality, suggesting that Weezer is comfortable as a band in a way they never quite have been before.

This "calm before the storm" aesthetic dominates Rook, and in another testament to its short running time, works beautifully, illuminating the few straightforward pieces like "Century Eyes," "Leviathan, Bound," and the brooding title track like a centuries-old woodcut, and allowing the tension that permeates the entire affair to ebb and flow naturally, resulting in one of the most heady and satisfying albums of the year.

Watershed marks a new chapter for Opeth, one that promises infinitely more than its predecessors.

All in all, At Mount Zoomer is a remarkable achievement, and another soon-to-be classic from Wolf Parade.

Beautiful, sprawling, peaceful, wise, and as tenderly romantic as the world is round, these Dennis Wilson gems are as revelatory as they are stunning.

Rap music has rarely gotten more virtuosic and creative than it does here.

Real Animal is an album about life--both as survival and as the faces and moments that fill our days on this Earth. How many artists could make two masterpieces in a row that are so different?

Although it shares superficial sonic similarities with his other records, 22 Dreams is really unlike any of Weller's other albums, as it's rich in sound and feeling, possessing a shimmering dreamy quality. It's an album to get lost in.

Party Intellectuals is easily Ribot's most fun album to date and one of his best.

It's a flat-out joy.

Poetry and music are so closely aligned anyway that at their best, they become one. This is a stunning, awe-inspiring, love-soaked example.

It's a tight, cohesive record with a subtle but undeniable resonance, a record that Juliana Hatfield always seemed on the verge of delivering but finally has.

Power metal may not be the most inventive musical style on the planet, but Dragonforce are making it more exciting than most anyone else has for quite some time.

Carried to Dust isn't just one of Calexico's most expansive albums, it's also their most balanced, channeling their experience and potential into a subtly dramatic, chiaroscuro tour de force.

For Fed, [Hayes] recruited everyone from veteran R&B arranger Tom Tom MMLXXXIV to jazz session drummer Morris Jennings to stalwart indie noisemaker Steve Albini to create a record as rich, complex, and ornate as the previous record was simple and spare.

The New Year also stands as an equal to the brothers' best work and that makes it absolutely essential to any card-carrying indie rock devotee.

'Dancing Choose's' title is pointed enough that the song almost doesn't need to prove that dancing on your troubles is powerfully therapeutic as thoroughly as it does, but that's just another example of this album's rare balance between craft and passion.

What's striking about Dig Out Your Soul is how its relentless onslaught of sound proves as enduring as the tunes.

Acid Tongue is where Lewis finally pulls it all together and delivers one killer of a record.

Even if King winds up returning to his familiar slick, star-studded sound somewhere down the line, having an album as earthily elegant as One Kind Favor in his canon provides a fitting coda for one of the great musical careers of the 20th century.

The sound is terrific, the presentation is handsome, the sound and selection are amazing; and negotiations with musicians are not done on colonial terms.

It just feels like a lively, deeply felt Pretenders album, one that has better songs and better performances than usual.

Tell Tale Signs feels like a new Bob Dylan record, not only for the astonishing freshness of the material, but also for the incredible sound quality and organic feeling of everything here.

The Grails have once more pushed their own sonic terrain, where all that is familiar to them is woven into a gorgeously textured fabric with all that could be envisioned by them at this point in time, with the listener as the true beneficiary.

The Power of Negative Thinking isn't the whole JAMC story, but it's the whole story behind the scenes and A-side singles, and sometimes the B-sides. Even better.

His long-awaited return on The Renaissance is no disappointment, offering more of the same understated, aqueous grooves and fluid rapping that the Abstract Poetic has built his peerless career on.

What pushes these songs past mere worship involves cunning collisions of robust rhythm, caressing noise, and heavenly melody, with each element equally crucial. Good shoegaze/dream-pop bands mastered one of them; the most exceptional of the heap, like this group, had all three down.

There are melancholic edges, but it's not haunting, it's comforting, reassuring music that's quietly powerful, music that Dido hinted at before but never quite made.

There are more twists and turns, more textures, than on any other McCartney album in the last 20 years, and if it's a little messy, so be it: it's better to have Paul letting it all hang out instead of hanging back.

Shogun is easily Trivium's most challenging and ambitious album yet, and even though it isn't likely to spawn any hit singles, it was clearly the album Trivium had to make in order to get unduly prejudiced metalheads off their backs and finally silence undue suspicions over their abundant talent and devotion to heavy metal.

Cuomo still doesn't allow himself the freedom to venture in these directions on Weezer's albums, and that's what makes both volumes of Alone quite valuable: they're as eccentric as they are accessible, portraits of a pop hermit letting his mind wander wherever it may take him.

It's a marvelously intimate performance, unguarded and open-hearted, unique in its delicate touch: it's Neil Young before the myth crystallized, and listening to it anew, it's easy to fall in love with him all over again.

Leave It All Behind is a concise and complete set of songs that brings out the best of both producer Nicolay and Phonte.

All this extra material may not carry the same deliberate weight as so much of Brighten the Corners, but it enhances the album considerably, bringing it closer to an album that can stand with Pavement's first three classics.

More than any other recording issued by this excellent band, Leucocyte captures the art of music making at the moment of conception.

Merriweather Post Pavilion is a perfectly organized record, not a note out of place, not a second wasted.