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.