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.