What comes across most effectively is the ease that both Roberts and Morrison have with one another. Their vocals settle in together comfortably. That feeling adds even more bubbling warmth to this already toasty disc.

The majority of the album places Actress closer to the superbly creative, evocative, and mind-altering terrain inhabited by Oneohtrix Point Never, with detectable traces of early-'80s Roedelius and Moebius, as well as Autechre.

There is a bounty of rare material, none of which should ever be inaccessible again.

Harmonicraft finds Torche taking off at full speed with an album packed full of driving riffs and soaring melody that's going to have an easy time convincing fans that the band hasn't lost a step after losing a member.

Like a lot of career overviews, this is somewhere between an introduction and a collector's item, but it initially retailed for the price of a single disc and holds an edge over the marginally less expensive A Collection.

Weather Systems stands with Anathema's finest work.

Definitely an album that's worth listening to on repeat, not only out of necessity, but because it's a refreshingly simple, straightforward album in an increasingly processed and affected era.

Hardcore Joplin fans and historians have an excellent retrospective package which, while illuminating the process of the creation of Pearl, doesn't replace it in the canon.

Quarantine is the addictive soundtrack to some kind of science fiction nightmare.

Hazlewood manages to sound resigned, lightly disgusted, heartbroken, and deathbed wise as he sings his way through these songs, none of which ever hit anywhere near an AM radio station. It's easy to be excited for more volumes in this series after hearing this one.

Hogan's style is refreshingly simple, honest, and strikes its target on every track; whether she's tackling country, pop, supper-club blues, or uptempo R&B, she can sing it right and make you a believer, and I Like to Keep Myself in Pain is the triumphant showcase her talent has deserved for far too long.

For all its ambition and poetry, Big Station is consistently great fun. The songwriting and recording employed here take Escovedo's populist and sophisticated art to a whole new level.

In Our Heads is some of their finest and most accessible music.

For as haunting as parts of the album are, there is no fetishization of death on the parts of Albarn and Russell; even with a tinge of melancholy coloring the fringes of the album, this is an album that affirms the power of life, in all of its mess and glory.

Stripped of all her carnivalesque accouterments, Fiona Apple remains as rich and compelling as she ever was, perhaps even more so.

A more aggressive, contemporary guitar attack aside, stunning power punk masterpieces like "The Act We Act," "The Slim," and "Fortune Teller" bear all of the vintage Mould musical traits.

Mission of Burma follow no rules other than following their collective vision wherever it leads, and their musical wanderlust has resulted in one of the most exciting and eye-opening albums they've made to date.

This borders on sorcery.

The album doesn't have as many slyly powerful hooks as Nostalgia, Ultra, but Ocean's descriptive and subtle storytelling is taken to a higher level.

All the selections on this best-of compilation focus on the high-energy side of the music, but that's no bad thing, and it's enough to make a listener sweat just from the speed and breakneck precision of it all -- it's not just father and son who are outstanding, it's the whole band.

There were plenty of other great British bands of the '90s but none of their peers--Oasis, Suede, Pulp, Radiohead--covered as much stylistic ground or wound up with a catalog as rich as this ridiculously generous box set handily proves.

They grew up strong and they grew up fast, so fast that their recordings retain a visceral force that makes The Complete Beat something more than a dream come true for fans: it is a convincing argument for their greatness.

All of this is worthy of re-visitation or discovery.

This collection is proof that Kylie is arguably the best pop singer of her era and more importantly, is fun from beginning to end.

Not only is it their best-sounding album yet, totally alive and raw, but it contains some of the hookiest songs and most thrilling performances of their almost-35-year career in rock & roll.

America's artful merging of the electronic and the acoustic shows that these tools we dedicate so much time and brain space to can also be used to create something free and emotionally invigorating.

If this isn't the album of the year, it's at least the art-pop album of the year, or the neo-sophisti-pop album of the year, or--beside Frank Ocean's Channel Orange--the alternative R&B album of the year.

The Seer is unquestionably a work of ecstatic beauty; it encompasses everything because it is everything.