As big and as diverse as the guest list is, the album hangs and flows effortlessly.

Dumb Luck isn't quite as cohesive as Dntel's debut was, but it is beautiful and carefully crafted enough to show that none of Tamborello's successes are flukes.

It finds the perfect balance between the vibrancy of her poppier work in the '90s and her experiments in the 2000s.

God Save the Clientele is another stroke of magic from a band that has few peers in delivering music that can make or break your heart with a vocal inflection, swath of strings, or gentle arpeggio, music that can devastate you in one breath and lift you to the heavens with the next.

No Shouts, No Calls might be some of Electrelane's most accessible work, but it's far from safe; in fact, its sweet vulnerability is exactly what makes it so special.

Though some of the songs here, especially the earlier ones, can be quite simple, even raw at times, there's a sad, clean sweetness that comes through despite the occasional bit of tape hiss, of tinny chords.

He can focus on the serious, the sentimental, or the fun side of life when he needs to, but he does it all without seeming like he's forcing out a persona.

Anyone who likes their indie pop with a full order of mystery and drama, hold the pretension, will treasure this dark and enchanting album.

The density of the Twilight Sad's sound evokes wide open spaces, yet the louder they are, the more intimate they sound.

Sky Blue Sky may find Wilco dipping their toes into roots rock again, but this doesn't feel like a step back so much as another fresh path for one of America's most consistently interesting bands.

Honestly, none of it makes a lick of sense, but unlike, say, the Beta Band -- whose entire shtick was that the parts of their music never fit into a coherent whole -- there's a shapeliness to Zootime that suggests the record was constructed from some inscrutable blueprint that's just naggingly out of reach.

Even if this is familiar ground, an album so tight in theme and feel is refreshing in an era where most lyricists invite anybody and everybody.

The key to the album's potency and freshness is its differences from In My Own Words.

Human the Death Dance may be his most personal effort, but it's also an incredibly well-built full-length -- even when it borrows from a handful of genres -- and it's arguably his best lyrical effort, undoubtedly his best production-wise.

Tio Bitar is Dungen's most realized album yet and should resonate with anyone who likes rock music at all.

As focused as it is ambitious, Boxeris riveting.

Mirrored is unlike any recording out there at the moment. It's loud, funny, and astonishingly sophisticated, and doesn't feel pretentious in the least.

Send Away the Tigers never seem heavy-handed, which is something that even their best albums often are. So, this isn't merely a return to form, then--it's also a welcome progression from a band that only a couple of albums back seemed stuck in a rut with no way out.

Snakes & Arrows is one of the tightest conceptual records the band has ever released.

With its fuller sound and relaxed flights of fancy, Icky Thump is a mature, but far from stodgy, album -- and, as is usually the case, it's just great fun to hear the band play.

Spellbinding.

There's a delicateness to Golden Pollen, in the double- and triple-tracked vocals, the soft instrumentation.

It's a Bit Complicated proves that Art Brut are masters of writing pop songs about loving pop songs passionately.

Anyone who has already decided that jazz is dead, that the great innovators have come and gone, needs to listen to the Bad Plus to be proven dead wrong.

While Erasure certainly didn't need the "return to form" album at this point in their career, they nailed it and brought better songwriting along for the ride.

Three consecutive Timbaland productions, including one suited for a black college marching band and another that effectively pulls the romantically co-dependent heartstrings, enhance the album rather than make it more scattered.

Another beautiful record that stands right alongside the group's best work.

Sometimes it's electronic music you can rock to, sometimes it's neo-disco tech-house you can sing with, but it's always the fringe of dance-pop at its peak put together in a razor-sharp package.