Somebody will really have to pull off a miracle to top Nashville as far as intelligent, honest and entertaining guitar pop goes in 2005. Or any other year.

The music alone nearly justifies the cost, improving on the dense atmosphere pervading Aesop's mostly self-produced Bazooka Tooth, and returning ace producer Blockhead to his prime role in the control chair.

The curiously lifeless production means that several listens are necessary before the songs' charms are fully revealed.

Like just about everybody else these days, Murphy's more skilled at creating isolated tracks than making full-lengths, even though this particular full-length has few weak spots and unfolds smoothly as you listen to it from beginning to end. The bonus disc, containing all the stray single tracks, adds a great deal of value.

Take Fountain is a solid Wedding Present album, one that will satisfy those who have been following Gedge all along.

The songs are wearier than ever and full of life at the same time, with each element seeming to fall into place by sheer luck.

This is one of Ladd's most accomplished albums to date, proving once again that he's one of the most forward-thinking artists around.

Overall, the Sage may be polemical on a level like few other than Dead Prez, but he also has a metaphysical side matched by few other than Jeru tha Damaja.

Burn the Maps is an elemental journey that tugs at the heart and sticks around in the mind.

An utterly mesmerizing and magnetic album, almost unfair in how incredibly ambitious and impressively pulled off the whole thing is.

Their darkly whimsical music has ties to the sweetly strange work of '90s groups like the Sundays, Sixpence None the Richer, and (especially) Belly, but there simply aren't many bands that sound like Eisley around in the 2000s.

Out of Breach isn't much different from 2003's Afro Finger and Gel, flitting between left-field house that is remotely danceable and bracingly atonal sheets of noise, often within the span of one track.

A devastatingly accomplished album.

Haunting and affecting.

Happiness in Magazines feels like Coxon's first true solo album -- it's the first to present a complex, robust portrait of him as an artist, and the first that holds its own next to what he accomplished in Blur.

Before the Poison is poetic and unnerving; it stands alone in her catalog in the same way that Broken English did -- but this time, on the other side of the mirror.

Worlds Apart might be a noble failure, but it would probably be worse if it just revisited previous successes.

It's a mature, accomplished statement for one of indie rock's most reliably miserable men.

Ultimately, it's hard not to feel that this album is little more than a blatant attempt to ape the Postal Service's Give Up.

Far from being the second coming of Dylan, Oberst is as precious as Paul Simon, but without any sense of rhyme or meter or gift for imagery, puking out lines filled with cheap metaphors and clumsy words that don't scan.

While there aren't as many heart-stopping productions as on 2002's unjustly neglected Come With Us, Push the Button proves the Chemical Brothers have retained the innate curiosity necessary to keep them blazing trails for years to come.

It ranks as the artist's most concise and accessible release to date.

Smart, moving, approachable, and well constructed, Nightbird is Erasure's mature masterpiece.

Fridmann's detailed sound is a far cry from either Kramer or Albini's minimalist tendencies, but his work here shows that Low can sound as good in elaborate settings as they do in simple ones.

Before the Dawn Heals Us is ambitious for sure, an emphatic step forward from the linger of Dead Cities.

Wilderness is another absolute gem.

It's breathtaking and essential listening for all fans of electronic music.

Buck isn't a talented rapper, but he has a gift for expressive storytelling and evokes a range of emotions with his limited, mumbling vocals.