This is all I really want an album to be: an immense, five-star production fronted by a compelling, three-dimensional character with an unrivaled faculty for craft.

Wasting Light is as good as mainstream arena rock gets now, twenty years after the fact.

At Mount Zoomer is a tremendous success.

By no means is It's All True a masterpiece; the duo don't stick their necks out enough to entertain that notion. But by creating a palpable tension between smart songwriting and their knack for texture, Junior Boys have pulled a legacy back from the brink of indifference.

With the possible exception of his work with Brian Eno, Backwards is his most technically honed album to date. This is the stuff of an artist refreshingly confident with his work.

In Ear Park sounds so much like Grizzly Bear that it’s difficult to recognize, at first, that it does occasionally retain the bedroom DIY aesthetic for which Department of Eagles are known, especially in the sense of its canned percussion, and at the album’s best it keeps the music attempting the scope and lushness of Grizzly Bear.

Goldfrapp have shed the sex-Moroder-robot-Bolan-fuck-disco like a used condom and re-tooled themselves as a whimsical psychedelia and pastoral folk outfit for the disappointing Seventh Tree.

This is Beach Slang’s core problem: they are constantly telling, never showing.

Diamond Eyes incorporates all the same basic tropes as every Deftones record before and almost certainly after it, but here, for the first time in ages, they’re crafted and performed with more than mere hints of the assuredness and pummeling hooks of their one (yes) great record—a full-course meal to the last decade’s worth of scattered crumbs.

Not so much a change of pace as a consolidation and careful re-allotment of her powers.

Freakout is a struggle between balance and shambles; the compositions constantly wobble beneath a gravity that threatens to bring them down for good and to render Broder’s brain inane for all time.

Want Two disposes of almost all of the commercial elements that had been blamed for One's downfall without revealing a satisfying work in the process.

They are doing the same thing they always do, which entails gorgeous and gracefully surprising variations on a deeply resonant motif.

While it’s very good at what the Band of Horses does best--providing a soundtrack to whistful moments or memories--unlike Everything all the Time there’s nothing here to grab onto, its songs merge together, and it’s so innocuous in the band’s trademark comfort that it can pass almost undetected.

The sparsity of their arrangements allows textures--the shushing of brushes on the snare, the scratch of the violin, the edge of distortion on the guitar--to shine through.

When they’re trying, as they do especially on the first half of the album, Cannibal Sea can be quite enjoyable.

There's something downright overwhelming about this disc, whether it's the unremitting playfulness or the way the band pulls together beauty and energy from the oddest of sounds or the way over top they sometimes launch into abstract political commentary.

Cursive aspires for greater things, and Kasher’s aims are marred by over-production, a Nickelback whoosh here, a digitized cascade there.

The music Real Estate make is so melodic and plentiful that it could capture any feeling it wanted to--Atlas just transposes their sound into the evening.

While this technically is enjoyable alt-country circa a half-album before Summerteeth, genre-standard romance and arrangements muffle the otherwise "astonishing narratives."

Inoffensive, largely listenable, and accessible, the album is still stunted, and so never reaches the peaks of "The Civil War," still their best and most fully formed effort.

The Way of the World is just one more Mose Allison album: exceptional in it’s own right but entirely expected.

Unfocused, haphazard, and a bit homogenous.

Prejudices be damned, this is the best hip-hop record this year, and if that doesn’t satiate your hype-riddled appetite, then you would be well-served to shut off your computer, removing yourself from the power of the web, and throw this in your car stereo.

All of its tracks are kila kila killer.

This freak of a record is almost obscene in its flippant disregard for the core elements of such a well-defined thing as what Boris is supposed to sound like... as crazy and over-polished and un-Boris as it is, New Album is still a new Boris album. And, apparently, that still means excellence.

It's not that the record is so unclassifiable--shit is downright pleasant to listen to--as it exudes the confidence to acknowledge its influences and contemporaries with the same convivial grace that has marked Q-Tip's entire career.

This one sees him expanding outward in any number of directions, and succeeding in nearly all of them.