Somehow, it all works remarkably well together. There are a number of songs that feel like guilty pleasures, and the Gram Parsons/Bob Dylan/Neil Young influences are worn on Adam’s sleeve, but lets face it: we’d all rather hear Ryan doing this than trying to bite ‘70s FM rock or Brit-pop shoegazer nonsense.

The hyperactive channel surfing of most punk music is here eschewed in favor of rumination on individual sounds, hypnotic repetition having more in common, perhaps, with ambient or noise than conventional rock. And like the best of those other genres, the album is finely scoped to just these eight complimentary, textural songs.

While it requires some patience, The Maginot Line is far from impenetrable.

Hair is more of a juicy stew than a straight-up throwback record.

Thorpe and co. can still sound as if they play against rather than off one another. But Two Dancers, a huge improvement that comes only one year after their debut, is certainly the sounds of Wild Beasts becoming a band to keep tabs on.

Air Museum lays to rest the shortlist of uncertainties I've pinned on Mountains in the past--mostly by not changing much.

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.

The peaks are good, obviously; but they're just peaks. And the dips are experimental fun but together they sound like curios. Still, the unfortunate sequencing aside, Passive Aggressive is a great compilation-especially so for those uninitiated with the band.

Thus is the template that makes More Fish so relevant, rewarding, and unpredictably necessary: uniformly fantastic production (except Doom) and Ghost coasting just enough that he doesn’t utterly eclipse the people he’s trying to let shine.

Goodbye Bread specializes in this kind of twisted subtlety; no longer content letting loose and letting the detritus fall where it may, Segall has crafted a record both familiar and surprising, both sunny and spooky.

Veirs’ songs are content to be four-minute pop numbers that exude hooks and instrumental magic; her album is content to be a collection of these songs, with no big finish or three-act dramatic arc.

It sets up the tension between the often gentle voice and its malevolent surroundings, and this, his third collection of re-arranged traditionals, oscillates between the sweet and the almost apocalyptic, often to great success.

There's a real, meticulous attempt at achieving the same playful, wandering state of mind of the pre-'80s experimental classics that inspire these songs, rather than pulling from any overwhelming examples.

The album manages to achieve that perfect pop effect: the ability to deal with enormously sad and personal subjects within the medium of happy, upbeat music.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's third album might not set the world on fire, but it's a great little record in its own right.

Milk's musical vision is the binding force behind Random Axe and it's something that Price and Simpson clearly believe in; thus, all their bragging about how essential their complete gullyness is to the rap game. Because, despite lines crossed and opportunities missed, it sort of is. Nothing so far in 2011 has a total aesthetic and attitude that goes as hard as this.

New Amerykah, Part Two: Return of the Ankh is a record full of smooth, creative, grooving (but not too grooving) songs that are exceptionally well conceived, penned, and executed.

The best way to package this album-Flying Lotus, Madlib, and Ian Curtis in the weirdest musical threesome ever tailored for the likes of DOOM and Ghostface Killah-as the normal routes of genre identification don't quite do it here.

A well-crafted doorway into Thee Oh Sees' lovely DIY funhouse, and leave your rock 'n' roll expectations at the giant lips-shaped entrance.

Meloy’s ever-multiplying prog-rock ambitions are well on their way to swallowing him whole, but for now he seems to be comfortable enough as a guy writing sweet folk pop songs alongside ever-shifting song suites and polite hard rock.

When it's good, it doesn't get much better.

It practically goes without saying that fans of guitar heavy psychedelia and mind-altering substances will find plenty to enjoy here.

Unsurprisingly, the formula still works just fine, and in more than a couple spots, it’s revitalized and intensified to great effect.

In essence, Ferraro has crafted a noiseless noise record.

If this album is less immediately impressive than its predecessor it’s because apart from tightening their arrangements the sound is still exactly what you expect.

With Get Lost, McGuire has nudged toward both goals, and while in many ways, for long time fans, this is exactly what you'd expect a 2011 Mark McGuire album to sound like.

The cryptic, empty songs of Rain on Lens and wandering, upbeat folk-tunes of Supper have been usurped by a renewed focus and direction.

The Floodlight Collective exudes something astonishing and rare, particularly for a record on the fringes of indie rock, scoping into abstraction. It is, more than anything else, sincere.