As rich as this stuff sounds (it’s hard to think of a working musician with classier production values) or how much she emotes on the mic, it’s calculated, cerebral and a little bit cold.

An album that is easy to listen to, but hard to grasp, Everybody wraps its complexities in bright soap bubble diaphanies.

The results, though rarely the caliber of the albums that bookended this era, are a consistent delight.

The spiraling, distortion-drenched guitar solos, the cracked and ruined moan of Mascis, the passive-aggressive romanticism, the relentless beat, the pedals, the sheer turbulent volume...it's just like Where You Been? all over again, with all the positives and negatives that the comparison implies.

Bill Callahan's latest solo effort is so laid back that it almost never gets going at all.

Ultimately, Cornelius has shown that he stands alone when it comes to future pop, and the results are an exceptional pleasure to hear.

It's music like this, intelligently composed and played, delivered with clarity and purposefully varied, that, finally, makes sense of the Fucking Champs.

Grinderman is as refreshing, bracing and absurd as the Birthday Party were when they blew onto the scene with their Old Testament zeal.

When the energy is present, 23 is a strong, pleasant album that connects a number of dots in a way that belongs almost exclusively to Blonde Redhead.

On There’s No Home, Hunter reveals a human (albeit a chemically depressed human) range of emotion, making her narrative more believable but much less captivating.

Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline is a return to the same blissful twilight as before, virtually unpaused.

Knowing that music of this stripe is only pretentious if it doesn’t work, it’s a near miracle that the entire album holds up, front to back, even those ballads in the second half that might have ruined lesser works.

"Jarvis"... is essentially a patchwork drawing from low and high points of his career - a quilt meant as a cover as well as an ornament.

From Here We Go Sublime is fantastic all around, and it’s all the more effective for its restraint.

Pole’s technique still relies heavily on the minimal, but Steingarten is garnished with a sonic density lacking on his first three full-lengths.

If an album could have hormone surges and acne, if it could sit home on prom night listening to Joy Division and smoking pot, if it could be as fully convinced of its inner worthlessness as of its ultimate triumph...in short if an album could be fourteen, this would be the one.

Listen to the tracks that are not being released as singles and you'll see that the band truly does have something to offer outside of their super-fun-party-time aesthetic.

Clocking in at an hour, there's ample opportunity for missteps and toss-offs, but also first rate, two-chord grinds that stand up to the best material the Fall has ever recorded.

Saltbreakers is a wonderful album – a little glossy on the surface maybe, but saved from preciousness by its intelligence, restraint and soaring images.

Make no mistake – the beats are still rigid, dabbling in taut funk and squelching electro as much as snotty punk moves and glorious polyrhtyhms. These nine songs, however, ring with a clarity of purpose and a true intent that was previously altogether lacking, presenting a far more cohesive image of Murphy and his many strengths.

It's dark, lovely and slow to blossom, but leaves an impression once it does.

Living with the Living is Leo's most diverse album yet, a sort of musical "This is your life," where the artist revisits styles and forms that he's loved in the past.

Bird’s intelligence – and obvious delight in the associations that words seem to make on their own – often places his lyrics in the precocious high-school poet camp.

As their music has grown more detailed, the details have become ever more foreboding.

It is in the spaces between words and drums, and in the general structures of the songs... that El-P most clearly exhibits growth. And it is these points on the album that make I’ll Sleep an intriguing release.

In a year that will feature not just a new long-player from Lennox's Animal Collective but also a box set's worth of rare material, it may be hard to surpass the haunting, blissful pageantry of Person Pitch.

Situated between his production for Common’s Electric Circus and Champion Sound with Madlib, the record scripts Dilla’s now triumphant escape from the majors and represents the more mercurial facet of his vision.

The problem is that the 11-song album is exactly 10/11ths forgettable.

There’s not a lot behind the well-polished surfaces.

As always, the playing is impeccable, although the cool professionalism evident on each song makes many of the album's tracks indistinguishable.

Neon Bible is so successful because it showcases big ambition without ignoring the small things.

Benchetrit and Spearin’s production work gives You, You’re a History in Rust a pleasantly unpredictable nature.

Instead of creating a sense of intimidation through overpowering samples and sheer brute force, they realize it through a cinematic eeriness and minimalist disquiet.

For a band whose promise has often outdone their execution, All of a Sudden is their most complex, accomplished and well thought out record.

What makes Strength In Numbers interesting is the way it departs from the usual.

Sex Change is uneven from song to song, but name a Trans Am record that isn't. What's something here is the smoothness with which the record evens out as a whole.

A series of songs that are seriously well-constructed and complicated - yet deeply, deeply odd.

The album’s 13 insubstantial tracks make no concessions to contemporary ideas of ‘substance’ in pop music: they are exercises in style so formal they’re almost French.

Extremely unoriginal, but well-crafted rock shot through with tantalizingly brief moments of interest.

On this album, Schneider seems a bit torn between his task as a hook-writing pop musician and a seeming urge to rock a bit harder, with the added burden of being unable to put his toys down when he should.

A totally hit and miss affair, with only two of the five songs clicking.

It’s an eminently listenable album, but there’s no need for unchecked evangelism. Just enjoy the damn thing.

Cryptograms is a tonal wash of brisk speed kicks and seasick comedowns, the kind of thing you could lose an afternoon to.

That flair for the undramatic has produced yet another fragile and entrancing record.

The majority of Friend Opportunity fails to surprise. While it’s an easily listenable disc not without its share of good and engaging tunes, for a band who have made some of the best and most confounding pop music of the last decade, it’s a bit of a letdown.

Wincing the Night Away feels a little paunchy, a little resigned – this is music that not only is mature enough to know that it can’t change the world, but is content to not try.

Although non-fans will likely continue to dismiss the band as over-the-top pop marauders, Hissing Fauna proves that there’s plenty of depth to their delirium.

There's a sort of magic in the way this Portland threesome balances structure and chaos, pop and noise.

The album's vocals exemplify the real problem here, which is that while the music is appealing and well-executed, everything feels perfectly coordinated and absolutely calculated.

Though Woke Myself Up is a group project, one still gets a sense of it having been recorded at home, amongst friends. They seem to be having a nice time of it.

The CD is bound to attract some fans for its unwavering dedication to psychedelic textures, not to mention the number of bodies involved in the logistics of their live show, but this is energy that should have been expended in searching for better sheet music.

Exhausting, energetic and bold – all adjectives apply - except for one hang-up: Ghost has done this all before on their previous album, 2004’s Hypnotic Underworld.

It is quite elegant in its clarity and cleanliness.

As a relic relief map of an endearing school of Canadian pop weirdness, Swan Lake's first offering is an accomplishment; still, that doesn't make teasing the occasional shining strand out of so much ugliness any less of a chore.

Entomology is full of music you desperately want to love, as it’s so clearly superior to the music that has subsequently genuflected in its direction. Thing is, I’d much rather hear a couple of minutes of Paul Haig’s droll yet strangely alluring post-Josef K solo records than the entirety of the host outfit’s material.

Ys is one of those rare sophomore albums that shatters exceedingly high expectations.

She certainly turned in some of her most thrilling performances for the Peel Sessions.

They remain a fantastic band, constructing their own cities of sound, a strange architecture with wine-dark interiors.

Calamity shows the Curtains to be a band of great moments more than great songs, and in this distinction lies the difference between the listener that dismisses the album and the one that holds on to it despite its flaws.

It's certainly not a perfect album, but Hello Everything represents the pinnacle of performance from electronic music's most thoroughly developed mind.

The potency of AHAAH's genres of choice are both the album’s difficulty and strength; if you aren’t partial to Balkan brass, klezmer or mariachi, abandon all hope of sticking this one out.

Yeah, it’s a mite catchier than Heron King Blues, but Roots & Crows ain’t much of a stylistic shift from Rutili and pals’ earlier material.

With Be Still Please... McCaughan weaves threads from all past Portastatic incarnations into one happy-sad tapestry.

This is a record full of loose ends and fractious energy, not at all compromised by its move up the food chain.

These songs aren't particularly denser or busier than their predecessors, but their burbles and whines serve less purpose than before; instead of sounding overzealous, they sound affected, voluminous for volume's sake.

Despite its scant 35-minute duration, Meek Warrior distills the entire history of experimental pop. Just as impressively, it finally bottles the frantic eclecticism and The Gods Must Be Crazy absurdity of the Family’s live show.

The lyrics lack the indirectness of so much of The Blackened Air and Road to Ruin, just as the piano-embroidered instrumentation skims the surface of what the singer’s band once plumbed with all of its clawing and scraping.

Even more than their last record, the fine A New White, For Hero: For Fool is a wonderfully sprawling mess.

A dream of an album.

Unfortunately, Adem’s efforts to take his music to new places result in the abandonment of much of what made Homesongs so appealing.

Ultimately, Dreamt will reward those who spend time with it, and Sparklehorse fans won't be disappointed.

Human Animal is the most textured and abstract of the band’s “official” releases in years, and while perhaps their methods aren’t new, the results aren’t simply the same old Wolf Eyes.

The cadre of eclectic guest appearances... make it seem like this record would play more like a mix tape, but Shadow pulls it off, and for the most part, each of the guest artists deliver the goods.

It does contain some beautiful songs. Its deficiencies won’t miff his indulgent cult (at least not any more than they’ve been miffed previously). But it doesn’t quite hold together.

There's a wider range of styles and sounds here, from dramatic shoegazer epics to the closest they've ever gotten to straight-ahead rock. Not everything gels solidly, and there are some awkward moments, but no real stumbles.

The results may not be as jarring as its predecessor - the excitement of their original experimentation is gone - but ultimately they’re more satisfying, indicative of a duo much more comfortable with their vision.

I Am Not Afraid Of You is a one-stop jukebox.

While Jamie Stewart & co. succeed at replicating the fractured nature of their live shows – the mix of sparse and dense, broken and enraged, auxiliary percussion and programming, noise and melodiousness is all here – it's beginning to sound rote.

Despite the relatively heavy guitars and relatively dense production, you’ll notice a similarity to the smart, earnest, complex material Molina played as Songs: Ohia.

Mostly Taiga is about sensation, playful and wild and smart but moving way too fast for contemplation.

Where Horn of Plenty still had spare singer-songwriter arrangements, Yellow House sounds far more elaborate.

Game Theory turns out to be The Roots’ finest record to date.

Your lost loves will not come back, but the morbid and exquisite plummet of losing them will, and rare is the artist that can make such a prospect as starkly comforting as it is here.

The Body, the Blood, the Machine reveals a band that's a bit older, a step slower, and startlingly sardonic.

There's a bit of Starbucks gloss to this record, a too-easy-to-like quality that may at first put off serious listeners and music heads. That evaporates pretty quickly, though, as you recognize that its lucid simplicity, its artful artlessness is not a trick, but achievement.

The Shining welcomes listeners to reflect on the magnitude of Yancey’s career, as any posthumous work is apt to do. Unlike Donuts, however, this newest offering will not leave Yancey’s listeners despondent about what could have been but, rather, will provide a fitting epitaph for what was.

Skelliconnection feels more like a series of singles and EPs rather than one statement.

Their most accomplished and astounding album to date.

The good news is that this is the band’s strongest music since Seasons in the Abyss. The bad news is that, compared to their vaulted ’80s output, the album lacks intensity.

These first five songs are like a good singles collection, every one of them free-standing and complete, none of them particularly relating to the others. The rest of the album is slighter and less compelling.

Most of White Bread Black Beer is almost unbearably lovely.

Other Animals was a masterpiece, Nightlife is merely pretty good.

The key is minor, the tone is melancholy, the concerns are callow, but the leitmotif is redeeming.

You'll hear a hint of Arcade Fire in the shout-along choruses, a whisper of Neutral Milk Hotel in the tales of deformed love, an intimation of the Decemberists in the pantomime sea shanties that explode into rock. They're all pretty faint echos, though, the vaguest kinds of familiar outposts in a sea of strangeness.

In the Maybe World feels like an (unintentional, perhaps) sequel or response to Geek the Girl, turning down the intensity while sharing a twilit mood.

If it weren't all so much fun, CSS would be really objectionable. But if it wasn't so objectionable, it certainly wouldn't be this much fun.

You could easily call this the sequel to Secret Wars - it has the same mix of baked acoustics, crushing organ and electric guitar lines, staccato vocals, and a meditative finale built around interlocked piano and drums.

The Avalanche is, perhaps predictably, a middling reconstitution of its legitimate predecessor.