Arguing Frisell’s stature as a national treasure is nearly effortless with albums like this one.

Garden Party is full of good feeling. Put it on and you can smell cut grass and barbecue. You can hear the pop of the can on your first outdoor beer of the spring. There are bluegrass-y runs and two-stepping rambles, all blurred on a microdose that makes everything brighter and more beautiful.

It’s not jazz, not rock and certainly not Fahey-style picking, but vivid and exciting all the same.

Runner signal a return to the "heritage" S&C sound, balancing motorik pulse and unbridled delicateness, regaining some of the spirit and intention that had begun to flag in the process.

Hold Time, Ward’s latest batch of songs, seems slighter, happier and louder than those on 2006’s "Post-War," but also distinctly complacent.

The Unfairground features ten strong songs without filler or flab. All have melodies that rapidly lodge in the brain, the kind that the paperboy could whistle on his round.

Her narrative sees all, experiences all, but keeps a remove in the dry, mechanical beats, the tamped down drama of synthetic accompaniment, the vocal lines that only once and a while slip past a murmur into wilder swoops and yelps. This is a cerebral, abstracted album about the physical, one that deals in potentialities and implied trajectories, rather than the immediacy of pulse and sweat and organ functions.

Desperation may prove to be the best rock record of the year.

African Electronic Music 1975-1982 is a deceptively smart compilation sequenced at least as well as Bebey's own albums.

His strongest set of songs yet. The guitar work remains effortless and radiant, but it is no longer the dominant thing. Instead the songs, bolstered by strings and vocal harmonies, take precedence. There’s an easy, lovely coherence to this record.

This album certainly sounds more produced, but the band's investment in studio time mostly means sighing washes of prismatic reverb rather than a new architecture of synths and drums. Still, many of the album's best moments are its most... well, not beat-driven, but beat-bedazzled.

Desire, is a mess: intriguing, puzzling, intriguing and ultimately frustrating as all hell.

Lotta Sea Lice avoids the potential flippancy of a side-project, using well considered song selection and quality lyricism to drive a singular but, we hope, not a single collaboration.

While Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes could have become an exercise in studio-based formalistic noodling, Adebimpe and Malone’s vocals and lyrics give the songs structure and direction.

The interplay of Gibbard's shyly introspective vocals with Tamborello's dense and meticulous backdrops works surprisingly well, at times better than anything to date from Death Cab or DNTEL.

Country Funk frontloads these generic examples, and leaves the rest of the compilation up to artists who managed to eke meaning out of the stylistic changes.

DIIV have synthesized a bunch of fresh influences, including guitarist Andrew Bailey’s penchant for hip-hop, plus the band’s new-found fascination with sampling and tape loops, to craft their most diverse and perhaps finest album to date.

If TaDet Lugnt was pristine portraiture, carefully aligned and composed, then Tio Bitar is the off-the-cuff action shot – freely flowing and effortlessly jammed, its hair ruffled and with a face in need of a shave.

On 4, he tinkers a bit with the trim, options and manufacturing methods, but leaves Dungen’s styling fundamentally unchanged.

While there are some real successes here, Father, Son, Holy Ghost is extremely inconsistent.

SUMAC’s evocative and powerful playing hits you in the gut, as a physical experience, even as it motivates an intensely meditative mode. This is terrific music, in all relevant senses of that term.

Nothing on Fantasy Island is as sharp or cataclysmic as that ["Voodoo Wop"] (the title track comes closest), but the unease is palpable. ... It’s very hard to tell whether Clinic is enjoying the hedonism of their hand-clapping, synth-bopping, drum thumping songs, or just trying to forestall the apocalypse. Perhaps a little of both.

Less folky and more eclectic than his past work, Crow offers ample evidence of growth in Banhart’s range as both a performer and a songwriter.

Having established the hypnotic power of loud, dense guitar marches long ago, Pelican sound free enough at last to explore melodic intricacy and inventive theme-and-variation play without hewing to the old layer of protective gloom.

If you like Woods you’ll enjoy this record. If you’re team Skygreen Leopards, however, you might want to wait for that Red Pink and Purples record, which is very good and all Donaldson.

La Luz takes a big day-glo colored leap in News of the Universe, expanding a spooky, surf-rocking, girl-group sound into psychedelic overload. This is a full-on, trippy symphony, evoking baroque late Beatles, Os Mutantes and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.

These are gnarly, inward-focused songs, but if you listen carefully, you can hear how a different sort of delivery—big voice, big drums, slashing guitars—could turn them into a female-centric version of emo-rock. Even if you appreciate the way the music works here, you might still wonder what that larger scale version would sound like.

It's like Fiery Furnaces with more heart and less irony...and that's not a bad thing at all.