It's full of complexity and contradictions, and trying to grasp it is impossible. But what a joy to attempt.

Silver Age is a very good album, one that recalls, in all the right ways, Mould's best post-Hüsker work, and in particular his Copper Blue.

Standing at the Sky's Edge is Hawley's first major misstep.

It takes time to acclimate to the album's frenetic fog. In that sense, Centipede Hz is both a return to and rejection of form.

While Breakup Songs is hardly less fractured than Deerhoof's other albums, it's also one of their more coherent efforts.

Antibalas is charging ahead, poised for continued recognition and celebration among Afrobeat devotees, as well as first discovery by world music dabblers.

Wild Peace is a work in progress, a document of a band on a very fast track, but still figuring out exactly who and what it is.

It's engineered, in a feature-article-friendly way, to embody its creator's personal development and comment on it in a way that's slick, weightless and easily disowned. For the first time in Marshall's career, lighter equals better

If he's not making his most important works of his career, it may well be his best.

Finders Keepers has managed to extract another handful of diamonds from a shaft seemingly unsafe for further exploration.

Guantanamo Baywatch is a pretty good all-instrumental surf band with a terrible singer. Chest Crawl... puts vocals on all but three of its 11 songs, attempting Cramps-style, reverbed rants, Trashmen-esque shouted call and response, Elvis-y 12/8 balladry and hiccuping rockabilly vamps and sheep-bleating, vibrato'd yelps, all badly off-key and dreadfully recorded.

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

The sounds don't mesh, they stand separate and unique, a convoluted series of unique experiences looped and falling over each other in a series of accidents Whitman wants us to call 'dance.'

Mostly, it reminds you of what you liked about both Comets and Six Organs, and takes that good stuff a few steps further.

The results are pretty weird. Which is a good thing.

One of Jamal's best in recent years.

Just as Yeasayer appears to have planted its two feet firmly on the dance floor, it seems to have lost much of its capacity for eccentric pop magic.

Thomas has a near prodigy-like ability to generate indelible hooks that pull from a relatively deep well of inspiration.

While the individual songs here impress, Holograms feels more like a collection of singles than a cohesive work.

Other than some inoffensive feignings at trying something new, there's not too much else to be heard.

Researching the Blues may be one of the most pleasant surprises of 2012.

Shrines lacks any friction; Purity Ring has created a very viable sound that doesn't offend or stick.

Trapist isn't experimenting anymore; the trio is using the tools they know best to subvert nostalgia and keep you ill at ease.

It feels like we are in the privileged position of witnessing a great guitarist running ideas out of his head and onto his fretboard.

In recognizing this missing piece [violinist Noel Sayre] straight on, Occasion for Song may finally have found a way forward.

Oh Holy Molar is a subtle album, but its impact is hard to shake.

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.

The songs punch and swerve and sway like organic beings, structured in a way that amplifies rather than hems in emotional resonance.