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.