Although surprisingly self-conscious at moments, Feels remains rife with a triumphant beauty, a bucolic sound that stirs and entrances the listener like a happy secret.

Lyrically Black Cadillac is exquisite. Musically it's far more than a country record, expanding into those mighty rooms of roots music and pop-rock where Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind and Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels on a Gravel Road shine and burn against their own dark palettes.

Sigur Rós piece together breathtaking orchestrations that sound like they're singing to you from another world, telling you why your world is not so bad, that even in all the miserable monotony, something beautiful perseveres.

The Black Album is a spectacular farewell if that's what it turns out to be.

The Crane Wife is an impressively realized song cycle.

Lacking both the musical and counter-cultural thrill of the Brion recordings, this album turns away from a certain artistic "rawness" in the original recordings, razing away counter-melodies and acoustic decay for a well-polished delivery that presents the photogenic songstress in a more "flattering" light.

While appreciating Yoshimi for its merits poses little problem, actually enjoying it is more difficult.

Ghosts of the Great Highway is one of those albums that you want to have around for when life gets you down.

What's impressive is the way they bring all these elements together, the natural world leading seamlessly into a brighter landscape of surreal otherness.

For those devoted to this rock band's increasingly artistic gear, Gibbard's a bard spinning pop-song sonnets that cause such constituents of fandom to reel real deep in some crooning-along swooning induced by the lithe lyrics.

The instant pop buzz Pulp have concocted in the past is largely missing, but each listen reveals another layer, another level, another reason to love it. Highly recommended.

Unwinds slowly, slipping between ghosted noise-and-field-recording passages and the sustained explosions of big, bombastic caterwaul that have become Godspeed's signature sound.

Spine-tinglingly great.

This is pop music pushing the boundaries of what pop music should be, without having to resort to overproduced and mass-marketed gloss.

Meloy's words stir your insides like good poetry, his imaginative tales climb into your mind, set up camp and stay awhile. But without the enchanting, heart-wrenching and totally affecting power that is the consequence of The Decemberists' music, the words would not have ever found life.

On Out of Season, Gibbons' voice takes the spotlight. There's a quivery sound, similar to Billie Holiday's, which gets lost amid Portishead's stops and starts.

Yes, it's fun rockin' pop. But, unlike a lot of today's pop music, Guided By Voices keep their depth.

From the first few seconds of the album, you're hooked.

Idlewild are rapidly outgrowing their influences as they forge a unique identity that leads me to suspect that they may soon be inspiring a slew of like-minded new bands.

Whatever the lyrical content, though, the pleasures of N*E*R*D ultimately come down to their exhilarating production, flush with the breathless energy of rock and starry-eyed with the psychedelic potential of the studio.

Like so many great singles of the past, this is the sound of a good band getting great. Don't miss the moment.

She sounds as distant as much of the Anthology of American Folk Music, and yet there is an intimacy to her songs. This is a singer/poet who really feels things. And this is the new, weird America, and Holland is singing its woes with a wisdom far beyond her age.

By the time the longplayer finishes playing, you realize, whilst the acoustic guitars and harmonized vocals and that awesome table-tennis-ball-bouncing-beat may've made you think this was some easy-to-love pop platter, it actually hasn't stumbled all the way towards getting-it-together.

While the album is not as cohesive a vision, many of its songs are more focused.

Ultimately the album is bolstered by the risks he takes, and though it trips a bit and never quite achieves the direct vision of previous efforts, it's rewarding nonetheless, for the perspective it brings to Darnielle's body of work.

The record spans time and genre, reinterpreting everything from ska to country-tinged folk as if it were the product of a whimsically inaccurate translation device from another planet, and in the process creates a new musical language altogether.

A collection of slow, sad, stately songs whose obvious studio smarts are dwarfed by a big bleeding folkie's heart.

An album that is both emotionally powerful and truly beautiful.