Created during Iceland’s dark, cold winter, Nepenthe’s intimate vibe immediately warms and envelops. In short: mesmerizing.

They put their cloudy heads together and came up with the power-chord-slashing and hobbitty keyboard werping goods but wisely didn’t lose all the dirty distortion and strummy acoustic bits.

Sometimes a sequel can out do the original. That's the case with Curren$y's follow-up to Pilot Talk, thanks largely to stepped-up production by Ski Beatz, whose beats sound like a minute hasn't passed since he worked on Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt.

Wacky pseudoscience aside, the results here are relatively accessible, at least by Matmos standards.

This time around, though, female backing vocals add interest and drama to what is essentially a rich batch of breakup songs that somehow leave you feeling good.

Assists aside, Land of Talk continue to showcase Powell’s singular musical vision, sounding a hopeful, tuneful note in her long-awaited return.

Girls continue to bypass fads by making timeless music about the universal themes of love, heartache and drugs.

It’s full of the proggy rhythmic U-turns, complex structures and virtuoso playing for which the band’s known.

It's cliched to remark on a duo's ability to sound like a full band, but the Dodos' virtuosic acoustic guitar playing and busy arrangements undeniably defy their numbers.

These songs, short and sparsely arranged, are more fragile. Crutchfield’s hardly beautiful, unadorned singing helps this idea along, and the ways she uses her voice introduce a complicating factor: confidence.

No, the sound isn’t all that different from what Petty does with the Heartbreakers, but the Mudcrutch album has the looser feel you get from old buddies jamming for kicks.

Fuzz do one thing--creepy, heavy fuzz rock--but do it really well.

There's not much that's accessible about The Most Lamentable Tragedy, but that's a good thing.

A vigorous 11-song collection that keeps the lyrics and melodies straightforward, allowing the complexity and uniqueness of his guitar-playing to burst through.

It’s a challenging album, one you might not put on often.

Kings of Leon often seem torn between their stadium rawk impulses and their hip underground aspirations.

Daniel Lopatin's newest Oneohtrix Point Never album is one of the more unique, powerful recordings to come out this year. It's uncomfortable but distinctly compelling.

Unfortunately, the rest is incidental disco-lite dross, with a couple of bland bumpers and a little East-meets-West fusion thrown in for good measure. The three M.I.A. tracks would’ve made a solid EP.

There are a few jangly throwbacks for nostalgia’s sake interspersed throughout Accelerate, but they’re overshadowed by blustery guitar blather that shouts “anachronism” at every turn.

She’s often a bundle of insecurities, vacillating between defeat and empowerment on fraught songs like Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay) and I Blame Myself. Her hooks, however, are as appealing and direct as they come.

Definitely on the arty end of the post-rock gradient, No Age manage to channel elements of other great bands who have woken up drunk on the lo-fi line between pretty and noisy.

Essentially, Evidence harkens back to 00s rap nostalgia without resorting to preachy tirades or regressive concepts, a respite during a time of sing-rap and hyper-aggressive flows.

Considering Zeffira's vocal training and Badwan's ability to project, they could have made a boisterous entrance. Instead, hushed tones and sweet melodies lure you in and keep you listening.

Foxwarren doesn’t feel like Andy Shauf and his backing band; it feels like a creative, cohesive group.

The album evokes images of oceans, lakes and rivers in not only the album art, song titles and lyrics, but also in the overall atmosphere. Songs fluctuate like water, varying from tumultuous and joyous to still and tranquil. They flow with ease.

Where the band’s double-drum rhythm section was once their most forceful sound, here it’s just another element in an impressively rich palette.

It suffers from its uniformly dark tone and funereal tempos, and Ahearn’s attempts to sweeten things with an overly polished mix only makes a sad situation worse.

A Swedish Love Story's brevity is basically a kind of pop tease, but the upbeat (or "posi," as he put it in a press release) vibes make for a stirring and enjoyable listen.

When they stop aiming for catchiness and instead get real about relationships, LYTD sparkles.

When the album is taken as a whole, its full beauty is floodlit--a rare experience in the age of singles.

It's an idiosyncratic, aggressively self-conscious and occasionally sentimental album, one that falls somewhere between languid, finger-snapping R&B and hip-hop braggadocio.

Through varied production, Q strikes a balance between his hard persona and the party vibe found on Habits’ catchiest tracks.

It sounds like fun was had in Dave Grohl's garage, but this good album could've been great had they spent more time songwriting prior to plugging in and cranking up.

Most of the songs, including the strong opening track, concern the duo's history as a couple and a band.

The results are indisputably unique, but the project often feels more like a collection of intriguing experiments than a proper album.

The more overtly rock moments give the album a bit too much of a 90s alternative feel, but that’s got to be expected from someone who came out of the slam poetry scene and previously worked with Trent Reznor.

Gordon and Post haven't missed a beat. In fact, they might be better than ever.

The album makes every effort to showcase the band's deep back catalogue, and represents their second coming--it speaks to the new generation of fans they've gained. There are worse ways to be remembered.

Thankfully, At Mount Zoomer is a formidable collection of catchy indie art-rock that won’t disappoint fans of their acclaimed debut.

You won’t find many dance-floor fillers here, and on that level this album comes closer to Junior Boys’ wistful electro ballads than to Metro Area’s laid-back club magic.

The melodies are a bit more major key, but if you listen closely, the lyrics are as gloomy as ever (in a good way).

They might've built their reputation on kinetic live shows, but taking the time to make a proper studio album has refreshed, revitalized and tightened their special sound.

A bunch of tunes seem built for radio (So What, Error), ballad Sorrow is overly dreary, and Skin Me borrows way too much from Nirvana. But the strength, emotion and new directions make this album a winner.

Eno definitely does imbue the mix with some sonically compelling elements, washing songs through some darker-than-usual moods.

This is understated folk pop, and as a result, some may be disappointed by the lack of big pop hooks. However, for those of us who always found Diamond overwrought and too extroverted, this restraint is refreshing and welcome.

The Haunted Man is yearning, elegant pop music in line with the past year's best.

It was always hard to predict which direction he might take next, but on his new album, Hardcourage, he’s surprised us by finally bringing all those disparate tangents together into a cohesive sound.

A must for anyone still heavily rotating Moon Safari.

The result is dreamy to a fault, with song fragments submerged in extended instrumental intros and outros.

It's a near-constant barrage of fist-pumpers built to fight back the sunrise, from the opening pummel of Throwaways to the Replacements-indebted pop power of closer Dirty Lights.

There are great production touches all over Beams, but unfortunately the songwriting is just okay, and the arrangements often bury the best sonic details.

She sounds like she’s rediscovering the thrill of making music, and a nervy triumph pervades.

Nothing terribly new or unexpected to report, just a more direct way of expressing not so adventurous ideas.

The result is a uniformly pleasant selection of peaceful, easy feelings that wouldn't sound out of place sandwiched between the similarly smooth tunes of Loggins & Messina, America, Gerry Rafferty and, yes, Christopher Cross.

In producer Tucker Martine’s hands (he’s worked with Neko Case, Punch Brothers, the Decemberists and Laura Veirs), O’Donovan’s music sounds light and atmospheric, her folk freed up by billowing electric guitars and sensitive percussion.

While the record is a solid listen front to back, standout moments include 'Princes,' which features Ghana-London rapper Tinchy Stryder, and the breathless vocals on the ghostly 'House Jam.' Watch for this album to pop up all over year-end best-of lists next month.

The album plods occasionally, but then the band’s mastery of mood shifts kicks in and a dreamy landscape and simple, jangly verse turn into a big, beautiful chorus.

The album’s last bit kind of peters out, but what comes before it is amusing and fun.

It feels like she’s made no effort to censor herself musically or lyrically, and that naked honesty makes this disc stand out strikingly.

Much of their bubbly futuristic synth music goes no deeper than what you’d hear in old TV Ontario science shows. Cute but disposable.

Wrecking Ball could've been great but was derailed by unnecessary gimmicks.

The album is both challenging and rewarding. On songs like Fresh Laundry, Allie X’s vocals are often treated with high-gloss effects that steal the personality from her voice. It’s not until final track Learning In Public that you hear her unvarnished, which by then sounds jarring. It often feels like she’s doing too much with too much.

All the emphasis on getting the realness down doesn't distract from Bridges's butter-smooth vocals and inventive phrasing. Instead, the understated arrangements allow us to really hear his voice, unadorned by excessive studio shaping.

On the whole, the band’s country-leaning indie rock pulses along for 49 minutes at a decent clip.

The album's middle is slow, contemplative and ambient, allowing Marshall's deep-seated melancholy to reveal itself.

The moody minimalism is still present, but under the rich vocal treatment the band sounds more subordinate and self-effacing, at times to a fault.

Maths + English is not without its gems.

Yet another must-have for Animal Collective fans.

An intriguing tension exists between the lo-fi production touches and pristine hi-fi sounds, and similarly between Cook's joking/not-joking attitude.

The songs are about working through the pain of love, but what comes across on record is joyous.

Recorded last summer in Los Angeles, their debut 10-track album effortlessly showcases both Oberst’s and Bridgers’s strengths as songwriters who are unafraid of literate vulnerability as they explore subjects like loneliness, privilege and estranged family.

Post Tropical’s lush horn arrangements, rare but welcome returns to guitar fiddling and overall sense of restraint keep it warm, woozy and with one toe still in the folk realm.

The band wisely retains the elements that worked the first time: intricate, jittery guitars, driving bass and creative rhythms, best displayed on the title track and Black Gold.

Some might prefer she stick with her usual skewering of gender roles, but that genuine anger lends a new seriousness and realness to even her silliest verses.

Sincerely, Future Pollution still sounds distinctly like Timber Timbre, and stands up easily against their other albums.

Iz and Bobby Avila (aka the Avila Brothers) produced and co-wrote the bulk of the tracks, and those are the most successful. It would have been smarter, though, to use them for the whole album, as the smattering of generic blues jams and guest showcases seem tacked on and out of place.

An anxious mood comes through clearly but doesn’t quite go anywhere, kind of like a protagonist who seems the same at the end of a book as at the beginning.

This is music to lose yourself in.

This is the most radio-friendly they’ve ever sounded, and as a result there’s less of that sense of fragile intimacy. That’s not necessarily such a bad thing, especially when it’s replaced by an addictive burning urgency, as it is here.

The co-founder of Godspeed You! Black Emperor still makes stumbling experimental rock but fails to improve on his previous work.

They seamlessly move from straight-up hardcore or punk to more traditional rock all over this record, and there's no shortage of fist-pumping anthems.

Everything is worth hearing, but frenetic waltz-meets-hora dance track Comrade Z is a definite standout. This isn’t quite as fun as Gogol’s music, but it’s more thoughtful than DeVotchKa’s Gypsy punk brethren.

On this one, there are wonky backup vocals, trashy-sounding drums, disgustingly distorted guitar solos, vaguely off-key horns. You get the sense that Lewis, also a talented comic-book maker, does whatever the hell he wants, and it totally works.

Made is at once more adventurous and more accessible, with a greater respect for straightforward(ish) pop.

The Alabama-born Houck knows his way around this music well enough to walk the fine line between respect and reverence as he delivers impassioned readings of 'Can I Sleep In Your Arms' and 'Too Sick To Pray' and kicks out a freewheeling rip through 'I Gotta Get Drunk' with the appropriate tinge of self-loathing.

Hearing 2003’s Frank the first time around, I can’t say I was knocked out by Amy Winehouse’s supper club jazz singing, and the album hasn’t improved with age.

Isbell shows us his sensitive side in a collection of lightly strummed breakup ballads and weepy slow-dancers you'd expect to get from Ryan Adams. That's not an endorsement.

Listening to the fiercely adrenalized sophomore disc by Sweden’s Love Is All is like being at the fair for an entire weekend, stuffing your face with cotton candy and taking one too many spins on the Gravitron.

He's turned the clock back to the Fun Trick Noisemaker era of playful psychedelic indulgence that was the Apples' stock in trade before the unsavoury aspirations of indie-rock stardom took hold.

There’s good understated playing throughout, strong songwriting and a casual, immediate feel that comes from recording an entire album in six days.

Though he used songs from the same recording sessions for both, Humor Risk is quite a different collection, accessible and verbose by McCombs's standards.

Many other songs retread themes of self-doubt and disillusionment, reaching previous levels of intimacy but without taking us anywhere new. Musically, Green does take C&C into somewhat unfamiliar, heavier territory.

There's nothing terribly innovative going on here, but their unguarded passion is irresistible.

She benefits from solid production by Saddle Creek staple Mike Mogis, who tweaks her retro sound with synths and electronic blips, but it's the stark M. Ward-produced tracks that, while more traditional, showcase the Dolly Parton potential in Lewis's voice.

His latest--entirely produced by long-time collaborator No I.D.--reveals an enlivened emcee, the same forceful voice who gave us classic albums such as Be and Like Water For Chocolate.

Together, they sound kind of Bowie glam, kind of ELO, but never dated.

Ultimately, this is the same Radio Dept. we know, love and hardly ever hear from. We’ll take what we can get.

As always, the main appeal lies in how honest and real it all feels.