The bristling energy that once held would-be sympathizers at bay has been turned inward, resulting in an unprecedented illusion of warmth.

Murs' strongest all-around album.

All around, Blockhead's first foray into solo sound collage is far from bad, but it rarely steals the show the way his rapper-associated work tends to.

The two-hour-plus runtime is gratuitous; probably the idea was to present the complete show (a la Alive by Kiss), but the effect is mind-numbing, and most of the successful experiments are lost in well-mannered gray.

On their own, N.E.R.D. are the hip-hop Toto.

Peace Love Death Metal is at its best when the inside joke is buried deep in the music, but whenever the deathtongue is planted squarely in the deathcheek, the songs turn not just silly, but lumbering and self-indulgent, overburdened by the overriding concept.

Our Endless Numbered Days is cleaner, more diverse, and generally sparser than its predecessor, and, given the apparent limits of Beam's former setup, it's also an astoundingly progressive record: Beam has successfully transgressed his cultural pigeonhole without sacrificing any of his dusty allure.

The Vines earn real damnation as Winning Days comes to a close. However boring and harmlessly vapid the first ten tracks are, "F.T.W." obliterates any possibility of forgiving them.

Madvillainy is inexhaustibly brilliant, with layer-upon-layer of carefully considered yet immediate hip-hop, forward-thinking but always close to its roots.... Good luck finding a better hip-hop album this year, mainstream, undie, or otherwise.

With every album, Fennesz's music has become prettier and more accessible yet still retains his distinctive style-- and Venice is no exception.

Ten is half as long as the band's debut and much more focused; each performer shows improved range and sharper talents. And yet, it's still a mixed bag.

It fits alongside the best of his career and adds another solid release to a solo catalog which will hopefully become more cherished in time.

Even if we're not taken by the subject matter, we're taken by how beautifully and personally Sufjan is taken by it.

A compelling synthesis of the hip-hop producer's talents and the solid ensemble work of the Blue Series collective.

Even its best moments sound like an amateurish reiteration of These Are the Vistas' quasi-jazz anarchy.

In 2001, their Brit-derived goth-punk was just gaining a foothold and still felt like a novel reinvention; now, its dreary slog is as commonplace as three-chord punk after the millennium's turn.

Too often, Lord's approach to her lyrics is overly reverent, to the detriment of the music itself.

They've focused their maniacal energy into seriously dense and carefully considered songwriting; even the cleaner and deeper production betrays Deerhoof's commitment to letting the songs speak for themselves, and to keeping individual parts as precise and undistracting as possible.

In some ways, Ultravisitor is the only Squarepusher album you need to know about. It contains instances of every idea, texture or beat he's presented until now, and unlike recent releases Do You Know Squarepusher or Go Plastic, little of it sounds stale.

Fall Back Open is more reminiscent of the arid, slow-burning side of the debut ("With a Subtle Look" comes to mind) than its upbeat fare, a reverb-drenched cruise missile flying in relentless slow-motion, like Calla with a pulse and a cherubic blond singer who could have gone boy-band as easily as indie-land.

With huge, ballooning vocals and a shit-kicking rhythm section, the record consistently threatens to pop its own feeble seams; by carefully shuffling away from their past outings, The Von Bondies have produced a booming sonic statement that's far more glam than garage, and a lot less "Detroit" than we've been trained to expect.

The Young Liars EP was as fully realized as all the critics suggested, yet now, TV on the Radio sound like a work in progress. Still, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes shows more strengths than mistakes.

The record's conceptual brilliance lies largely in Bejar's ability to craft deeply moving passages out of ostensibly artificial and contrived elements, subtly suggesting that all music, if not all human expression, is in effect some sort of artifice.

If the listener isn't eventually caught in swoons, at the least he will respect the degree of Lerche's refined artifice.

Like all lasting records, Franz Ferdinand steps up to the plate and boldly bangs on the door to stardom. There's no consideration for what trends have just come and gone. There's no waffling or concessions for people who won't get it.

A strong experimental record that draws on Cee-Lo's malleable style of rap... one of the year's strongest hip-hop albums to date.

The band have finally mastered the monstrous proportions of their diffuse talents and arranged them in ways that are wholly satisfying and distinctly unique.

Contrary to what some have claimed, They Were Wrong is listenable, and intentionally so: the band frequently finds ways to successfully straddle the fence between form and noise... though most of the time, it's admittedly impenetrable and alienating.

Even the least-crucial songs feature a tough backing band and a powerful, raspy performance from Candi.

Frusciante has finally harnessed the energy and unqualified honesty that pulsed underneath the wandering Syd Barrett-ness of his weird work, and applied them to a reedy, vaguely psychedelic, and consistently melodic collection of songs.

Most of Kila Kila Kila is heavy in all the wrong ways and strangely earthbound.

Were its hooks not as strong, She's in Control would probably come across as mechanical and calculated, but its many bright spots elevate it above being just a shrewdly timed exercise in cultural re-appropriation.

Rarely has a genre sounded so tried and tired, so forced, formulaic and reliant on its own mythology as country music is made to sound on Regard the End.

This album sounds like it was recorded and released as a favor from someone at the label. Truth is, the lighter that ignited All This Sounds Gas is long out of butane.

Profound, innovative, and absolutely vital.

Just as fuzzy and unpredictable as its namesake suggests, with high, hissing vocals, archaic-gone-futuristic blips, pedal steel, keyboards, glockenspiel, and a barrage of other noisemakers helping to build a thick, spacy stretch of soft 60s psychedelia.

The real problem with Volcano, though, is not only the fact that they aren't really doing anything inventive with their music, but that the music itself is utterly forgettable.

To say one of these albums is better than the other is basically beside the point-- anyone who buys one will certainly want the other, and both are fairly comparable as far as quality is concerned, anyway.

They've rediscovered their broad range and proud, sleeve-worn strangeness.

On the whole, this is the quietest Neubauten album to date, frequently lowering to a mere whisper, but don't let this fool you-- no album this band has made in the past has bristled with so much latent violence or been haunted by a more palpable sense of unseen menace.

With better lyrics and a longer attention span, McKay would be a jaw-dropping songwriter, but it's difficult to get sucked into a song if you don't connect with the singer.

On Magic & Medicine, the band's frenetic freakout leanings have been stripped away in favor of a more humble approach, placing subtlety and songwriting above the sounds being produced. It all sounds far less interesting.

The most disappointing aspect of Probot is that many of the songs sound more like Foo Fighters turned to eleven than actual metal.

While it's unfair to directly compare Courtney's solo work with Hole's shifty discography, America's Sweetheart demonstrates a fairly monstrous decline in both quality and conviction.

A flawed, overlong, hypocritical, egotistical, and altogether terrific album.

Forget Yourself is no small resurrection, and though it owes a great deal to The Church's traditionalism, that's nothing to apologize for.

Ghost have emerged as one of the most formidable (and important) rock bands I know. And Hypnotic Underworld is their rollicking masterwork.

Equally inspired by The Raincoats and Jacques Brel, The Power Out veers from one inspired genre tribute to the next, if it never quite cements the band's identity.

We Shall All Be Healed is complacent, formulaic for a trailblazer, lapped by Destroyer, optimistic-but-joyless in that it is pessimistic-but-punchy, and gooped with the silly putty of vagueness and cliché.

Each of these songs displays a mastery of craft rarely heard.

Me First proves to be a remarkably consistent and memorable listen.

While The Grey Album is truly one of the more interesting pirate mashups ever done, it ultimately fails at the hands of perfectionism with several pieces sounding rushed to beat some other knucklehead to his clever idea.

This is music just about anyone can enjoy, either for close listening or simply ambient sound.

The Posterkids sound positively ageless through No More Songs about Sleep and Fire, not having missed a flailing beat through the intervening years of decreasing tempos.

This may be Herren's least accessible project to date.

The album's chilling resonance is due in part to Godrich's anagogical recording of minimal instrumentation and digitally etiolated detail.

So while Delìrivm Cordìa is filled with great blocks of sound, it too often loses sight of direction.

It's here, about halfway through this four-disc set, that most people will turn off Join the Dots.

Cast of Thousands rides the borders of sentimentality expertly-- Elbow's new-found hope in unity may seem like idealistic drivel on paper, but is carried off on record with refreshing determination.

Obviously, Twista's not breaking down any walls with his wordplay on Kamikaze, but along the way he kicks over a few garbage cans while letting Kanye West, Toxic and the rest of his production crew move some crowds and elevate their status, one slow jam at a time.

Defiantly sappy, Silence Is Easy survives mostly on Walsh's oddly graceful singing. Unfortunately, the music on the whole is prosaic, even boring at times.

Another in a line of accomplished, eternally pleasant and intermittently brilliant Stereolab records.

A flatulent, irrelevant, self-indulgent attempt at recapturing the hotwired spontaneity of their debut through a dirge of sub-par psychedelia and try-hard freakouts.

Secret Wars is the first step toward the combination of Oneida's monolithic psych-rock and the numbing riff iteration they've spent so long deriving.

Even as Punk Rock shows that The Mekons have far better musicians today than when they were first fumbling around with Gang of Four's instruments, it also proves they're better songwriters.

Dalley possesses neither heart nor soul as a lead vocalist, and his milk-warm emotional outpouring of tiresome, overwrought subject matter could get lost in a crowd of two.

With Califone's penchant for extemporaneous creation finally being properly indulged, Heron King Blues is an appropriately loose and sprawling record, requiring a bit more patience than some of the band's previous projects.

As a singer, he's remarkable and distinctive, and on Cellar Door, he explores the range and impact of his voice to great effect.

An epic, sweeping cycle of songs that's completely over the top-- usually in the best possible way.

Just as Elliott Smith's "Needle in the Hay" was perfect for the suicide-attempt scene in The Royal Tenenbaums, any song on this album would complement a still-photo montage of a prolonged labor ending in a miscarriage.

Captures a portion of the wispy bedsit magic that used to mark some of The Field Mice's best work and boosts it with the lush, "Hazey Jane II"-like chamber-pop of Belle & Sebastian's first flourishes of glory.

Dizzee's despairing wail, focused anger, and cutting sonics places him on the front lines in the battle against a stultifying Britain, just as Pete Townshend, Johnny Rotten, and Morrissey have been in the past.

A record of overwhelming deconstruction and newly explored territorial demarcation.

The sad fact is, no marketing strategy, no matter how savvy, could conceal this collection's bathetic, overwrought travesties and gruesome failures.

With Tasty, Kelis has left the roller-rink, returned from outer space, and she's back on her own two feet on terra firma-- unfortunately.

He's already recorded such a wealth of great material that no mystique remains, leaving no real reason for anyone-- including the most dedicated fan-- to seek out these poorly produced musical shreds.

Electronic music that genuinely rocks.

It's the album's end-to-end strength that speaks the most-- against hip-hop artists who fail to make solid albums and those rock idiots who say it can't be done.

So perhaps it's about time that we stop calling Cex a wunderkind: He may be barely 25 but with the introspective yet exuberant Maryland Mansions, he's officially grown up, establishing himself as a performer to be taken-- yikes!-- seriously.

Ultimately, Naked is not essential. Unlike scattered moments in the Anthology series, this music (though immaculately presented) doesn't really expand on either the music of Let It Be, or The Beatles' legacy.

Even in falling short of Jay's classics, Reasonable Doubt and 2001's The Blueprint, it manages to eclipse 1999's brilliant Vol. 3: Life and Times of S. Carter as his third-best album-- which in itself still makes it one of the year's best.

Indeed, there are some dull moments on Spokes, but plucking tracks from the record and turning them around under the magnifying glass probably misses what Plaid intended (this one seems meant to be listened to in succession).

The new Magnetic Fields songs will, thankfully, not raise any eyebrows; the enthusiasm and sparkling spontaneity is, like always, pressed into ukuleles and tucked into preposterously addictive Yamaha sound settings circa 1985.

Stubbornly lo-fi and expectedly scrappy, the album is also tremendously listenable, a rhythmic, leg-flailing romp through vintage soul cool, glam boogie, classic rock thrash, and punk bravado.

A collection of preposterously cheerless (and charmless) songs that try much too hard to achieve a poignancy-- or anything, really-- that might hide their complete insignificance.

For the first time, Kozelek has put out an album whose meticulous sequencing yields more than just a random scattershot collection of great songs, but rather a complete cohesive musical statement.

It's not so much that Rock N Roll is incorrigibly written as that the record is unforgivably careless, unwilling to commit to anything including itself.

Overproduced, under-written, swaggering nonsense.

One of the most impressive aspects of The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place is that it feels constantly in flux, growing and transforming with every note.

The Thrills' external, sometime vaccuous pinching is clearly self-conscious, a carefully premeditated breach of expectation that causes more of a wince than a flash of pleasant surprise.

Thankfully, the band is up to the challenge of turning up the spotlights and the volume, and they crank out a solid batch of insanely catchy, pristine pop songs that'll crawl inside your brain and die there, only to come back and haunt you at the oddest times.

Despite the production and sonic sweep, this is a standard rock band working within an oft-stated, faux-experimental dream-pop realm.

That there's nothing new or innovative to be found here is sure to be a common complaint, though only those who prize evolution over knowing one's strengths will cry fraud.

Anything that keeps this compelling musical in the foreground of popular consciousness is worth something, and if a fan of Hedwig happens to be an indie rocker as well, this compilation is a delightful wedding.

Yo La Tengo are still one of the most talented acts going, and whether they're maturing or simply cooling off these days, they're still evolving.

Ramshackle, jumpy and curiously charming, Dead Man Shake is full of Westerberg's trademark spastic vocals and nimble guitar work, only now determinably fuzzed up and shrouded in Sun Records spunk.

Some of the most propulsive, ferocious music of the year as well as some of the most poignant.

Ultimately, Laika make pleasant music that's difficult to be passionate about.