The new mastering job, by Frank Arkwright working with Marr, actually is really good: loud but not bomb-level loud, clear, and airy. (Hatful of Hollow, in particular, is dramatically improved from its previous incarnations.) On the other hand, Complete is a profoundly inaccurate description of this set.

Many of the tracks on his last album felt like sketches—the kernel of an idea, abandoned quickly. The same sensibility holds here, but even the simplest idea is stretched across a much bigger frame, to six or seven or even eight minutes. That’s important; you need the time to sink into these things. After a spell, you can’t say whether you've been listening to a given piece for two or 20 minutes.

For the most part, the music gives the illusion of being something sourceless, something created without effort--not product, but pure being; not labor, but freedom.

SVIIB is not only the group’s most technically accomplished work, their perfected swan song--it feels true.

There are minor moments when Demo's slight r&b hooks miss and when Sway deviates too far from his good-natured strengths, but the lion's share is ace-- thoughtful but not pedantic, funny but not stupid, sincere but not treacly, realistic but not boring.

For all this record’s hubris, the long-touted “generational voice” that is Alex Turner has never sounded more real, or more himself.

Throughout, Mr Twin Sister is every kind of luxury--it’s more pillowy and firm than the spindly, spiky dance-pop of their past, crystalline on the outside and glittery on the inside, a snowglobe of a Times Square celebration.

The forward movement of July can be entrancing and propulsive.

Night Time, My Time isn’t the reactionarily somber anti-pop drag it could have been--instead, it’s a smart Kelly Kapowski hair-whip and loud bubblegum-crack of a record that lends itself to compulsive listening.

Though the album can be quite funny, it delivers the goods with no funny business—16 songs and not a throwaway among them, each an example of what works, rather than an experiment in what might.

It is beautiful, emotive music, literally and figuratively entrancing.

The overall strength of Under Color of Official Right doesn't come from its big words, Detroit cred, or works-cited page; it's from lyrics that, while fraught with symbolism, feel emotionally resonant and, sometimes, viscerally unpleasant.

To See More Light shows impressive range.

So while two straight discs of Fela is exhausting, it's probably the most suitable way to digest him.

Like his fusion heroes, Bruner wants it all: the future shock of electronics, the tightly edited pleasures of pop, the love-sick opulence of quiet-storm soul, and the show-stopper instrumental breaks of jazz. The fact that he's mostly pulled it off, with a record that's serious in intent while playful in execution, is pretty astounding.

Appropriately named, Movement feels like a progression and challenge from one of the year's most exciting new voices, producers, and composers.

Mew has succeeded in developing a good sound from some of the least hip ingredients imaginable, and No More Stories... feels like a consolidation of every stride they've made to date.

In its punchy production and eagerness to mix hard rock with boppy little guitar leads and cheeky catchy choruses, Kiss & Tell is a direct throwback to that fertile crossroads between thickheaded 70s AOR and the pop/new-wave nexus of the early 1980s.

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

For all his indulgences, Waits never lingers too long; these tracks are concise and expertly edited, and Bad as Me feels as new as it does ancient.

Final Days’ exhilarating, cathedral-toppling spectacle could prove to be the career game-changer that ensures his band remains a cult no more.

Like the best work of its participants, Beast Moans is no pornographer's rubdown; it delivers on its tease.

It's a great debut for a band with an impressive, distinctive sound.

Dream All Over recalls the most crucial lesson of all underground rock music: become your own sound, and create a universe for it to exist in.

In the end, what makes The Foley Room Tobin's best album in seven years is the way his bent for organized chaos manifests as a deft control of every sound that surrounds him: Anything's a beat, everything's a break, and the difference between sound and music is entirely contextual.

Those expecting the dense, powerful, and insistently upbeat onslaught of Mass Romantic will no doubt react to Electric Version with some degree of initial disappointment. Repeated listens, however, reveal that Electric Version not only displays Carl Newman's brilliant and unique pop sensibility, but allows it enough space to reveal previously obstructed layers of emotional depth.

If you simply want a rap album that will inspire all-caps quote sprees on Twitter or hourlong Gchat exchanges with your fellow microphone fiends, it really doesn't get any better than Reloaded.

It has a facing-the-beast quality of a punishing spiritual quest, as if Elverum steeled himself and left his house at midnight, barefoot, and just kept walking.

Iit never feels forced or like she's making some kind of push. It's unhurried and natural and real.

The love in his music is as terrible as it is beautiful, a wrenching act of spiritual determination. Swans make this sound effortless, though, in a fitting end to a remarkable chapter of their career.

Like much of Sweetener, the song is musically sparse but encompasses a kaleidoscope of vocal tones. It is here, four albums in, that the true multitudes of her voice, and by extension herself, blossom.

That gradual unfolding is one of Historian’s many delights. It’s not an easy album to wear out. It lasts, and it should, given that so many of its lyrics pick at time, and the way time condenses around deep emotional attachments to other people.

Songs build and build and build and then die, gazing longingly at exhilarating emotional peaks just outside their reach.

Though often framed as the band’s discovery of R&B, Sunshine Tomorrow reveals Wild Honey to contain almost as many connections to brother Brian’s sad-boy masterpieces and psych-pop as it does to the surf-rockers of yore.

The catch-22 for MellowHype is that while their centrism certainly has its merits, their music is unlikely to convert anyone that has, at this point, already written off Odd Future. Which leaves them with a solid, fun rap album to satiate a feverish cult and a growing number of casual fans.

There is no moment where Brown grabs your lapels and demands you to feel what he’s feeling, whatever it may be. He has called uknowhatimsayin¿ his “standup comedy album,” and the mastery on display is that of the comic going out there and killing. But the best-loved and most enduring comedians left their own blood out on the stage, too.

Woods' greatest strength has always been songwriting, and sharpening the focus and cleaning up the production has only enhanced the band's welcoming melodies.

From the first song it sounds rich and original.... It's as major a step as you'd expect-- really, as you'd demand-- from someone like Why?, not only for its sheer inventiveness, but the continuity that turns these lyrical snapshots into moving portraits.

For Grizzly Bear fans and Department of Eagles devotees alike, Archives 2003-2006 is a document rich with revelatory moments and educatory touchstones--but as an album, it functions even better.

As great as all these songs are individually, they sound best together, and hearing them in relation to one another reveals things about them that are harder to catch when they're separated.

Craft’s outsized personality is matched by less flashy, more fundamental skills: vivid, immersive storytelling and sharply focused, fat-free songs that have the lived-in feel of 40-year-old FM-radio favorites.

A strong finish to Tesfaye's first trilogy, providing just enough closure to satisfy, and just enough mystery left to entice us back for the next round.

Real Life Is No Cool isn't just the achingly stylish and neatly accessible dance record to end all that, it also constitutes a fresh new take on the strand of retro-futurism that Lindstrøm helped create.

Earle's music doesn't simply mirror the transcendence of its creator; it lends transcendence to the listener as well, as all excellent music will. But what truly makes this one of Earle's best records is that he refuses to be pulled down by musical decisions. It's as if he never faced a problem of whether or not to add this or that instrument, or to veer off in this or that direction. He simply had the idea and went with it.

With an open approach to queer sexuality and radical politics, The Smell of Our Own offers an alternative to the saccharine teen spirit we're so used to sniffing. It's a sensual celebration of stinky, real-life sexuality.

It is the clearest Dean Blunt has ever sounded and one of his most thrilling releases to date.

For a dirty, grungy rock’n’roll band, there’s no better place to hold communion than the local pub, where the separation between artist and audience can be so thin, it may as well be nonexistent. Maybe that’s why Way Down in the Rust Bucket feels transcendent: It captures the world’s greatest bar band in their spiritual home.

Africa Express keeps it to a bite-sized 41 minutes, and every one of them includes something to savor.

Her sophomore effort, I Speak Because I Can, finds Marling, still only 20, shrugging off virtually all traces of girlishness and wide-eyed charm, instead delving into darkly elemental, frequently morbid folk. And yet, astonishingly, the expected growing pains never come.

Eno Axis is both a wonderful album and a handy instruction manual for our times: Follow the simple suggestions tucked within McEntire’s songs and you may just feel your weariness begin to lift like morning mist burning off a river.

It is this excess of ambition over achievement, as opposed to any real consistency, which makes FutureSex/LoveSounds more of an album than Justified was. Songs which sound puzzlingly self-indulgent in isolation-- most obviously, the smirking, tenuously tuneful first single "SexyBack"-- are cloaked in a compelling intensity and purposefulness when played in succession.

What's refreshing about Kennedy's tracks--alluded to in Madak's quote above--is the amount of fun he wrangles out of such a sparse and austere template.

Arguably their best record yet, a logical and accessible realization of a sound they've been developing for more than six years.

This is incredibly heavy music made light (joyful, even) by the zeal and power of its players. By plowing into, through, and ultimately out of the dark, Ex Eye is an ecstatic fusion--an exhilarating exclamation of defiance, no warning required.

Do some of the more standard-issue runs seem a bit labored? They do.... But the emotion buzzing out of these songs keeps a great number of them stunning, like indie-friendly versions of scores from period epics or superhero movies.

If Crumb’s first two full-lengths squeezed worlds into safety-sized containers, this record is as authoritative as they’ve ever sounded. It sprawls in the vein of psych-pop genre-benders King Krule and Toro y Moi, but also manages to feel singular, a standalone statement of their ever-evolving identity.

Sick! doesn’t recontextualize the genre in the same way Some Rap Songs did, but it’s an act of self-revolution. It magnifies a newly assured Earl Sweatshirt, skin shed and free to ascend.

On War & Leisure, he sounds unconflicted and ready to rumble. The freedom he promises his lovers in his music extends to himself, and he’s better than ever at just letting go.

It's not quite the masterpiece everyone (at least me) was hoping for... but it does deliver on the hype, which in 2005 is almost the same thing.

For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, it feels more satisfying than the last two records. That might have something to do with its tonal sensibility: While the melodic sounds are as wispy as ever, they’re slightly more harmonious.

Nearly every track on LP3 pushes out toward the five-minute mark, and where previous American Football songs were internal journeys, this album’s travel to new vistas in all directions.

Sound & Color is not an electronic record. But it is strange and mystical and unexpected.

Time and time again, Premonitions delivers on that promise as Folick shares her inspiring vision of an ennobled world.

On his eponymous debut, Mikal Cronin proves he can hold his own.

The cartoonish brutality of the music is fun as hell, and since Korvette is most often mocking himself during Honeys, it doesn't come off as hectoring.

The album moves at roughly the same pace and with the same general tone, rendering some of the songs indistinguishable at first, but committed listens will reveal this to be as nuanced and as rich of a production as anything either Dreijer has done.

Murs' strongest all-around album.

It's mellow and smooth and relaxing, sure, but it's also unpredictable and full of little revelations and turns of sound that make it one of space disco's crowning recent achievements.

With Demolished Thoughts, Thurston Moore solo albums have become more than fields of noise throwaways spiked with the occasional gem, more than Sonic Youth stopgaps.

The raw-material demos that close out B-Sides and Rarities count as the collection’s greatest revelations, affording a work-in-progress intimacy to the creative gestation behind songs that already feel as familiar as the back of one’s hand.

With the help of producer Brian McTear, the songs fit together naturally; whether above synthesizers or acoustic guitar, Nadler never sounds forced.

The album yielded a substantial return on whatever that audience invested. But Wild Pink ultimately came across like a conversation Ross preferred to keep to himself. Yolk in the Fur can’t wait to share it.

The songs are long and dynamic, pushing their boundaries to the limit while maintaining spaciousness.

Created alongside a young producer and fellow Dallas denizen named Zach Witness in just 12 days, the tape feels off-the-cuff, yet also steeped in history and wisdom.

Mostly, Like the River Loves the Sea succeeds in elevating Shelley’s ruminations on “the ground I am bound to” and “the tender things around me” to matters of universal resonance.

So while I'm Gay isn't a definitive statement, it is an especially compelling point on a bizarre trajectory, one that feels worth keeping around.

Le Bon fills her music with ornately carved oddities, but she’s always had an ear for pop melodies, even within her most ambitiously arranged songs.

The first three-quarters of Inside-Out contains some of Yo La Tengo's best work to date. As a whole, however, it may be one of their less ear-catching records. If recorded by an aspiring young band, Inside-Out would be deemed the next big thing by all music press. However, people are used to Ira Kaplan's masterful electric assaults and the broad range of sounds that generally appear in spades on Yo La Tengo's LPs.

Bands like Mazzy Star, Galaxie 500, Spiritualized, and Slowdive will come to mind, but this is neither pastiche nor homage.

Whether he delivered on the full extent of what he wanted to achieve is up for debate; luckily, he's good enough that even when he comes up short, he's still better than most.

The Bible is a willfully abstract record, but for its many experiments, Wagner and company bring an intense focus to these songs.

Everything pops, but the gloss never makes the songs here feel processed or too glossy. It simply fits them well. And the songs are strong, too.

Crystal Stilts make terrific use of their recycled material, appropriating favorite forebears' brooding moves (and their richly endowed signifiers), and contributing their own deft hooks and stealth energy.

Gojira's best work to date.

Lovely Creatures presents the definitive display of these anguished labors and sweet fruits they bore over twenty years--an unmovable feast, immortalized.

Her nervy assessments of the world are filled with equal parts suspense and heart, and beautifully zany riffs, where the feeling of being frayed by uncertainty comes together into a strangely comforting patchwork.

It may not herald another big day coming, but Fade is a thoroughly immersive dusk-to-dawn soundtrack to a dark night's passing.

Phrenology completely realizes The Roots' talents and potential, maintaining its cohesiveness despite its many disparate elements.

Hooke’s Law is an accelerant. Over staggering tracks overrun with rhythms, melodies, and voices, keiyaA hurtles through the abyss and dares you to keep up.

Through the Open Window reveals an artist trying to find his voice and then convincing others to listen to it.

Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, one of the finest left-field releases of the year, transcends geography, inviting you to close your eyes and build your own richly detailed world.

It's bound to ruffle feathers and turn off old fans, and in a way, going so outright "pop" is one of the gutsiest, risky things a pillar of the scene like Scuba could have done.

hey've never been as good or as distinct as they are on Steal Your Face.

Whatever the case, he and Switch are kicking off summer with an armful of perfect cookout-, top down-ready songs, like the daytime soundtrack equivalent of all of the summertime night's rooftop music that's been coming from Swedes Air France and the Tough Alliance and their new wave of American indie disciples, such as Real Estate and Memory Cassette in the past year-plus.

By presenting a more rounded portrait of Guthrie in which politics is only one subject among so many, The Complete Mermaid Avenue Sessions shows just what Guthrie was fighting for and provides a persuasive rebuke to anyone who might whittle the man down to just one dimension.

New Start proves that the prowess of footwork’s first family is intact, and Taso might just be the glue that holds it all together.

White's gift on Big Inner is taking sounds created by actual southerners and turning them into figments of his musical imagination, which he bends and shapes into bottomless columns of ethereal soul.

In Prism ultimately sets a new standard for them: don't just make it sound like you never left, but rather make the past seem like a mere warm-up for what's to come.