You get the feel of two of the world's greatest musicians in a room together, having a conversation and creating a document that will carry their legacy into the future. It is not challenging music. Anyone can approach it easily, and it is the perfect initiation to Touré's talents for listeners who haven't yet heard him.

High Land is not only his first statement of intent as a songwriter, it’s his most innovative, his most influential, and his most timelessly vivid. Peaking early can be bittersweet, but the album is all the better for it.

The astonishing amount of care and detail that went into All Hell might just be the result of seven and a half years of creation, or maybe it’s Los Campesinos! giving us an album big enough to live in case it needs to last a lifetime.

Musically, it feels like the first St. Vincent album since Marry Me presented without a unifying aesthetic: at various points, Clark incorporates Bond theme melodrama, Steely Dan-style prog, bouncy art pop and lechy industrial rock, making for what is arguably her loosest record, an exhale after years of fitting her songs into increasingly tight restraints. It’s a freedom that carries through to the album’s emotional content.

An album that's sonically deep, dark, and one of 2006's finest.

It's a perfect way into the world of Belle and Sebastian, even if the band spends the second half of the disc trying to redecorate that space.

Every Replacements record is extraordinary in its way, but none exemplifies their garbage-to-grandeur alchemy like Pleased To Meet Me, which rocks like early Kinks, swaggers like T. Rex, and pays tribute to their spiritual godfather Alex Chilton.

Arriving at a particularly abundant time for lyric-driven indie rock drawing on folk and country, New Threats From the Soul stands proudly on its own.

It is one of the most exciting and passionately composed albums to appear not only in the global bass tradition but in the pop and experimental spheres this year.

The brilliance of Romance lies in its unsettling blend of antic energy with refined craft—in the depths of detachment, Fontaines D.C. strike an engaging pose.

For all its anguish, it’s underpinned by the joyful realization that she’s finally free to record on her own terms.

It’s Haim as we haven’t quite heard them before: not just eminently proficient musicians, entertainers, and “women in music,” but full of flaws and contradictions, becoming something much greater.

Amid a musical landscape now splintered into infinite subgenres, Superunknown remains the very definition of no-qualifiers-required rock--a tombstone for a once-dominant aesthetic, perhaps, but also a solid, immovable mass that endures no matter how dramatically its surroundings have changed.

Despite the omission of obvious classics like “Warm Leatherette” or Fad Gadget’s “Ricky’s Hand” (presumably because the Mute label archive was off-limits to the compiler) Close To the Noise Floor provides a fascinating overview of the formative years of British home-studio electronica: groups who were precursors in spirit, if not direct lineage, to the techno and IDM artists of the ’90s. Still, with the cult for “minimal wave” now a decade old, it almost feels like another task has become urgent: the rediscovery of the groups that did the groundwork for the outfits on Disc 3 of Noise Floor.

Each of these tracks is indeed summery in its own way, as is most of There’s a Dream. But there’s one thing that neither this collection nor Hazlewood ever forgets: The brightest sun always casts the darkest shade.

A fresh sense of discovery also suffuses I Am Not There Anymore’s more straightforward songs.

Live at the Fillmore sounds and feels vibrant and inviting, and it is curated with obvious attention and care.

The ability to live with such contradictions and give them life with his words is part of what made Scott-Heron’s work special, and McCraven’s music inhabits that complicated space and keeps its sharp edges intact.

The first disc is fine, containing most of the band's singles and a few key album tracks. The second is messier.

At its best, folklore asserts something that has been true from the start of Swift’s career: Her biggest strength is her storytelling, her well-honed songwriting craft meeting the vivid whimsy of her imagination; the music these stories are set to is subject to change, so long as it can be rooted in these traditions.

Chrome Dreams carries a dream logic that's bewitching in a way the individual moments simply aren’t, a testament to how a good album sequence can almost be a magic trick.

An expanded version of the Truckers’ The Dirty South that finally reveals the true breadth of their 2004 masterpiece.

The Drexciya reissue rightly returns the spotlight to the original electro's signature rhythms and analog palette.

Each track is fully realized, thoughtfully written, and prudently performed, rolled out with a steadiness that can become a little maddening after a handful of listens.

Not simply an excellent album, Chutes Too Narrow is also a powerful testament to pop music's capacity for depth, beauty and expressiveness.

He’s responded in the best way possible: by producing a record that, in structure and scale, is every bit The Seer’s equal, yet possessed by a peculiar energy and spirit that proves all the more alluring in its dark majesty.

Where parts of Lush revealed themselves slowly, saving their secrets for intent listening, Valentine is more immediate, grabbing your gaze and refusing to let go for 32 straight minutes.

Although his voice doesn’t quiver with emotion and texture like those of serpentwithfeet, Sampha, and FKA twigs, it makes plaintive lines land as dreamy.

It finds the band climbing toward some unknown peak, and while it attains great heights, there's also a now-again sound of wheels spinning, and every reason to believe LB still haven't reached their ultimate destination.

Like Ghostface's modern classic, this album defies hip-hop's current atmosphere of youthful cockiness and aging complacency: instead, it's driven by the sometimes celebratory, sometimes traumatized sense of stubborn survival and perseverance, a veteran mindset that can no longer picture success without having to defend it.

You don't get anything that great [as "1777"] on the rest of the album; that said, it's an emotional peak you only need to reach once on a collection like this, and the restraint on the following tracks helps with the overall thematic.

Song for Our Daughter brims with peaceful reflections that, even though Marling herself is just grazing her 30s, could seem like the work of an artist in their twilight years.

The thrill of Future Nostalgia—the title itself a claim to modern classic status—is in hearing her tailor the retro-funk form to suit her commanding attitude.

Divers is not a puzzle to crack, but a dialog that generously articulates the intimate chasm of loss, the way it's both irrational and very real.

Now she has an album that ups the stakes and nuance of her artistry. Not just in telling a story over the course of 12 songs, or by making a record that interacts with more modern musical ideas, or in how she’s using her voice with newfound multitudes, but by being bold enough to share it all so vulnerably, with the entire world listening.

Each song contains its own small epiphany, but they never quite add up to the one big sweeping epiphany that you'd hope for.

With Caligula, she has created a murderous amalgam of opera, metal, and noise that uses her classical training like a Trojan Horse, burning misogyny to ash from its Judeo-Christian roots.

An exceedingly triumphant psych-pop oddity.... I doubt 2004 will birth a more blissful sonic encounter than Ta Det Lugnt.

Though it draws upon the distant past, Julia Holter's made a timeless people-watching soundtrack: an acutely felt ode to the mysteries of a million passersby, all the stars of their own silent musicals.

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.

Throughout the album, Yorke’s everyday enlightenment is backed by music of expanse and abandon. The guitars sound like pianos, the pianos sound like guitars, and the mixes breathe with pastoral calm.

If Nature Morte was a Richter scale-busting apocalypse of a record, A Chaos of Flowers is the ominous aftershock, an extended reverberation that accrues its own awesome, unsettling force.

Leftfield choices underscore the courageous and subtly unusual nature of Gibbons’ album, which hides its eccentricity behind her deathless voice and sympathetic lyrical insight.

Masseduction often feels fragmentary, like two or three albums in the campaign of one.

From the first shudder of the keyboard and crack of drums to that last, celebratory walk through the village of the virgins, Iyer, Crump and Gilmore keep things spellbinding.

Saint Cloud is something far bigger. It isn’t just talking to Lucinda Williams’ 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, it pulls up right beside it, a vivid modern classic of folk and Americana.

Yes, this is shit-hot thrilling music. But it's also brainy and ambivalent, and more engaging for it.

Masterful sequencing and economical writing (most songs are under three minutes) allow Bey to be as nimble as ever.

Like its sister album, it is unexpected, unfiltered, uncomfortably messy, and dizzyingly fun.

This is the sound of Simz reconciling with Simbi. And it sounds great. Cue the ovation.

English Teacher can’t leave a song alone: Not a track goes by without a twist or complication, whether a time-signature change, an instrumental flourish, or a sudden wall of sound. .... Most promising, and core to This Could Be Texas, is the band’s interest in melding indie-prog, rock, folk electronica, and post-punk into a new package.

“Only One” highlights Jenkins’ facility for understated sophistipop; she’s a masterfully silky interpreter of hurt, a canny channeler of failed love in the softest possible tones. But the album’s very best song is its most atypical. “Delphinium Blue” is mostly synths.

GOLLIWOG masterfully uses that spooky proximity for self-reflection and thrills. Like the late MF DOOM, who he interpolates twice here, woods is perfectly intelligible despite his layered lyrics and elusive public profile.

Maybe that's why this album has such an incredible pull: It doesn't make an atmosphere so much as a space to spend time in, and Adebimpe doesn't become a narrator so much as a witness.

It grants him the freedom to play with tone, to write personally or use his gravelly voice as texture, to treat the harshest raps and the most delicate hooks as mad experiments gone wrong.

In the end, Barnett returns invariably to herself, a subject she finds hard enough to understand. If all this seems a little heady in discussion, it's to the credit of Barnett and her band--Dave Mudie, Dan Luscombe, and Bones Sloane--that it doesn't sound that way on record.

It isn’t quite as punchy as RTJ2, which was brutish in its tactics, with nonstop bangs and thrills, but RTJ3 is a triumph in its own right that somehow celebrates the success of a seemingly unlikely friendship and mourns the collapse of a nation all at once.

Von Hausswolff and her ensemble are patient with these songs. They linger over them, giving them time and space to develop, even when they’re nearly at the boiling point.

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.

Because Up in Flames is so focused on big moments and aural candy, it's wise that Snaith decided to keep the record under 40 minutes. He blows you out and then packs it up.

On her fifth solo release, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, she may be maturing, or more vulnerable, or more vulnerable to her maturity. But regardless, the sheen gets slicker and her music gets duller as the time passes.

While the subject matter of POST- ensures its relevance and substance, much like everything else Rosenstock has ever done, it also sounds like the most fun thing one could possibly do. It’s a motivation to, at the very least, get out of bed.

On Reservation, Angel Haze shows herself to be the rare rapper who has copped a great deal of contemporary popular hip-hop and R&B and come out the other side as purely herself.

The ravishing delight Tumor brings to this character is what makes their music so affecting. Yves is a performer whose roles, played with the utmost rigor, always find a way to linger in the memory.

Like the best artists from the South, Goodman renounces perfect symmetry and leans instead toward the crooked and out-of-focus. These are qualities embodied by the characters who populate her songs.

Gibbs skates over these beats, effortlessly gliding in and out of the pocket. Even the moments of stark contrast feel natural.

This ambient music is not psychedelic. It never evokes outer space or the cosmos or, for that matter, the natural world, even when it uses the sound of water. It’s music for the indoors, music for doing things, there for you if you want to listen closely but also content to exist on a subliminal plane.

Not particularly easy work. But with Big Time—her clearest and most radiant music—Olsen set out to more deliberately foreground the virtue of ease.

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.

I'd assume Bay of Pigs' disco diversion to be just that in the long run, but after the relatively wagon-gathering summary of "Trouble in Dreams," this certainly feels like a break and, perhaps, the first blush of something new. Cheers to that.

All the more for you to swim around in. And those peaks certainly take you higher when the builds have been teased out to the limit.

Isn't Anything crystallizes MBV's unique dynamic.

Ancestral Recall, aTunde Adjuah’s ninth studio album as a leader and his most progressive statement of stretch music yet, is a testament to the contemporary flexibility of the jazz tradition; at times, it also constitutes a hyperspace leap out of it.

It offers a window onto the playfulness of his improvisations and, in a structure that mimics the range of an actual Prince album, shifts nimbly between up-tempo songs and ballads, sweat and tears, near impossible to stay sitting still while listening.

Time and again he suggests that freedom itself is an act of improvisation, of imagination, that begins now: “We write our own story.” It’s in the context of these bigger ideas that Com lands some of his biggest gut-punches of all time, while rapping in his simpler, prize fighter mode.

Encapsulating and elevating the best of Destroyer's back catalog, Destroyer's Rubies serves as a potent reminder that the intelligence of Bejar's songs has never obfuscated their emotional weight.

The best moments on this record arrive when Harding’s playful approach to words syncs up with her playful approach to sound. The logic driving the end result may remain hidden, but its allure is undeniable.

The sparse and largely unobtrusive music, and Jurado’s wanting vocal range place the emphasis on storytelling, one his strongest assets. The results, however, are a mixed bag.

What makes Painful so eminently approachable after all these years is that it manages to sound like a fully realized, band-defining statement yet unpretentiously off-the-cuff at the same time. It’s a feeling reinforced by the overflow of material available on this reissue.

MAGDALENE is visceral and direct, but despite featuring a trunk-thumping Future collaboration (“holy terrain”), this is not a play to make pop music in the charts-humping sense. It’s a document of twigs’ marked achievements in songwriting and musicality as she elucidates her melodies without sacrificing her viewpoint.

The songs are occasionally great—“Ghosts” and “Burnin’ Train,” in particular—and sometimes they feel remarkable just due to their old-school presentation.

This isn't the Roots' most accessible album, and it's definitely their most downbeat, but it comes from a place that isn't always easy to dwell.

It’s just a meticulous document of a band whose hedonism kept them from restraining their absurd level of mastery. So here: have Zep as they both wanted to be and eventually were.

From a production standpoint, the record is nearly flawless. The bulk of YHLQMDLG strikes a balance between reggaetón’s dembow riddim and an island-influenced Latin trap palette.

Across these 102 tracks, he sounds as devoted to his work as ever, puncturing a style of music built to offer definitive answers with his own heavy brand of cosmic nihilism.

Rejoicing in the Hands establishes Banhart as a major voice in new folk music. Not only does it improve on the promise of his earlier releases; it effortlessly removes the listener from the context of the recording.

While undeniably beautiful, Vespertine fails to give electronic music the forward push it received on Björk's preceding albums. Rather than designing sounds never before imagined, the album merely sounds current, relying on the technology of standard studio software and the explorations of the Powerbook elite.... Still, Vespertine makes for an intriguing listen, and manages to hold its own after hours on repeat.

The most disheartening thing about From a Basement on the Hill is its plainness-- it's neither a perfect record (and not one of Smith's best) nor the kind of colossal disaster that could be angrily pinned on money-hungry handlers and desperate fans.

The Blueprint is possibly the least sonically inventive hip-hop chart topper in years-- stunning and captivating for sure, but still loungily comfortable enough to sleep to.

Listeners love Japanese Breakfast because she gives you everything: a buffet of sub-genres, blunt confessions, larger concepts, and on-point orchestration, led by someone with undeniable charisma. Listening to Michelle Zauner go all in on Jubilee provides every bit of the joy she intended.

With NINE, they add new layers—of mystery but also flippant humor—to their sound.

Lenderman has honed his songwriting such that I’d nominate a couplet for short story of the year: “Kahlúa shooter/DUI scooter.” He’s got lines that’ll paint a stupid grin on your face.

The brilliant In Rainbows represents no such thing [downshift]. Nonetheless, it's a very different kind of Radiohead record. Liberated from their self-imposed pressure to innovate, they sound--for the first time in ages--user-friendly.

Despite the new song structures, guitar solos, and drum fills, Brownstein's guitar still roars wildly, Weiss's drums still thunder, and Tucker still wails with a primal urgency that is one of the most compelling sounds in rock music today.

It’s a lonely album with a whopping heart, a hungry siren call for connection.

Only God Was Above Us is also the most honest album Vampire Weekend have made, an encapsulation of what the band does best, melodic and abstruse in Koenig’s own masterful way.

What the Isley Brothers achieved can't be contained in a single album nor can it be adequately summarized in a hits collection. They seized all the tumult, all the excitement, all of the sounds of their time and turned it into enduring commercial art whose endurance and depth is best appreciated in a set like this, where the actual records can be heard in their entirety.

Slow Forever thrives in that existential anxiety, as though Wunder and Fell realized they had a lot to lose but even more to gain. As surprising as it may seem for an album where death, despair, and destruction linger in every word, Cobalt gambled on resurrection and, against the odds, advanced.