Flying Club Cup would be a triumph even with those layers stripped away; that's not to say that the cultural patina obscures the "real" songs underneath, but its removal allows us to sidestep mind-numbing questions about authenticity and intention.

The uptempo tracks are breezy and chill; the ballads are lush and deeply felt.

MADE might be a small album, one that never musically ventures outside Scarface's comfort zone, but it's a heavily personal work from someone with a whole lot to say.

It was sometimes unclear when Stereolab's mid-century references were meant as kitsch, but here, Gane & co.'s retro-futurist flashback feels optimistic, as though convinced that the key to fulfilling the promise of a new era were just one perfect rhythm away.

The tension between artifice and reality is what gives Seth Bogart most of its conceptual heft, but it obviously helps that the album is very fun to listen to.

If you're a lifelong garage-rock purist or just enjoy the occasional Jay Reatard track, there's a good chance you'll get a lot of mileage out of Help. It's hard not to: This is like meat and potatoes prepared by a master chef--totally familiar but utterly delicious.

If his tales feel like strangers’ snapshots found in a box at the flea market, his songs have an equally vintage tint, shot through with a déjà vu quality that makes them feel like you’ve heard them before, but can’t quite place where.

Ross knows his lane and stays in it on Teflon Don.

Glitter and Doom Live is not simply a souvenir of a tour most fans didn't attend but a de facto greatest hits of Waits' fourth decade of music, during which his gnarly adventurousness didn't wane but only intensified.

While alternating between derivative and rudimentary, On!Air!Library! is nevertheless well executed in its obviousness.

On Time Out of Time makes the billion-year-old buzz of two neutron stars into something heart-stirring.

Mise En Abyme hunts that sensation of flux and liminality, unearthing warmth in a landscape of paranoia.

For all the album's wandering spirit, the first eight tracks on Push the Sky Away are neatly structured into two complementary, four-song halves that mirror one another.

Still Brazy solidifies YG as a torch-bearer for west coast gangster rap.

It's a strange and forgiving album, less toothsome than the ones that preceded it, but Musgraves' resistance makes this album important, even when it's imperfect.

For a technically sophisticated record that doesn’t have a great deal of dynamic range, EARS has a surprisingly strong emotional tug.

Even if this is an album that defies obvious lineage and needs a roadmap to uncover the specific sources from Joe Barrite's archive, there's an inescapable sense of emotional impact here.

Building off a simple guitar note, the record’s slow-burning title track is perhaps the band’s greatest accomplishment yet.

Curious, constantly in motion, full of puzzle-like counterpoints and arresting chord changes, it's a joy to listen to, and one of the brightest, most invigorating records I've heard all year.

Treble and Tremble showcases a full array of old-school remedies, from inventive mic'ing and overdubbing to brutal filters and bullhorn distortion a la Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse. If Espinoza sang any better than he does, he'd probably be bored in the studio.

Little Wide Open is the most cohesive, tuneful and cleanly drawn album of Morby’s career.

It’s tricky to praise music so clearly based on form and balance. Comma isn’t filled with a mind-warping atmosphere you’ve heard nowhere else, it’s not an invitation to meditate or do yoga, and it probably won’t make you cry. It offers something ineffable that I can best call a “presence,” and its ability to center you in the here and now is, in its own low-key and meticulous way, overwhelming.

Granted, it's not mind-blowing, and it's not nearly as masterfully executed and affecting as their earliest work. But there are only a handful of bands out there that can put out an album as well-constructed as Rock Action and still expect people to bitch and moan about it.

Akoma radiates cool, simmering control. There’s never any doubt that each percussive element and textural glint has landed precisely where Patton intended, yet this samurai-precise music is as unpredictable as a shroomy Ricardo Villalobos odyssey.

Her mesmerizing, eventful, and strange album brings these remote voices close enough to feel their breath in our ears.

The album anticipates the year’s mood: restive, anxious, sometimes antagonistic, and above all, searching. Beneath its rockslides of wrong notes lies the conviction that a different kind of order is possible. Dorji’s other albums may be more soothing or more conventionally beautiful, but none feel better suited to the exigencies of the present moment than this one.

It is perfectly sequenced, mysterious and moody. For a debut album, the fully-formed nature of their songwriting, sublime pacing and monolithically tasteful atmosphere is remarkable.

While Why There Are Mountains reminded me of what those records [Perfect From Now On or The Moon and Antarctica] sounded like, Lenses Alien does something more difficult by reminding what it felt like once they were over and you were left to wonder if you just stumbled upon a cosmic, philosophical treatise disguised as an indie rock record.