This great unknowing serves as the album’s guiding principle. In Cave’s wounded voice, you hear him grapple in real-time with the incidental prophecies of his lyrics and his need to get the job done.

Really, in a world far too concerned with backstories and far too lacking in good old dedication to craft, Grizzly Bear's just about as boring as they come: four guys who very quietly set out to make a fantastic record. And so they did.

This self-fulfilling fatalism is at the heart of innumerable rock songs by innumerable bitter young men, but it is rarely expressed with the introspective clarity that Bachmann displays throughout Icky Mettle.

It sheds the excesses of Five Leaves Left and finds the gift buried beneath the brush: a singer, forever short on time, always at his best when taking the most direct route to a beautiful bedrock of very hard truth.

Their strangest and strongest work. .... Geese’s most singularly idiosyncratic music arrives to their largest audience yet.

Profound, innovative, and absolutely vital.

Deep in its mesmerizing glut are some astonishing works of synthesis. Sound bristles, foams, bursts, and oozes, lashing its acid against aya’s newly ferocious vocals.

The more Big Thief zoom in, the more magical they sound.

These 10 songs represent her ideal playground, a space bright and broad enough for her dreamlike visions and mutable voice to take whatever shapes her imagination allows. .... arish knows the seance-like arrangement of microphones that will allow the transformation to occur.

Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven is a massive, achingly beautiful work, alternately elegiac and ferocious. However, Lift plays like an oddly transitional album: much of the first disc presents a refinement of the sound that crystallized on the Slow Riot EP, while the second disc flirts with moments of vertiginous shoegazing, looser rock drumming and reckless crescendos of unalloyed noise. Succinctly, the first disc is easily continuous with their earlier work; the second disc might just be the future.

Summerteeth looms ominously in Wilco’s catalog, marking a point where he [Tweedy] knows it all could have gone wrong. He now sounds like a man who understands pop music will save his life. That quality makes the bonus material on this drinking-age-anniversary all the more potent.

The end result is a great album, albeit one more lighthearted than its myth would suggest.

The OOZ drops at our feet like a piece of poisoned fruit, a masterpiece of jaundiced vision from one of the most compelling artists alive.

Murray Street is Sonic Youth's first successful convergence of envelope-pushing guitarwork and accessible songery since 1988.

It remains exceptional because it captured a moment when a premiere showman worked his hardest to win over new fans. Decades later, these 1966 concerts at the Whisky A Go Go still possess the power to convert skeptics so seems that Otis Redding did indeed get his wish: He made one of the greatest albums that ever came out.

Oui is stunning easy listening in recession, but up close, it's genius. The production, the arrangements, the instrumentation, the electronics would sound cumbersome in the hands of the unexperienced, but the Sea and Cake fuse these elements with economy and care. If Oui doesn't erupt like an outright revolution, it's only because the band makes it look it too easy.

New Bermuda, if anything, is more overwhelming than Sunbather.

Fishscale reiterates with cinematic verve that the most vital current Wu Tang Clan member's storytelling can match Biggie's in both excitement and humor. Yet Ghost's songs are unrelenting in their slavishness to density and credibility, and that can turn off casual listeners even as it intoxicates hip-hop purists.

The live album (recorded in Stockholm in 1994) and disc of rarities and demos put the finished product in context, while the array of EPs show off the wide stylistic range of everything the Breeders could do well.

Out Hud also back up their flash with remarkable substance, setting their music apart from anything as one-dimensional as standard club offerings or moody trance cuts.

"Street Horrrsing" was a great record, but Tarot Sport is a cut above. Perhaps surprisingly, it's also a welcoming album--and one of the best of this already fruitful year.

Even at its most dissonant and abstract, this record is human to the core, and if you're ready to face a few demons, it's as inspiring as music gets.

"Left Alone" is nothing short of a vocal masterclass. It has the singer going from the verses' rap-like cadence to the hook's curlicue jazz stylings to the operatic long notes of the bridge-- notes that slowly curdle underneath their own exasperated weariness.

While the rest of pop culture infantilizes itself with cussing puppets and manufactured bands who willfully dangle like marionettes, Waits is serving up vintage brittle fusion and somehow breaking the law of diminishing returns. [Review of both Alice and Blood Money]

For 30 years Swans have challenged the boundaries between beauty and ugliness, music and noise, catharsis and abuse.... The Seer is the album that transcends them.

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.

So This Is Goodbye isn't just an improbable notch above 2004's Last Exit-- it's also among the best records you'll hear all year.

If Willner doesn't hit at least some of your pleasure centers, well, forget your ears-- your nerve endings might actually be dead. Even three months in, it's a safe bet that From Here We Go Sublime will wind up 2007's most luxuriant record.