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]

With this new LP -- released on a major label on both sides of the Atlantic, no less -- odds are, a lot of people are going to listen, and I don't mean in the tail-eating, blog-bite-blog sort of way.

It's a real trove, and not just because this lineup is relatively obscure.

This is bold, irreverent, exploratory music.

Don't just judge it as an album by a band coming off a major line-up change. You won't need to.

It has a distinctive blend of magic and might, the sound of a band who knows they’ve hit their stride and still gets giddy at the noise they make. It’s a bar band delivering communion.

Frankly [add-ons would] just be a distraction from the underlying theme that becomes clear once you get absorbed into the music, which is that Blue Lines is still Blue Lines, and most of the world is still trying to catch up to it.

Calexico have created their first genuinely masterful full-length, crammed with immediate songcraft, shifting moods and open-ended exploration.

This is a solid, intelligent album that a lot of people will love-- one that'll slot onto indie-crossover CD racks right beside the debuts from Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, and the Futureheads.

Deerhoof, an indie band who have released plenty of discombobulated pop and no wave albums, have lately turned toward accessible, foot-stomping rock. It worked on The Runners Four, but it works better and quicker on their new album, Friend Opportunity.

This is a massive artistic statement from The Microphones, and though it may be cryptic-- even overwhelming at times-- it remains warm and open, thanks to the stunning intimacy that has consistently been the group's hallmark.

The most entertaining and lushly melodic work of Morrissey's solo career.

Despite its eclecticism and relatively Dadaist leanings, Sung Tongs is a romantic album; romantic in its celebration of innocence and nonsensical shared knowledge, and the sweet, trusted idea that everything will be fine-- as if it hadn't always been.

It's tempting to think of Art Brut as the foreign replacement for the catchy/clever observances Weezer used to traffic.

[The Merge reissues of Copper, Beaster, and FU:EL] are a wonderfully presented document of a punk legend [Bob Mould], starting over creatively and emotionally in a brief window he helped open, and succeeding beyond his and anyone's expectations.

The pair’s songwriting is so inventive and electric that even the depths of the late capitalist abyss begin to offer pathways to freedom.

With Sunbather, Deafheaven have made one of the biggest albums of the year, one that impresses you with its scale, the way Swans' The Seer did last year.

They rival The Shins, or The Magnetic Fields, or any of the innumerable indie touchstones, but what truly sets Who Will Cut Our Hair apart is the near-total absence of traditional verse/chorus/verse framework in their songs; to nail beautiful, memorable lines with such remarkable ease is a feat unto itself, but to do so in essentially formless compositions is a different class of achievement entirely.

Focusing on Wildheart's overt eroticism is one way of listening, but it's impossible to overlook just how seriously he's taking craft.

In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country runs like updated material from their majestic 1998 offering, Music has the Right to Children. And like that album's namesake, these five elegantly mournful melodies creep and explore like adored but unruly children, full of wide-eyed astonishment and naïveté.

Greenspan... manages to fold elements of nearly a quarter-century of forward-looking pop into a distinct sound without sounding either conceptual or trading on contradictions or the smoke-and-mirrors of attention-grabbing eclecticism.

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

On 7, all the contrasts that mark their music are dialed up to blinding; you are plunged into darkness and then showered in light. The experience is so enveloping that you find yourself contending, once again, with that familiar itch to locate meaning.

Kala is clattering, buzzy, and sonically audacious.

Phantom Power sees the down-to-earth Welsh band moving away from genre-hopping and rough juxtapositions, and beginning to blend their influences into an evenly spread melange that simply sounds like a highly evolved pop band.

Olsen suggests that nihilism and optimism are closer than you think, that what feels like knowing yourself is almost always revealed as delusion. On All Mirrors, she glories in that tumult, and the sparks that fly illuminate her bravura turn.

Given its fragmented genesis, it's surprising how listenable and of-a-piece Fall Be Kind is.

Their best album to date-- a bold claim to the upper echelon of rock.