The results are beautifully solemn.

It’s tighter, and incredibly, more intimate and intense than the first, this is a band that functions as a whole, not merely a threadbare net of musicians straining to support the singer.

In a career full of successful fusions of metal, psych, crusty punk and indie rock, Spiral Shadow is another triumph.

"Majestic" is a word often used to describe Mono, and this record, the band's fifth, will not challenge us to avoid using it.

As the watery floating of "I Think Ur A Contra" draws the album to a close, it becomes clear that not only did the members of Vampire Weekend succeed in creating an excellent sophomore album; they've managed to survive long enough to outlive their hype and its attendant backlash.

Assembling an impressive list of guests that understand his legacy (Paolo Nutini, Mayer Hawthorne, and the Dirtbombs' Mick Collins among them), Coffey sounds downright vital, unleashing dusted licks and stinging wah-wah over boom-bap breaks and buoyant horns.

Fuckbook is the best joke fake lo-fi cover album since Pussy Galore’s Exile, except with the added irony of the roasters becoming the roastees.

The Sun Awakens' sparseness has a deepness to it that requires spending time with the album in its entirety in order to truly understand it.

The music deliberately sits somewhere between glossy and unobtrusive. It shimmers enough to mask Allen's tepid singing voice but remains far enough away to allow her largest asset -- her snappy personality -- to take charge.

In Flesh Tones is sensitive, unsure and guarded, yet it's comfortable and inviting despite this.

Reign is more nuanced and varied in sound than Treats was.

Gone are the spotty moments that marred his previous solo work. Most important, Malkmus seems to be having fun again.

Celebration is as theatrical as it is guttural, with Ford’s voice bellowing above cabaret-style organs, sharp guitars and loose, spiraling drum riffs.

Meadow features Buckner's most focused work in years.

Flume manages to be somewhat of a timeless release in terms of modern electronic music, one that could have dropped at any point over the past 12 years or so and still made an impact of some sort.

The Airborne Toxic Event’s gift is two-fold -- they manage to take the little things, the day-to-day ellipses of modern romance and elevate them to a level of art.

The Knot isn’t a happy album by any stretch of the imagination, but optimism can be found within the notion that Wassner and Stack, by some strange alchemy, make sadness beautiful. In so doing, they have made an album that needs to be heard.

It takes its time, but its rewards are plentiful.

All I know for sure is that I’ve got two ears and a heart, and Manners sounds and feels pretty great.

We can all go on loving For Emma, Forever Ago (with good reason), but don't let your attachment to that obscure what Vernon has created here. No cabin, no crazy backstory. Just a great, inventive album.

Refreshingly, Love as Laughter doesn’t take itself too seriously: this is smart rock completely devoid of pretentiousness.

It is a snapshot of Pinback at its most practiced and self-aware: fluid, calculated, penetrating, yet always at the fringe of its former incarnation.

The rookie blunders are kept to a minimum, and Wale’s mesmeric talent--the left-field punchlines, the charmingly laid-back flows, the nakedly emotional storytelling--is enhanced by lively beats that juggle eclectic synth-pop with throwback soul.

A lack of self-editing is the only real flaw on an album which proves that two decades into their career QOTSA are sounding fresher than ever.

Half of the album is rambunctious and full, driving and manic; the other half charms us with melancholic lullabies fueled by a single sip from the purple bottle. The result: With Feels, Animal Collective has created its first pop masterpiece.

With Not Yet, Monotonix delivers a tight half hour of intensely likable scuzz rock that gives a solid kick to the lizard part of the brain.

51 is a damn fine mixtape... one of this young year's best.

Transcendence has yet to occur, but they have taken the required step in acquiring a broader range of exposure.

The album's strength really, is evoking so strongly the excessive, lonely culture that the music comes from.

Simplicity works here, and even though the album may not have a clear direction, the array of song topics is catchy enough to make this alt-rock/indie/country/folk experience work.

Longtime fans might lament the loss of a second guitar and the balls-out thrashing that sometimes came with it, but on certain levels it may be a blessing in disguise. A leaner Deerhoof allows other facets of the band to shine, most notably Greg Saunier's drum work.

In taking a slower and more deliberate approach to his craft this time around, FaltyDL is responsible for one of the more purely enjoyable albums of the still-young year.

Mystery, a four-song warning shot of an EP, completes the cycle of hype. Duck and cover, y’all: Something wicked this way comes.

The frequent presence of full-time collaborator Nancy Whang's voice on many of the songs adds an extra element of melody that largely sees the record's intention true to the end.

There is something else weaving through all of this, that other mysterious thing that some great records have, that keeps you going back even while you know that whatever vocabulary you come up with, whatever modifier you hang on the album, will be inadequate.

Parenthetical Girls consists primarily of Zac Pennington's unmistakable vocals, and they are given a musical context that emphasizes their stark beauty on this album. It was well worth the three years of effort on his part.

With music this uniformly entertaining, it’s best just to quiet down and let the former Stephen Patrick Morrissey do the talking. That's what Years of Refusal confirms as his greatest strength, anyway.

The musicians have crafted a lucid soul record (barely longer than a half hour) centered on humility, devotion, and other mature sentiments that are blissfully out-of-sync with pop/youth-centric music.

Rather than the stripped-down or lonely songs that so often accompany the bill of "solo effort," these five songs are as polished, highly wrought, ornamental--take your pick--as any on Veckatimest.

Vapours gives Thorburn fans what they’ve wanted for a while: a great album of pop bliss from a guy who for too long has avoided delivering just that.

There may be a language barrier to be dealt with here, but the feelings of the songs here transcend all walls, real or perceived.

Like A$AP Mob and Odd Future before him, Purrp arrives fully formed, with his own unique, fully realized aesthetic vision.

This crackling album stands to remind that the man can still rock like all hell.

They have that kind of hypnotic quality, a combination of strength and texture that sounds calm at every turn, which is what makes it so surprisingly volatile in its effect.

A Church That Fits Our Needs isn't easy to define, but it is easy to get lost in.

As with Icky Mettle and then with Crooked Fingers, Bachmann once again has provided a taut and startling proper debut; his writing feels completely reenergized.

Timberlake's second solo record is dark and dirty to begin and smooth and sexy to finish. With only a few awkward cameo tracks to damage its reputation, this is going to be the soundtrack of the next few months.

Where Love and Life limped from song to song, The Breakthrough zips confidently through its sixteen tracks.

These musicians came into their own and have created another standout record without repeating themselves.

Mojave 3's new material isn't an abandonment of any strengths; it's an embrace of the simple pleasures of the classic '60s garage-pop style of songwriting.

Social Climbers is a valuable document of its time, place, and a reminder of the greatness that might get away.

In reality, Technicolor Health is a remarkably eclectic, dynamic album even in its use of rather obvious launching points.

Return to the Sea is filled with breezy, infectious melodies and quirky whip-smart lyrics; qualities that were sometimes lost underneath the Unicorns' shtick.

With 1968, Pajo... may have finally found a style he feels comfortable putting his name on.

The Crying Light is not exactly light and happy stuff, but for Antony, it’s a giant step forward down the path toward personal and artistic happiness.

Antony has found a voice that expresses what it feels like to be trapped in that gray area between misery and rage.

By turns exuberant and hushed, intricate and occasionally frenzied, Gorilla Manor more than lives up to its title.

Comets on Fire is the band Wolfmother wishes it had the balls to be.

This album stands out because of its stadium-worthy aspirations.

Robyn's transition to the boldest--and maybe loneliest--girl in the room allowed her to showcase her versatile range of emotions and musical influences, plenty of which are on display in Body Talk Pt. 1.

Unstoppable.

Pulling off the high-wire act of musical comedy this well deserves an unabashed kudos.

Aside from... one unstructured, unwieldy track, Dumb Luck proves highly smart and skilled.

In a perfect combination of inspired production, innovative instrumentation and transcendent songwriting, Akron/Family is a richly layered and flowing album that is as emotional as it is challenging.

Risky though it may have seen (in terms of both taste and talent), this is a great record.

Underneath the Pine, like Causers before it, is slightly padded, with ambient passages helping bump this past the 35-minute mark.

The writing, arrangement, and pacing is deliberate enough to create a sensible package yet light enough to invite a listener in.

If the album sounds simple, it's because it is simple; it's the attitude, idiosyncrasies and Architecture in Helsinki's refusal to fall into the fey trappings of paint-by-numbers indie pop that make it such a distinguishing treat.

[Out of Boris' three albums released this year] New Album remains the victory lap, a cap to yet another year of successful experimentation.

While not as hybrid as Abe Vigoda nor as melodic as Jay Reatard, these women kick out a place in the musical universe through sheer, happy, blasting audacity.

Behind all the artifice, behind the production and underwater effects, is some simple but solid songwriting. The catchy, cheerful melodies combine with the psychedelic production to create a trippy beach-music feel appropriate for their St. Petersburg roots.

Slave Ambient continues themes of wanderlust and searching that were all over the other records, but as Granduciel sings of friends gone, of calling loved ones home, of trying to find his place in the world changing around him, the music behind him seems to be searching too.

Exposion challenges us to rethink the limitations of a song, and thusly rewards us with an album unlike any other this year.

Stephen Wilkinson has taken the field recordings and organic experiments of his previous albums and filtered them through a stylistic prism, resulting in a kaleidoscopic but nearly uniformly accomplished set of songs.

I Love You, It's Cool prove Bear in Heaven's 2009-10 success wasn't a fluke, and given two years, they can deliver another album of ebullient jams.

Hidden won't change British indie, but it should obliterate all expectations as far as These New Puritans are concerned.

The members of Art Brut manage to infuse humor without pushing it too far. Or maybe they do push it too far, and that's why it feels more important.

Wilderness is one of those albums where if you like one song, you like the whole lot, and vice versa.

Less Than Human lives up to the [DFA]’s reputation for making quality dance records, but it also explores enough outside territory so as not to feel like the next album out on the conveyor belt.

After Robots more than answers the call to hype; it breaks down the borders between countries and scenes, and it bears a message that it’s just as possible to create progged-out songs of unending complexity if you’re from Johannesburg as it is if you’re from Williamsburg.

One of the year's best guitar-rock albums.

Empros proves Russian Circles' ability once again, without going horribly out of its way to prove something or make some sort of grand statement.

Crystal Castles leaves its mark as an electro record that challenges, succeeding and failing all at once, and perhaps most important, never forgetting the primary goal of dance music.

That such a glorious and previously unheralded collection of tunes could appear so far into what seems like a decade plus wave of reissue fever is a wider comment about how much great music still out there waiting to be unearthed. The Method Actors deserve to be placed alongside the very best acts of any scene or era.

The wonder of Some Are Lakes is the fact that such arguably masculine instrumentation goes such a long way to buoy Powell's lady vocals. Neither takes a backseat, and the combination feels way natural.

Another World is under 20 minutes long, but it’s more than a placeholder. It’s the portrait of an artist as a changeling, moving above and beyond his former skill-set.

The musicians' new sense of restraint gives us what may very well be the Blood Brothers' smartest album yet.

Baby 81 is a wicked crystallization of all the sounds on the first album, tightened up and brightened up and even louder and more textured.

The album is all over the place, with traces of Queen pop excesses flowing seamlessly with crunching, almost hardcore-punk-tinged guitar rockers and some weird stuff, too. Yet each of the tracks keeps Sloan’s Big Star-sounding power-pop roots intact.

It seems impossible that the same band that started out so ramshackle could deliver an album as splendid and tighly wound as this.

Factory Floor achieves something that many albums don't--it serves up as a impressive album with no expectation.

Arthur & Yu may be too grounded in the past to alter the future of pop music. But if they make songs this lovely, there's no shame in that.

As they've made it to their fourth album, they've quickly become one of indie's most reliable bands, each new album bringing the promise of some of the year's best music.

Water is leagues more mature than last year's In Evening Air--the production more robust, the lyrics more evocative of people who've been around long enough to know what's worth lamenting.

With electronic and live sounds, emotional production and excellent vocals from some of the underground scene’s best, Leave It All Behind is an open and experimental take on hip-hop and soul, highly successful, at that.

It's a much warmer album than her most recent album, 2002's Daybreaker, and it's perhaps her most complete album yet.

The album is full of Hersh's characteristically strong songwriting and the emotional uppercuts that make her best work so gutsy.

Opticks is also more mature than her previous outing, which at times can seem like the happenstance work of an adorable child. It's clear that Silje Nes is coming into her own as an artist here.