Divine Providence is the group's best album to date, but doesn't necessarily have its best songs to date.

This tribute has a back-to-the-future quality, a sad wave at a sensibility that has slipped out of our reach: lost, indeed.

The balance of Conatus comes off a bit too formulaic and familiar; after a while, you realize it's sort of one-trick, with Danilova pairing her--admittedly stunning-voice and platitude-heavy lyrics with stomping electro beats.

There's nothing on Gauntlet Hair that rivals the pop-minded immediacy or the floor-stomping clamor of "I Was Thinking...," but it still manages to wade deeper into an abyss that few bands manage to come out of successfully.

Sure, the albums is filled with grand, sweeping sonic statements, but they seem to come from a place in extremely close proximity to the art-rock icon's heart. That's why it works.

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

There are great pop songs on Tape Club, and it does remind us there is life after the hype-dam bursts, but most of us are better off picking up Let It Sway to see what Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin are all about.

So while it sounds pleasant throughout, and sometimes awfully beautiful, it won't stick with you as long as it could after the album's final notes fade.

Overall, though, Days is a great sophomore album and solid evidence that Real Estate is growing and ready to settle in for the long haul.

With less of the anxiety that marked his earlier albums, that world is a joy to get lost in over and over.

On Neighborhoods, blink-182 took [Dude Ranch/Enema of the State/Take Off Your Pants And Jacket's] sonic template, updated it, and made an album where they tried to understand what it means to be a member of blink-182.

Don't let Miller's presence detract you from buying an otherwise perfectly adequate album. Let the rest of the stuff that's wrong with it do that.

This mature Ryan Adams gives us 11 songs on Ashes and Fire that are perfectly fine, a few bumps but most of it is solid with a few that really stand out.

If there's an item of ironic animal print clothing hanging in your closet or you know the difference between a porkpie and a derby, then chances are you'll find something to like about Hanni El Khatib's debut effort.

It's all spare and often dark, but Breaks in the Armor is a surprisingly comforting album in its cloudy way.

More than the last few albums, Wolfroy rewards this kind of close relationship between listener and performer.

With Howl of the Lonely Crowd, Comet Gain will likely continue to lack recognition.

So while High Places have neatly avoided getting stuck in a rut on Original Colors, daring to reinvent themselves into a more motion-friendly group, fans of their first couple of albums should still find the overall mood sufficiently low-key to provide easy access.

It's a brief, delightful little thing, with a handful of knockout singles.

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.

Believers is another step away from Bondy's noisy past, and he knows how to use his inside voice.

These are just the outcast songs with edges too elusive to polish. And while you're unlikely to fall completely in love with them, it's comforting to know that Lekman felt similarly.

At the heart of it though, we're still left with what's Björk's been doing for most her whole life: music.

Things jump back and forth from there, and never seem to build to very much. Shadow may want to cross back.

The record's general aesthetic stays the same, docile sounds, pitter-patter polyrhythms, and shimmering vocals, but the ear-tickling mutations along the way is the appeal.

Ultimately, Hearts is an adolescent album in every conceivable sense.

Like his rhyming, his production is sophisticated, earnest, and maybe could benefit from a dose of rawness.

It's an uneven record in some ways--that middle sequence weighs it down and Feist still feels undersold as a band leader in the studio too often--but while that may be what keeps it from the finding the same success its predecessor did, it's also what makes Metals the more exciting album to dig into.

It trades the organ liquidating power of Crack the Skye for a collection of songs that sound as much like a B-sides compilation as a new LP.

The Whole Love has the band giving more than in the recent past, but the combustible musical debate at the band's core seems largely to have ceased. Wilco may still have the ability to thrill, but they've lost the ability to surprise.

Taylor doesn't get caught up in making his sounds too big, too large, or too much. He could, but he doesn't. He maintains control, doesn't get lost, and the result are nothing short of terrific.

Work (work, work) sounds more like a laborious task than a bracing trip into emotional bedlam and sexual anarchy.

Through its happy welding of superb vocals and tactical percussion, Gold Leaves achieves a timeless quality, with a bright future on the horizon.

The album is nothing like a career-killer, but it is a career-worrier.

These mid-tempo songs sap some of the group's natural energy from Dracula.

Twin Sister live up to their advance press here: They're a good band with room to grow, and a couple great songs.

For the most part Only in Dreams is a sound that is firmly theirs.

With West, Wooden Shjips is just breaking in its new soles--and hitting its stride.

Heems and Kool A.D. might be deconstructing rap for the purposes of delivering ingenious and challenging verses, but Relax is one of the best capital R rap albums out this year.

Mostly, Hysterical is lost in a hazy cloud that is more Dan Bejar than it is David Byrne.

It's apparent they're looking to construct a big tent for everyone to fit in, and unsurprisingly they're succeeding wildly.

While Seasons on Earth turns out not to be the sort of stoner's delight diehard psych-folkers might be looking for, neither is it looking in any direction other than straight ahead, evocations of another era notwithstanding.

Wild Flag is the creator of an absurdly good album, one of the most vital of 2011. Wild Flag is not a supergroup. They are a super group.

Mountaintops is a decent pop record, and will surely add a few fan favorites to the live set, but for a duo that did so much with just two instruments, they too often do less with more here.

Strange Mercy is her best yet, a deft mixture of self-confession, master class musicality, and downright unshakable songs.

Complaining about a lack of hooks can be painted as unrefined, but frankly Era Extraña hasn't shown me why it deserves hallowed deconstruction, it may be weightier, but there's absolutely no question which Neon Indian album has the most stick.

The trouble here is what we know: That they're capable of more. So the question becomes how much we hold our expectations against them, and the way you answer that question will shape how you feel about their latest offering.

Male Bonding have stayed on course, but their sound remains as virile as it was.

Inter-Be was good, but this record proves the band can make a sound uniquely theirs. In doing so, they've also made something far more lasting.

The flashes of the old Rapture are far too few, but when they're there, In The Grace of Your Love proves that the Rapture have lived long enough to outrun their hype.

Despite the missteps, the band still emanates a certain cheekiness that's rare these days, especially for a lot of oh-so-serious psych outfits.

A handful of these delicious earworms deserve to be on the radio. The mismanaged sequencing of Konkylie robs its melodic impact, but the ability to write a great tune is definitely with these Saints.

Jeff Bridges is all quiet and sepia-toned, dripping like molasses in dollops of hammy pedal steel, placid acoustic guitars, and Bridges' cracked vocal chords.

You Are All I See suffers from the exact same problem that plagued another act with a helium-voiced frontman: Passion Pit on their 2009 album Manners. Instead of delivering full products that capitalize on their immediate strengths, both albums pad their triumphs with overdramatic bluster storms that fail to really go anywhere, and it's kind of a shame.

Hella are a band reinvigorated on Tripper, realizing and embracing with all of their arms (a run through any of the tracks here definitely makes it sounds like they each have more than two) the sounds that absolutely work best for them while showcasing their growth as songwriters and the experiences they've picked up from their myriad side projects.

In short, Thursday is a mixtape of subtleties.

Galactic Melt is a joyfully faded and distorted take on electro experientialism. Get sucked into its wormhole.

While it's likely to be a huge album -- and far more interesting than any other releases of its size -- it's not the leap forward his last couple albums were.

It may be easy to namedrop a litany of '90s bands to describe Cymbals Eat Guitars, but Lenses Alien proves that doing so is a fool's errand. This sound doesn't fit such easy spaces, which is what makes it so damn good.

There's too many synths, too many hooks, and just too much happening for us to enjoy it. The charm is gone, and we're left with a mess too muddy to understand.

The mixture of pop and mystery is enticing.

There's a lot more discipline present on the band's second album, Leave No Trace, but it's not clear if that's an encouraging development.

Stephen Malkmus is back with Mirror Traffic, in a way he wasn't with the Pavement reunion, which is to say in a way that reaches past nostalgia and easy money and is based in great music built to last.

Viewed in a vacuum, Out of Love is one of this year's strongest debuts, a complete album with easy hooks and easy charms.

Watch the Throne is as much of a celebration of the A-list prominence of its two marquee stars as it is an exegesis of all of that fame's attendant complications.

It's got some purely great pop songs on it, enough that in spots it rises out of that fan-only ghetto, even if other moments find it falling back in.

The lyrics meander, often failing to offer so much as a hooky line or even a coherent narrative.

With Family of Love, Dom hasn't fizzled out--it's flowered in five different directions.

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.

For all the excitement and dramatic tension of the opening tracks, Condon himself seems unsurprised by his songs the rest of the way, and you might find yourself reacting the same way. Pleasantly surprised at first, then just pleasant.

This vocal sound gives Whitmore authority with his words, and, more importantly, we believe him when he speaks.

Rock music's era of overarching influence on culture has no doubt passed into the historical twilight, but artistry and ambition in the form is alive and well on records like Hp-1.

Ferrari Boyz often sounds like a Waka Flocka solo disc that features Gucci Mane on every single song. Between the duo, Waka's lines tend to be the ones that stick with you the most.

When listening to Icky Mettle, you feel included, like they're the crew you've known your entire life. The fact that it's both very relevant today and a thrilling snapshot of the restlessly creative 90's underground is no small achievement.

It just goes to show that on a DJ Khaled album, you can't be Eddie Van Halen. You've got to be David Lee Roth.

Legendary Weapons is fine enough for diehards, but doesn't reduce the general desire for an actual Wu-Tang album.

Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped is about as ambitious as 35 minutes of music can get, and Krug gets an awful lot out of one instrument here.

Simply put, this album is more than pretty good.

Boston Spaceships is his most accomplished musical vehicle working right now, and Let it Beard is one of the finest releases in his endless discography. Period.

This time around, Zomby isn't constraining himself. This record sounds big.

Its dreamy interludes, leading into those electroclash tangents provide a welcome bit of inventiveness that help to remind that, while relatable at their best, Little Dragon are hardly conventional.

When Fish Ride Bicycles was probably never going to be as good as hearing "Black Mags" for the first time, but no one could have bet that it would be this boring.

This is a solid record, at times sparse and moody, at times lush and hopeful, but always chill. Very, very chill.

Luckily, Blackenedwhite, the first post-Odd Future hype machine album, is still as good as it was eight months ago, when it came out and was instantly the most fun album in the Odd Future oeuvre. It's a triumph of two kids putting all of their efforts into an album, and coming out with something great.

The beautifully (which is to say, lightly) remastered album, and the warts 'n all bonus disc shows us just how good of a band Sebadoh were, and why they became far more than just the band Barlow started after he left Dinosaur Jr.

OX 2010 lacks a clear vision and focus.

Gaga has always been able to anchor her haughty conceptual undertakings with simple, catchy tunes, but with Born This Way, the persona and the message are starting to bleed into the songs. It's not a good look.

It's All True plays with its own honesty as perfectly as it does your expectations.

If that score at the top of this review seems unfriendly, it's not because they've grown boring or predictable; it's just another step in an ongoing process.

As with any Teddy Bears release, this is all meant to be a sort of pastiche; lots of genre jumping, lots of smooth transitions, lots of hooky goodness mixed with a plethora of guest stars and vocalists.

Sure, he can hide his identity, but there's no denying his sudden emergence as one of dance music's notable producers, very well steeped in his own layered aesthetic, yet open enough to welcome other musical influences into the fold.

Sweet Christ, in no universe will Big Sean be greater than Notorious B.I.G. or Big Pun, and at the rate he's going he'll be lucky to end up a better rapper than Sean Combs, let alone Sean Carter.

You'd be hard pressed to find a big ticket R&B album quite as restless, tuneful and fearless this year.

Ascension doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it's a welcome addition to the Jesu canon.

While there may not be a ton of surprises from his solo work at this point, this is still an awfully strong set from a guy who's pretty tough to beat when he's on his game.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra has produced the rare indie pop record that seizes you on the first listen but also rewards repeated playing.

On Weekend At Burnie's, Curren$y has crafted a record he's probably chilling out to right now.

The fact that it turned out quite well makes that fact that much more satisfying, and elevates the album above mere curiosity to a possible road sign pointing towards Fuck Buttons' future material.