Skit I Allt reminds you to wipe your brow and lean back as the heroic guitar returns. Sing along, the hooks are so strong! But keep the headphones on lest you actually hear your own voice.

Build a Rocket Boys! sounds very much like an Elbow record, but it doesn't sound like any Elbow record we've heard before.

The band's debut full-length, Morning Tide--released on Chop Shop Records--allows that sound to sprawl and unfurl.

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

Benjamin Verdoes and his bandmates have put together a debut of impressive songs that can be infectious and inviting, but also caustic and surprising.

Office Of Future Plans reveals itself as quite possibly one of the most brilliantly sequenced albums of 2011.

The Roots are about to get flooded with production offers, since if they can lend John Legend serious street cred and make him more thrilling than he has ever been, they ought to be able to do this for everyone.

The 10-track album is heavily front-loaded--while the texture and tone remain relatively consistent, the writing "relaxes" a bit about halfway through, and there's little in the record's second half that's as intensely arresting as any of the aforementioned songs.

The Ruby Suns’ greatest strength is how easily they’re able to pull off this mix on Sea Lion without seeming over-bearing or preening. It makes the whole album seem effortless.

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

The album features Leo's most meaty and confidant singing to date.

It does two things that disparate types of electronic music do, and manages to bridge the gap between ambience and glitch so seemlessly they feel much closer than you might have first thought.

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

At its core, Mostly No prioritizes songcraft above bare texture, and Cohen's willingness to temper eruption with meditation sets Milk Maid apart from many of its buzzy peers.

While Driedeger and company still have a ways to go in crafting a distinct sound and generally tightening their writing (especially the lyrics), they're well on their way.

Movie Scenes is further proof that Madlib is the Miles Davis of hip-hop: He's always finding a way to set the bar just a little bit higher.

This album strain on the ears or on the brain, but when the last track plays out its last seconds, it leaves a feeling of satisfaction.

15 Again hits more than it misses, and its hits push all the right buttons, musically and emotionally.

This clash of the sincere and the facetious that makes Beware such a disconcerting album.

The members of Dinowalrus deploy an eccentric series of sonic strategies on %, and this diversity is the album’s greatest strength.

Eluvium has crafted an album that is at once immediate and accessible while deceptively complex.

Little Joy never really breaks out of its mostly grey color scheme, and is an album that could test the patience of many, but these do not seem like things that concern My Disco in the slightest.

Wincing the Night Away suffers from a fair deal of uncharacteristic filler.

It’s the sound of Polvo insistently reminding listeners that they brought hot fire in 1993, and they can still bring it as good as ever in 2009.

This album works adequately, maybe exclusively, within the folds of Bright Eyes' self-contained space, and that's really not such a bad thing.

In the end, The Fool's success comes in not cutting corners. No moment here settles for the cheap thrill, and in building these songs -- carefully,and each with its own distinct materials -- Warpaint comes off as an awfully confident band, one you should be listening to more often.

With this album, Lytle has established himself as a solo artist who does not so much distance himself from his previous band as successfully scratch an itch for sounds that have been missing from the music landscape for quite some time.

Humor Risk proves that striking a balance doesn't necessarily imply stasis.

But for at least 10 tracks, Gucci is able to sustain a hell of a run, forming perhaps commercial rap's best dispatch this year. There have been, and probably will be, better rap albums this year. But none will be more fun.

The result is a confident, tight batch of tracks that beautifully encompass a prosaic kind of ache.

The players on Monsters of Folk complement each other extremely well. There is definitely something to be said for group chemistry. These songs don’t always shine the way they could, but the album is a great effort.

Throughout its 43 minutes, Fool’s Gold has the air of the kind of effortless breeziness that comes with tossed-off side projects. But that vibe underscores the effectiveness of the album, which features multiple stylistic quirks that could lead Fool’s Gold in a variety of directions if they continue as a project.

Blur may not have gotten the adulation they deserved in the states during their heyday, but Midlife is a solid move to reevaluate Blur’s position in the pantheon.

The songs are better, the guest performers more exciting and enthused, and the production varied enough to highlight the differences between each track (which wasn’t always the case on the previous album).

Unfortunately, instead of being an ambitious failure, and despite all of the fantastic moments, I Bet On Sky makes the potentially more damaging fault of being "just alright."

Corin Tucker went back to her roots on Kill My Blues and shows why her brand of lo-fi indie punk had such a strong following in the first place.

One Nation may not demand repeated spins, but its lack of form and formality is refreshing.

The album showcases the band's pop proclivities while preserving the dark, often harsh, atmospherics that makes their sound so distinct.

Wasser’s a collaborator at heart (she was a charter member of the Dambuilders and worked with Lou Reed, Antony & the Johnsons and Rufus Wainwright, who guests on “To America”), and she sounds most natural when she’s backed by horns and keys and backing vox and slinky grooves.

Over the course of one great LP (2004’s "Underachievers Please Try Harder"), one pretty great one (2006’s "Let’s Get Out of This Country"), and now My Maudlin Career, Camera Obscura have arrived at a sound centered on Campbell’s self-reflective loneliness and their lifting of all the best of ‘60s music--a sound they own by themselves.

Cymbals Eat Guitars don’t get drowned in homage, however; from the first explosive note to the last, Why There Are Mountains is a routinely rewarding album, with each listen revealing great new scenery.

Part of the album's appeal is its lo-fi production values. These songs are clearly built on analog four-track recordings and then embellished with overdubs.

No longer firmly fixing their gaze upon past, The Brunettes have begun to turn their lights toward the future with Paper Dolls; moreover, these bouncy little bedroom discos should be more than enough to ensure that the band’s present (and future) remain bright as well.

Taken as a whole the album is great slab of rock and roll music.

Horehound doesn’t sound like the first album from a tossed-off side project; it crackles with the intensity of a band that has been together longer than a few months.

Clearly Robyn knows her pop history, but she manages to prevent the album from slipping into simple pastiche by always keeping the balance between old and new just right.

In Panic of Looking, he keeps speech in the realm of analog, not digital, and still makes it into music.

Bestival offers the opportunity to take a tour of the band's long, fruitful career, stopping at each stylistic turn in their journey to take in the sonic scenery, but it also adds the freshness that only a live performance can bring.

They could have retread the same musical territory, but instead they deliver a record that’s remarkable in its maturity and--most of all--its ability to be replayed again and again.

Here, Mind Spiders achieve what every delirious party-goer wants: a celebration that stretches to infinity.

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

It's this combination of the simple and the intricate, the elegant and the forceful, that makes Luminous Night work so well.

There Is No Enemy does not offer new horizons for Built to Spill, but it does shine in a consistently good catalog.

This compilation of songs from films and tributes becomes nothing less than an inadvertent tribute to Kozelek himself, a finely woven tapestry of pop music as refracted through his heartfelt filter of pastoral, troubled beauty.

More important than any commentary about the listening habits of internet browsers I could possibly make is the fact that Dancer Equired stands as the perfect gateway for new Times New Viking listeners, and definitely deserves to be enjoyed and not brushed aside.

Upon hearing how masterfully Black Tambourine pull off these covers, it all makes sense. The sound these women helped codify with their music and their writing is inescapable today.

It’s this awareness that makes Living on the Other Side--on one level a pretty basic rock album that doesn’t surpass any of its predecessors--seem like something much, much more.

True to its title, it finds the pair plowing away dutifully and deftly at the furrow that's been their focus from the beginning.

New Zealand pop lifer David Kilgour's Left by Soft, his seventh proper full-length (and third for Merge), is a lovely addition to the veteran songwriter's catalog.

The Sister is Marissa Nadler looking down and realizing that she has recently written eight good songs.

For those readers familiar with Whitman, rest assured that this record only strengthens his hold on the contemporary experimental electronic scene.

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.

Credit must be given to LP mastermind Jim Cicero, who at age 23 proves he's wiser than his years by crafting a set of compelling tunes that sound surprisingly distinct despite the past and present musical inspirations that could've just as easily overwhelmed it.

The album is pure Groove Armada pop at the end, but the decision to be slightly less saccharine means that it's not nearly as disposable as some previous outings.

Without question, part of Shocking Pinks' charm is the intimacy of its unpolished production values, but, with a little more patience and rigorous revision, it's easy to see Harte's best songs being even better.

Like all score-dominated soundtracks, Slumdog Millionaire, at times, sounds like a mishmash of random pieces that don’t have much to do with each other. But that’s due to the fact that these pieces were created with specific visuals in mind -- so only listening to the album, you’re only getting half of the story. But this half is still pretty incredible.

Like the White Album, Exile on Mainstreet, or Wowee Zowee, this album's risky lack of sonic cohesion becomes the very through line that binds the work as a whole. Unlike those albums, however, not all of the experiments here are uniformly excellent or thrilling, nor do they all live up to the promise of the wonderful, muted Satan.

It would be more of a worry if Dye It Blonde's high points weren't so revelatory or well-executed because while it's not a conceptually brilliant record, there are enough triumphs to score a summer romance and get cut up on mix CDs.

Girls and Weather is a rousing debut effort from a band that isn’t out to try to pull birds by acting like the Stones (or the Clash or the Libertines).

Reefer works best as a moment that’s fleeting.

By all accounts, A Strange Arrangement is a potentially star-making turn from a completely unlikely source.

Furr still finds Blitzen Trapper as a band that’s relentlessly restless, just one that’s purposefully that way.

As far as listening experiences go, you can certainly do a lot worse than sitting back in your chair, being consistently affected by Asobi Seksu's sunlit wandering. Unfortunately, it would probably be better for Hush if the band stepped into the shadows every once in a while.

It's an album that purges the nastiness of its predecessor and switches things up enough without sacrificing its power, a template that hopefuly they remember to follow.

Logos, while just the second solo album from the frontman for a band of marginal fame, represents the latest and greatest chapter in Cox’s ride to indie stardom.

The stream-of-conscious raps that peppered her debut have been scaled back, replaced by relatively more traditional compositions, but the music is still deliciously unpredictable, and the words are a pack of SweeTart poetry.

The lightness, even with the same downtrodden lyrics, comes from the upbeat arrangements that find their way through the slosh of feedback--an appropriate sound for lyrics that evoke the same feeling--sloshing through the everyday. Perhaps Merritt realizes that to be comically self-loathing or misanthropic is, perhaps, all a person can ask for.

Over and over, we get the sense that Cadence makes records for that gaggle of kids on the album cover, for the look on their faces. If any of the rest of us likes it, all the better. It works: We’d like to know more about Mr. Weapon, and his buds.

Repo isn’t a great progression from previous Black Dice records. But their willfully amateurish approach, and a continued fascination with the coarse and the crude, make this another welcome addition to their woozy, dog-eared oeuvre.

While not the definitive Tindersticks album, Falling Down A Mountain is a compassionate, delicately rendered collection of songs that warrants repeated listening.

That he was able to keep as much of himself in the transition from the underground to the mainstream is what is admirable.

Meat & Bone is proof positive that music needn't be so reverent to its past.

Longtime Companion feels like the first cracked smile after the tears have stopped, somewhere between dusk and the gloom of night.

While managing to side-step both preciousness and predictability, The Broken String pulls together the long-anticipated and full-fledged follow-up that fans deserve, at the same time aptly defining where Bishop Allen is now: all over the map.

Despite a sharp shift in direction, the spirit of Ascent floats--sometimes upwards, at times skittish and swooping underneath clouds--but nonetheless rising.

At times, the country air's so strong you can smell the hay/freedom. Far more often, though, Dekker and company find the sweet spot.

Muse is nothing if not distinctive, and Black Holes and Revelations is very much distinctively Muse: fantastic at points and ridiculous at others, without much in between.

The odd bits and bobs typical of the 7-inch and B-side world manage to make Advance Base Battery Life a little more interesting than Owen Ashworth's previous work.

The members of Cold War Kids have deepened their sound rather than expanding it.

Brothers, meanwhile, proves that the Keys can still put a few more miles on their well-driven blues machine, regardless of what direction their non-Keys work takes them.

It's an album that marries the buzzsaw abrasion of past Swans' albums with the country-cum-death-blues feel of his work with Angels of Light. That's an easy way to explain it, anyway.

The songs toward the latter half of the nine-song, 50-minute album begin to blur, but overall the album introduces a good, anachronistic headspace to enter into.

This album will still take away the breath you aren't holding: It's at once bleak, aching, and insidiously beautiful.

War unfolds less like a cohesive concept album (though a rock-opera would be a likely future addition to the group's discography) as much as a series of telenovela vignettes.

It's hard to shake the feeling that the band's fourth album, Blood Pressures, is the one that will take The Kills to the next level.

Pluto should be appreciated for what it is, an album of impeccably crafted, energetic, original music that is striving above all else to be popular and universal, even if such goals look less likely of being achieved than ever before.

Taken as a whole, the music on Hungry Bird is at times lovely, but also has the tendency to become unsettling.