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.