Listening to Bleach now, the main thing that comes across is how little it sounds moored to a specific time.

The Bears for Lunch surprises from quick song to quick song (even though we know this trick well now) and maintains an overall cohesion and distinct mood.

Big Business boys Coady Willis and Jared Warren, the drum/bass duo, returned for their third album as members of the Melvins in 2010, keeping the hot streak going with The Bride Screamed Murder.

This record is the sound of a young musician being given the right chance at the right time and knocking it out of the park.

My Guilty Pleasure is more cohesive, its production more varied, its songwriting more effective.

Okkervil River has never provided easy answers in their albums--unless you read the many interviews with Sheff, who always seems willing to explain what he can--and I Am Very Far is another fine album in an increasingly finer canon.

The Mouse and the Mask’s levity is the antithesis of the dense Madvilliany, and it continues Doom’s steady march toward achieving legendary status.

All the swirling riffs and overlapping repetitions might be tiresome if not for the sad, imperfect voices at their center.

Like the rest of Primary Colours, this is the sound of a band finding themselves out of favor and having to really strive for greatness. The Horrors will still have a hard time winning over new converts, but they’ve done a magnificent job of confounding expectations with this release.

With its shameless pop-punk anthems and wonderfully irreverent lyrics, Donkey finds the members of CSS at the top of their game.

With the explorations of additional instrumentation as well being more comfortable with silences and with echo, SunnO))) approach the freedom and abandon of the spirit-travelers alluded to in the titles and approaches on this, the band's best record yet.

ike Animal Collective, Copeland's work is musician's music, geared toward the adventurous listener with a trained ear and a tendency to enjoy music as, well, an expansive, ever-shifting experiment.

As all over the map as A Certain Feeling is, it’s much more concise than the band’s 13-track debut, "Ears Will Pop & Eyes Will Blink." There’s not much extraneous fluff here.

It's the sound of a cooking band truly cooking it in the studio. Everything sounds like it's about to jump the rails at any given moment.

As much as the album may be a breath of fresh air, it still resembles what the Britney’s on our side of the Atlantic are putting out, closer than many would like to admit.

It's an often frustrating listen, but in the end the album is a triumph.

Christ Illusion is not a throwback; it's something new steeped in something old.

It's a perfect chill-out record, readymade for a sunny day or starry night, and it straddles the line between evolving style and signature sound brilliantly.

With Remind Me in 3 Days, they throw down a worthy challenge to hip-hop’s status quo.

The album is an extremely satisfying listen, but if Common is to lead the revolution, he has to make more of a statement than a great bass line and some tight rhymes.

Thorburn anchors every note, every contribution with a personal outpouring of emotion and heartbreak, the likes of which we've never seen from him before.

Thanks to his varied songwriting, there's nary a weak link in Burst Apart. It might not benefit from the easy hooks of a concept album, but if you stick around till the end, it is every bit as rewarding as Hospice.

Barnes's most personal and emotional album to date.

Zammuto excels at the opposite: deconstructing life into easily digestible songs that make you feel something.

Her music-box arrangements have a child-like giddiness about them, but this collection of glittering songs has an emotional and sonic maturity that will keep you listening long past bedtime.

If More Fish isn't as good as Fishscale -- and there's just as good a chance that it is as good -- it's the tapestry method that doesn't make for a cohesive listen.

As a funk or electro album, As U Were is fun to listen to. A little cheesy, maybe, but it gets the proverbial party started, which is always a clear sign that something's going well. It's when Lyrics Born tries to hang on too tightly to his old roots that things start to get messy.