Lisbon is another great record in an admirably consistent discography. It's got a drive and precision to it we didn't see on the last record and it reminds us that, for all their intricacy and texture, The Walkmen are one of the great rock bands going.

As False Priest beds down in its second half, the album still has a sonic charge, but the frenetic sense of discovery from the first half drifts away.

Majesty Shredding is one of the finest rock records of 2010.

Heretofore lurches well beyond the confines of the breathtaking rustic songcraft they're known for, but every experiment is drenched in gorgeous melodies and inventive instrumentation. In short, it's Megafaun's most effortless, assured work to date.

Album of the Year stands as one of 2010's most innovative and adventurous albums of any stripe, incorporating traces of African jazz, latin music, psych, metal, and more in its relentless attack. It bangs hard from start to finish, and it's guaranteed to send producers scrambling to rerecord their drums in its wake.

Wilderness Heart is tight but never overly controlled, and it varies in all the ways you could possibly want it to. It's a Black Mountain record through and through, that's for sure.

Now that Cuomo is older and singing about things like fame and the alienation of age, it's become harder to empathize.

Screaming Females are too talented for Castle Talk to be anything but a solid album. But "solid" is a word I never wanted to use for Screaming Females.

Phosphene Dream's real achievement is that it takes the band's earlier murderous attitude and makes it impossibly bland. It might be the first time you fall asleep during an album with copious references to toxic gas, hauntings, death, blood, and killing.

McKee's voice may sound exactly like it did 20 years ago (the fate of most twee-pop ladies, it seems), but The Vaselines' trademark noise has only grown deeper, richer. Listening to this record just feels good on a purely physical level.

He'll probably still be relegated to afternoon festival slots and in hard to find reaches of your local record store, but Pop Negro is another delightful record that pushes the boundaries between music and countries.

If this isn't an instant classic, it's only because it takes some time (and ears) to appreciate.

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.

Bilal and McKie place emphasis on the craft of each song and the arrangement of each instrument. Bilal's voice is treated as one of these parts, so there is a flat quality to the sound. This may frustrate fans of Bilal's voice or those expecting a conventional star-centric album that places the spotlight on a voice or an instrument. Instead, Bilal's feelings are the centerpiece here. That alone makes Airtight's Revenge a welcome return for a needed voice.

All too often Shadow Temple falls short and is flat out boring when it should be actively engaging. It took Rama 14 years to rise to the throne and bring peace and harmony. The band members need to do more than this if they want to if they want to outperform their namesake.

There isn't a song here that truly rises above the rest, and nothing here is as offensive as anything you'd hear at a stop on the Warped Tour.

Where they used to sound like the crackling of a subway car rounding a bend or the seediest alleys of New York in the pre-dawn hours, here they sound like alt-rock renderings of what moody post-punk is supposed to sound like.

Robyn could've put together a single album filled with all-knockout jams, but it's better than she got to exercise her brain trying to fit in everything she wanted.

What Uhlhorn has done on Fin Eaves is reconcile those influences into something unique to him; this is homage or pastiche, rather than imitation. Rather than playing different influences to different effect, Fin Eaves is a whole work, the first of the band's career.

While the frequent use of echo and the isolation of each instrument lend the record a spare quality, Strange Weather, Isn't It? is hardly akin to Bowie and Eno's emotionally stark Berlin Trilogy. Instead, the album sounds like a band trying to regain its footing by returning to its fundamentals.

The Orchard is the sound of Ra Ra Riot hitting for the middle, delivering 10 tracks of deliberate orchestral-tinged indie-pop that'll hit you in your 2007-era blog-rock pleasure center.

They manage to make the grandest songs imaginable seem like they were composed with only you in mind.

Carey has made a debut record that is both solid in its own right and hints at the promise of great things to come.

It's unfair to saddle Dead Confederate with the burden of the entire Athens tradition, or look for it to be anything other than a band making a record. But Sugar would have been much more interesting if these guys had focused on that instead of trying to be five or six bands at once.

A case could be made that this is a newfound maturity, and without a doubt Rivers is no second-hand attempt. However, sans even a single convulsive whirlwind, Rivers is more musical wallpaper than a masterpiece.

The fact remains, however, that Cloak and Cipher is an impressive piece of work, and inevitably that idea of novelty up there is just a cultural standard, determined by every other album ever released. It's an interesting thing to consider if you're trying to articulate the context around a piece of work, but it's not too much more than that.

They've got the hooks, they've got the personality, and (at their best) they've got the songs. Their low fidelity is a choice for the album, not a way to plug into a movement. And while Past Time might not realize their sound as well as it could, when its working this is a sound that has no expiration date.

It's more or less a corporate-rock distillation of nu-rave, three years too late.