Right now, I can’t think of a better album to listen to after having a shitty day. Glasvegas is a masterpiece of modern miscreant malaise.

Norman Cook’s concern for the state of his trade, while veiled in ironic drag, is hard to ignore. It’s what makes The BPA tick, but also what keeps the BPA’s debut album more in the theory-not-practice side of respectability.

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.

We're approaching the dead of winter and are in the middle of a recession, and Universal Mind Control isn't helping.

Call And Response is an interesting (and by “interesting” I mean “awful”) remix album due to the fact that no one seems to want to mess with the originals for fear of alienating anyone or veering off from the song’s original composition (likely for the sake of the commercial prospects of the album).

The songs on the Dark End of the Street EP are well-sung and nicely arranged, but they are missing that vital thing that turns a song into a necessary document of feeling and experience.

A mountain of shambolic, livewire B-sides and covers of heroes and influence ranging from the Fall to Echo and the Bunnymen, help add a sense of balance and ballast to Brighten the Corners. It makes for an expanded vision of the original while at the same time proving that the original’s vision wasn’t quite so narrow after all.

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.

"Blackout" seemed like it signaled a more club-orientated path for Spears, like Madonna or Kylie Minogue, but Circus is a hodgepodge of pop themes that never really finds a face.

This is a bit more than a simple holiday cash-in, but it falls short of anything all that necessary or memorable.

We Are Beautiful might not be the pinnacle for Los Campesinos!, but it does prove they’re rapidly on their way up.

The project is structured much like a high-end runway show, so although most songs work on their own, they’re far more revelatory as a group.

There’s no telling if Ludacris will ever be given the level of respect he desires, but this help proves that he deserves it.

Tapes goes through the motions of dance music without ever delivering anything remotely danceable.

The album has a consistent lack of meaning and genuine feeling.

Although The Cross Of My Calling ostensibly provides an outlet for the band’s Marxist ideologies, its impeccable musicianship, arrangement and production make any political sloganeering irrelevant.

Even if it came out in 1996, it would still be self-absorbed, turgid, over-produced and soulless.

By investing a now-classic catalog with immediacy, freshness and a delicate, humbling charm, Sugar Mountain not only stands as the best argument for the Archives series and illumination it could provide, but as a classic live record in its own right.

Compilations of this sort can rarely stand as both, and The BBC Sessions, through innovative and intelligent sequencing as well as a dedication to the band’s history, stands well above its peers.

Sunday at Devil Dirt, for all the dark imagery and surgically perfect string arrangements, works best when Lanegan and Campbell involve themselves with simpler sentiments.

Jacobs works in a peerless vacuum located in a hazy plot point on the pop timeline, located somewhere in-between outright sugary pop and nerdy bedroom electronica.

It’s great headphone music and would make a suitably dense soundtrack for a drunken stroll through the Lower East Side, where much of the inspiration for NYC was found.

It's a neat trick that Love Is All has pulled off on this record, making the mundane and common just as urgent and real as the enormous and intangible.

It proves that with the same attention, wit, grace and intellect that these musicians gave to their songwriting, they can indeed construct a retrospective that not only reflects the brilliance of their band but heightens and intensifies it as well.

This album is the sound of just scraping by with a shitty job but not letting it get you down because there’s more than enough beer and guitars to make life worthwhile. Maybe in the next life or maybe in another world, but for right now The Bronx are right now. Welcome back, boys. We missed you.

The live tracks, especially those on the second disc, are the songs that will win you over if you are still listening and still on the fence.

They owe nothing to a far-gone musical moment, nor can they be pigeonholed. Limbo, Panto may be one of 2008’s most startlingly great debuts.

The guitars come at you from all angles, drums bubble up and clatter like a perfect assembly line, the vocals soar or are flung in from behind. Melodies sneak up and poke you like stray branches. Grab your headphones and start wandering.