On 2006's What Are You On?, he was too cranky by half, but here he returns to hopeful melancholy, lonely drum machines, everyday drug stories, even a '70s yacht-rock sketch ("Tommy Made a Movie"). Glad you're still breathing, man.

Sauna opens with the hissing and crackling of a steam room, and things get Benji-er from there.

Kweli wins by spitting knotty verbiage over high-test beats. [Feb 2003, p.99]

Holmes' Bow Down breaks from the elegant flow-noir of his previous platters by spinning luridly out of control. [12/2000, p.220]

Gigaton has a little something for everyone. It’s a complex, dynamic album full of earnest emotion and subtle humor. Its form factor recalls both 1996’s No Code and 1998’s Yield.

By turning indie-folk into nonstop neurotic cabaret, Oberst may have made the best album of his prodigious, prolific career. [Sep 2002, p.133]

On Caution, she is still doing it better than most of her students, and sounds more comfortable than she has in quite a while.

His furious, frantic monotone dramatically collides with producer El-P's postindustrial beats. [Jul 2006, p.86]

Liberated from the stylistic baggage of their previous albums, the Quins deliver something close to pure intoxicating emotion, granting themselves the freedom to go anywhere they want next time.

The most booty-shaking, speaker-twinkling, glitz-intensive pop-soul record to come down the turnpike in years, out-dazzling even kindred efforts by Timberlake, Bruno Mars, and Miguel.

More coherent, conceptual, and organic than their eponymous British Invasion-influenced debut. [Dec 2001, p.154]

The album is stunningly crafted; their influences (Joy Division's mystic menace, Siouxsie Sioux's gothic howls) are proudly worn on blackened sleeves, but rather than dance around such matters, they dance with them.

Ices' lush melodies and dreamy voice will convert skeptics and mesmerize supporters of Kate Bush and Joanna Newsom.

QOTSA may be rock at the edge of the abyss, but Heart On vaults right over, taking flight on an updraft of woozy audacity and shuddering riffs.

The result is the trio's startlingly impressive debut: astute, melodic evocations of plinky new wave and the Cocteau Twins' smeary dreams that achieve a timeless emotional response. [Nov 2008, p.89]

Like Animal Collective, Youth Lagoon craft modernist pop so perfectly of its time that we're hardly aware of how much time has passed.

mostly Nine Types of Light feels like the liquefying of a band, ten years and four albums deep, into the soft tenderness of pre-middle-age satisfaction. Like, maybe family life sounds pretty good right about now--and it fits them well.

Taking a cue from Shelby Lynne, the Watsons consult vintage Southern styles for inspiration, incorporating touches of country and plenty of hot-blooded soul.

She simply delves deeper and gives what few artists can deliver: a self-contained world of warmth, crystalline detail, and intimacy that lies far beyond a Twitter feed.

On his 11th album, this musician's musician once again finds a coterie of like minds--Fugazi's Guy Picciotto, members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor--to help turn chronic disquiet into disturbingly palpable dread-folk.

The music is melancholic, urgent, enveloping. After more than a decade, her tightly controlled croon has lost none of its flinching effect to communicate shock and smoldering rage. Aside from sparking urgency and indignation, it evokes feelings the other side could use: humility, and shame.

Hyde and Smith prove they still have the Midas touch.

No Time for Dreaming wails in a world of "Heartaches and Pain" (see the memorable closing track), but Bradley's despair is never less than stirring.

"Turn the dial on my words," she suggests, and the band's glorious noise obliges time and again.

This 53-year-old minor folk vet’s drawl doesn’t obscure his flow, making it all the easier to follow his tales in real-time, inhabiting a husband cleaning his deer rifle or the bent-backed Deaver who watched as “Uncle Sam took away the neighbors’ land.”

We Were Promised Jetpacks' second album tightens the craggy fuzz of their first, revealing twisty post-punk songs with chewy pop centers.

Haunting. [Dec 2006, p.98]

As a work of scholarly revisionism, Purple Snow is peerless. How and why the Twin Cities helped transform Prince Nelson into the Artist remains a mystery. But this is a charming addition to the Paisley Park family.

This is their longest album and has the highest stakes, and succeeds.

It's synthesized, as expected, but not in a new wave way. Organs breathe a heavy, gloomy sigh through 13 tracks... It's beautiful and I'm sold.

Rainbow is a document of Kesha coming into her own, blossoming into the artist she’s always truly wanted to become.

On the leaner, extraordinarily concise Magma, you hear Gojira becoming even more fully realized.

So assured of its luxuriance that it clocks in at a trim 46 minutes, blackSUMMERS’night nonetheless leaves one sated. This distillation is purest Maxwell.

The title of the Roots' ninth studio full-length suggests a more fulfilled mood (Obama victory, gig as America's favorite late-night house band), at least compared to the screw-faced abyss of their last two records.

The band sounds better than ever, too, mounting a muscular four-way attack that captures the immediacy of their frenetic synchronicity better than any non-live album of theirs to date.

Packed with more than enough ideas to constitute what’s still ostensibly a “debut album,” OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES pushes new limits of bombast only to settle into the same sort of razor-sharp, high-concept pop that’s worked for SOPHIE since the beginning.

Deeper than anything she's delivered before, Aaliyah's a hard record; almost never does a song roll over and beg to be loved. This makes the yielding moments all the sweeter. [Aug 2001, p.130]

A kind, weird club crunker, Ecstasy references included. [Jul 2001, p.128]

Junior could be just the thing for still-mourning Sleater-Kinney fans or anyone who likes their licks righteous and their indignation more so.

What makes Human Performance a narrowly great record is that it bucks narrative. It’s not their most sensitive record or politically astute or least dissonant but all of these things--their most convincing performance as humans to date.

Humor and mirth best define this voracious multicultural outfit, no matter how many tunes are set in minor keys.

Amid all that cultural confusion basking in a neon glow, Mala in Cuba is a welcome relief, an artist reveling in his uncertainty and building it into something original and authentic.

Much like Bon Iver's output, Range of Light delivers a set of songs with a fixed sense of place and a nostalgic sense of time.

Sometimes trance-inducing, sometimes wildly dynamic, the album is a sumptuous, woozy feast that proudly dances on the lines between nirvana and reality.

She’s flipped the script on us, and in doing so has created her most cohesive work--and maybe even her happiest ending yet.

Thanks to a volatile mix of the uplifting and gloomy--there's a bitter murder tale ("Dust Bowl Dance") and lingering visions of death ("Timshel")--Sigh No More transfixes.

Plundering the 1980s for inspiration (shock!), 27-year- old New Zealander Pip Brown emerges with a confection of synth-infused, mammoth-chorused tunes that sound surprisingly and thrillingly fresh.

They’re caustic and incendiary as hell, but they’re also unbelievably fun, an exciting and rare quality in music this visceral.

Despite being haunted by the group's flip from rock-star charade to reality, Congratulations still brims with mischievous energy.

The guest cast's presence never infringes on the album's overcast beauty. [March 2003, p.120]

Isolating his experimental tendencies to specific tracks leads to some uneven pacing on the album's second half. Otherwise, Green Language fully delivers, serving as a fascinating turn for an artist who earned his reputation by essentially bashing fans into submission with bass.

A half-dozen times on their debut, the Shackeltons sound completely convincing, and that's about six more times than most bands ever manage.

You're Nothing turns everything up--it's smarter, faster, catchier and noisier than their debut, more a Funhouse than a Rock for Light.

Mumbly, scratchy-voiced Pete Quirk is more self-assured than on 2007’s Invitation Songs, championing optimism and determination in the face of trouble, powered by sharp folk and country-blues guitars, plus no-frills percussion.

The project is very human and certainly the band’s most dynamic effort to date. Never has Paramore left so much space in its productions or allowed Williams to sound so sparse in moments, like her tiny frame might finally shatter. Nor has the band ever played so deftly with sounds of comfort and alarm, like a clock radio slicing through the most blissful dream.

Sun Coming Down is Robin Hood-rich with pithy one-liners punctuated by Keen’s hi-hats, crashing through Darcy’s free-associating swarm of noise like that one person in every New York-based rom-com or sitcom wending his way through an avenue packed with people.

High Flying Birds isn't a total knockout, but it should keep Liam sleeping with at least one Beady Eye open.

While Brock's pop instincts have never been more refined, his jitteriness has never run more rampant. [Apr 2007, p.85]

While that may sound dangerously morose, Death Cab have become skilled with the light/dark juxtaposition.

The album is claustrophobic and unrelenting, but also intensely exhilarating in its brevity.

The [album] is exuberant and enthusiastic, and its architect bops along with an unapologetically clean-cut strut.

A soundtrack nuanced enough for the rippling wit of Mann's lyrics.... These songs are layered and soft-spoken, to be sure, but also confident and rewarding of multiple listens. They are the sound of Aimee Mann growing as a songwriter. Yet the album also features the sound of Aimee Mann grousing about being a songwriter.

While her sound is still dominated by typical darkwave elements--doomy synths and the pishy patter of minimal drum machines--the rest is unexpectedly warm, illuminated by her indomitable voice.

Los Campesinos! can't stop adorning their odes to existential grief with snappy handclaps, but the Welsh septet are still showing signs of growth on this third album.

Vampire Weekend have made a truely fresh, fun, and smart record. [Feb 2008, p.91]

From murky ambience to noise, free jazz, and beyond, Hval deploys sounds with a careful attention to feeling, building lush collages with a strategic intent further amplified in the lyrics. While ultimately smaller and less ambitious than her previous full-lengths, The Long Sleep grasps at ideas about presence, affect, and influence, recognizing the important potential of networks of all types in the lives of all who listen.

Wit's End is even more hushed and sluggish than 2009's Catacombs, leaving lighter Dylanesque fare for depressive Leonard Cohen depths.

After several albums of caustic, cryptic scuzz-punk, San Francisco's Ty Segall finally cleans up his act--or, at the very least, dustbusts it around the edges.

Yeezus ranks as more than a glorified placeholder in West's catalogue, but one can't help feeling that parenthood will compel his muse to even more Olympian levels of bombast and grandiosity.

Pleasure's ten tracks of gorgeously distorted, lo-fi pop glides languidly enough for '90s slowcore, but with woozy rhythms, lovelorn lyrics, and reverb-saturated textures that feel timeless.

A science fiction romance dedicated to the triumphs and disappointments of the modern world, the Geometrid has all the D.I.Y beats and endearing loops of Looper's first record, Up A Tree. This time around, though, Looper take the grade-school storytelling groove of that record and retool it space-age stylee.

The handclap stomp of "Miss You" explodes at just the right moment, while the house-music piano of "How Deep Is Your Love?" proves the boys' club credentials remain intact.

Like most of these top-shelf indie-pop tunes, ["101"] is cause for hoping Julian Casablancas loosens his songwriting grip on the next Strokes album. [Mar 2007, p.94]

The wonderful Street Songs of Love brightens slightly without losing intensity.

Emerald City may be his most unsettling work yet. [Aug 2007, p. 110]

Hot Thoughts sounds like Spoon and Dave Fridmann’s idea of a futuristic, guitarless record, which is to say it’s full immaculately constructed rock songs arranged on layers and layers of synthesizers and studio fireworks.

The album isn’t perfect. The pensive closer “Childhood” is too precious in its “where did the time go” wonderings. Lead single “Edging” is a mediocre punk number even Green Day might have left behind, and “When We Were Young” is undercooked and appears to battle its own time signature. But it’s still the band’s best work in 20 years, and rocket fuel for this new chapter and whatever follows.

It’s the band’s brightest, most animated album. The sound is crisp, every layer discernible, lacking the blurs and reverberations that constitute traditional rock production and instead drawing from the rhythmic separations that characterize ‘80s pop and freestyle.

For the first time in years, Pearl Jam are seizing the moment rather than wallowing in it.

It's all willfully abrasive, unflinchingly depressing, occasionally tedious, and intermittently triumphant.

Stones Throw rap fanboy morphs into credible crooner--now scans as natural evolution; his increasingly confident cries and grooves and songwriting aplomb are undeniably pro.

The best-sounding Decemberists record to date. [Nov 2006, p.103]

And yet, despite such growing pains, Clark's penchant for restless, exploratory tangents ensures that Blak and Blu hits like a ton of bricks.

Newly aching but still introspective, the Thermals remain a revelation.

"R.I.P music," wrote Cunningham in the introduction to the album. As corpses go, this one is exquisite.

Rough in all the right places but pleasurably smooth in others, Held in Splendor is less like the kitschy t-shirt quilt you made to remember your high school clubs and teams, and more like the perfect old blankets your grandmother used to sew: oversized, musty, and familiar even when you haven't worn them in years.

Carrie & Lowell is such a deeply, deeply personal statement from Stevens that its smallness sometimes shows. Though it’s easily his best and most powerful album since 2005’s Illinois, it never quite reaches the same sweeping highs of that epic concept album.

The resulting soil is almost tangibly immediate.

The Money Store fits into modern hip-hop like a square peg on fire, a 40-minute straitjacket tantrum of vein-popping, slow-flow barks closer to Helmet's Page Hamilton than Harlem's Charles Hamilton.

It's a warm, lightly psychedelic sound reminiscent of British strum god Bert Jansch and the quieter moments on Led Zeppelin III, less a soundtrack for Sunday brunch and more a place to get lost in, though our host herself isn't interested in hiding.

It should be noted that this all sounds fantastic.

Gathered from scraps of the You Want It Darker sessions and cobbled together with contributions from Beck, Feist, Bryce Dessner of the National, and more, it’s a worthy postscript to Cohen’s farewell, another clear-eyed look at the inevitability of death.

At times, that there’s as much “subversive” pop music as there is music that is supposedly being subverted, not all of it as deep as advertised. Poem, thankfully, is far more thoughtful about it than most.

Spirited and frenetic, Hold On adds up to more than just the sum of the band's five-star libraries. [Apr 2008, p.100]

Scuffed-up and brainy, Object 47 finds Wire still beguiling after all these years.

Recruiting Cursive’s Tim Kasher (on a single that outs the founding fathers as slave rapists) and Laura Jane Grace for 14 good songs in 40 minutes, Oberst’s made his best album since 2008’s addictive Conor Oberst, and ended up with the white male rage of the year.

Though not as brash as Goblin, nor as polished as IGOR, Call Me delivers consistent performances—and the artistic leaps Tyler’s made over the past four years are palpable in the album’s most boastful and somber moments.

All Hell throws up no barriers to access--if you have an abiding interest in great stories told by a great new storyteller, it'll welcome you in.