The Juan Maclean takes the mechanized side of music, the Kraftwerk precision and automated bass, but injects it with a personal, human vision and unmet, unwanted desires.

Congotronics 2 sticks closely to the sonics of the first volume, possibly because the bands do actually sound similar, or possibly because the bands have been recorded in similar fashion.

A terrific and thoroughly enjoyable effort.

Fundamental offers pleasure as rewarding as The Magic Mountain or Glenlivet 18--indulgences best enjoyed as you approach the half-century mark, when your imagination is keen to leisured elongations of familiar tropes or newly appreciative of exotic sumptuousness.

As with much of her past work, it’s almost embarrassingly human, sometimes sounding too close to you to believe it’s not your own.

Multiply sounds like he picked up some ancient reel-to-reel tape from lost Holland-Dozier-Holland sessions and gave them a 2005 production spit-and-polish.

This record contains some of the most astounding music that Boards Of Canada have ever composed.

TV on the Radio have crafted a work of immense, cataclysmic, almost overwhelming power and righteous fire.

After disappointing would-be breakthrough releases from so many of the discopunk frontlines, this is an album that’s more easily classifiable as “great” for what it isn’t, rather than what it is. It’s not inconsistent. It’s not a total deviation from what we know of the group. It’s never dull. And, most importantly--it is in no way a let down.

Portraying the state of pop as a series of predictable formulae long since exhausted by corporate superstructure, Human After All more than lives up to its name, rendering a metaphor for failure on the grandest yet simultaneously most personal of terms.

So when you see Infinity On High getting praised, don’t bother scoffing. This deserves to get praised. There's a lot on here that's great and pretty much nothing that's bad.

Califone has worked, skillfully, with all of these styles and sounds before, but they’ve never left the table with a more realized, delicate treatment.

It's tightly focused, beautifully written, and totally without filler.

A slow burn may not be quite as exciting as a scorch, but this is a hotter flame than most anything else you'll hear this year.

Mainstream and casual fans will remember them best for Things Fall Apart, but probably only hardcore fans will be able to see the value and dedication that much of Phrenology holds.

By adding textures, piano, acoustic guitars, and restraint, and losing some of the scowling and savagery, BSP have unleashed a truly unique pop creation, one with depth and feeling.

For a high-minded piece of process, one that rests on the old trope that the good stuff is always bad for you--or in this case, for the majority of the world--Herbert packs a lot of snap, crackle, and, particularly, pop.

[An] extraordinarily unassuming, gorgeous release.

What makes OK Cowboy worthwhile is not a greater emphasis on the chilly tones that made Vitalic’s initial singles so impressive and characterized some of his savage DJ sets, but the demonstration of a surprising degree of variety and even humanity within those seemingly narrow colonnades of rising and whiplash synths over soulless, mechanical drums.

The poetry is too good, the gloom too cached in symbolism and fine melodies to feel trite or melodramatic.

A manically strange, darkly and violently beautiful, and deliriously pop album.

What really makes Wincing the Night Away succeed is how the Shins’ moneymaker templates evolve into more complex tapestries. In a manner similar to the New Pornos, the third album becomes the most successful due to an implied heft that comes from a concerted effort to sound like a band rather than a singer-songwriter vehicle.

Despite the chill of "Dormant Love," A Vintage Burden might just be the best summer LP you’ll hear this year--perfect timing.

Stillmatic features the best rhymes from Nas since his debut, Illmatic, and possibly the best rhymes of the year, rivaled maybe only by Ghostface Killah’s Bulletproof Wallets. Nas rhymes wonderfully on every song, dropping knowledge like.

Out Hud’s shift to house-pop may not be the group ‘coming into its own,’ but it does throw aside the burden of influences that S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D. had attached to it.

The quality level is almost inhumanly high, and the range of the tracks here gives you a better idea of what the band is like than any of their individual albums.

It's one of the few Europop albums that not only deserves worldwide domination, but also has a really good chance of achieving it.

No Shouts, No Calls isn’t just their most song-based work, it’s also their most romantic.

If you come expecting a great album full of hit singles, you won’t get it. If you come with an open mind, what will greet you is the opening chapter of a tale about a girl living through music, remembering through music, exploring her art and herself, starting out to create something special and different.

A diverse batch of songs that she brings together as a consistent set, showcasing Yearwood as not just a fine singer, but also a just-gets-better-and-better artist.

Musically, at least, it’s the most accomplished thing he’s ever done.

Every moment screams to be played a little bit louder and a little bit longer; because Playing the Angel is just that good.

Labor Days is a wonderfully complex piece of work.

Each song glows with infinitesimal joys, tiny pointillist production flourishes noticeable only under close scrutiny. But in rounding out their sound, they brought the viewer close enough to see the brushstrokes and the smudges.

Few albums made in recent memory sound this harrowing or this painful, yet even fewer have such a true sense of catharsis.

None Shall Pass may or may not be the best album in Aesop Rock’s discography, but it might be the most fun to listen to. Call it his San Francisco Renaissance.

Nick Franglen and Fred Deakin rarely miss with this album.

In Rainbows, then, is Radiohead as straight and lean as they’ve ever sounded.

Like Blueberry Boat, this is a triumphant album of good bits.

The compressed, cleaned-up ferocity of Hypermagic Mountain is a leap of refinement in every way, a sign that the band, while lushly unripe, is ripening gracefully.

An excellent album.

Most of it... feels as weighty and emotive as Sleater Kinney, or as seductive as Mary Timony in the mid-90s: fully-formed, feminine indie rock.

As an album, WIW seems to have sprung fully-formed from a single night’s restlessness; often more organic than much of his debut, but still with a steady electro-backed pulse, its pacing and sequencing flow like water beneath a frozen creek, barely seen and mostly imagined.

The Greatest isn’t perfect, but its stumbles are neither intrusive nor damning.

With the multifarious tributaries flowing effortlessly into the whole, I Thought I Was Over That has a diverse coherence that is hard to define and establishes itself as a distinct entity in its own right.

With Phantom Punch Sondre Lerche finally makes good on the promise of his talent; he’s mastered and polished his intuitive gift for melody and arrangement and rightly applied it to his most natural musical inclinations.

Fury is a twelve step sequence of poisonous, caustic, and lithe rap.

The fact that Hot Chip can take all these conflicting moods, string them together, and make of them a satisfying whole is testament to their understanding of the classic rubric of the pop album—an identifiable, unique sound that has enough room to allow for variety and enough consistency to keep the listener's attention.

An endlessly enjoyable sophisticated pop album.

It’s an album that leaves you both soothed and disturbed, lulled and shaken by the group’s masterful blend of the comforting and the uncanny, slightly dazed as if returning from time travel or a knock on the head.

Yes, of course, it’s a total homage to his favorite music—but it’s an extraordinarily moving one, both emotionally and physically.

Yes, this may well be the best of the Eels, his greatest achievement to date, because he reaches so far on nearly every track, and yet still finds something to grab on to.

Parades, both restrained and wildly dramatic, gently touching and warmly enveloping, is not a record that sits comfortably with convenient labels.

Right now Elbow are hitting an emotional pitch no one else is managing; one more personal and more potent than those that might be considered their competition.

Perhaps less transcendent, The Milk of Human Kindness may ultimately prove more enjoyable.

Fishscale intermingles skewed narratives, expert guest choices, exquisitely conflicting production, and a concept and focus—the drug trade is the near exclusive subject mater—that, while somewhat reductive in scope, sharpens the album into an immense, furious, and focused album.

Building on his unassuming alternative icon status, this great debut (under his own name) is sure to bring him that bit nearer to the awareness of the mainstream.

A richly executed and textural record—one of the best guitar-based albums of 2007 thus far.

A masterful record.

This is one of the most forward-thinking “rock” albums to come down the pike in some time, playing with the genre in both form and function while showing off Reznor’s ridiculous resevoir of ideas in fine fashion.

The result is in some ways immensely pleasing (at its best the quality here is easily the equal of the songs from the proper album), but at seventeen songs and a full hour in length Oh You're So Silent Jens suffers a bit, predictably, from too much of a good thing.

It’s the collage of styles that distinguishes this album: Cuban and Indian flourishes, Eisenhower-era doo-wop, the smoky Stax groove, bucolic British trad-folk, the eccentricities of American folk, of both the Dust Bowl troubadours and the Vietnam flower-children.

Easily her finest effort since Ray of Light.

The songs here are superb, the arrangements and production nearly perfect, and Jackson’s singing is the best of his career.

This is called showing the kids how it's done--and doing it.

Human Animal comes off as a less directly brutal assault than its predecessor. It sounds a hell of a lot better cranked to ten, though, its contours more explicit, the sounds sharpened to a steely point.

Writer’s Block has announced the renaissance of both pop music and love.

Just Like You shows and proves unquestionably that Cole’s capable of some seriously rich, powerful art.

The finest album of the White Stripes’ career.

45:33 works both as exercise-soundtrack and discopunk-odyssey because James Murphy understands how to make people move on a basic, physical level. [Review of UK release]

The disc succeeds by merging a unity of sounds with a complex variety of emotions.

His best [album] yet, his most fully-formed, emotionally engaging and sonically rewarding.

Barnes has created some utterly brilliant compositions, captured a perfect blend of melodic energy and sincerity while never sacrificing catchiness, and has used both achievements to create one of this year’s most cathartically fun albums.

Sometimes it does sound like The First Ever Country Record On Matador, too tied down to ideas of what country records are supposed to sound like.... And then Laura looks you in the eyes and you realise that really, you’re being a bit of a twit. She’s still there, the same as she ever was. Her surroundings have just got a bit grander.

On On My Way To Absence Jurado provides far more satisfying moments than dubious ones, and that’s no small feat when trafficking in the kind of bottom of the barrel human emotion that Jurado has made his trademark.

There are gimmicks, but there’s musical merit, and genuine feeling to match the calculated charm.

Out Of Season is both a remarkable record of beautiful music, and an outstanding, awe-inspiring performance inducing near-irresistible feelings and sensations. This album is a sublime example of the art of the singer, and of the art of music.

La Forêt has the sort of courage-minus-contrivance that is exceedingly (and ironically) rare in music of its dramatic and thematic ilk.

If this isn’t a breakthrough album for them that takes them to the top of the heap, seeing them showered with money, women and limos, well, then the consumer and music fan is not doing their job.

You could spend an age listing and describing the musical wealth of Damaged... Better just to listen to it, soak it all in, than fail with words.

To me, Medulla is an experiment in transforming the primal power of the human voice into a 21st century context. It's an amazing effort, and it's one of the best albums of the year.

Perhaps All City’s most pleasing triumph, for fans of Northern State’s earlier stuff, is that the colloquial character of the Hesta and co.’s voices is in no way diluted by the more polished music accompanying it.

Ms. Yamagata has moved beyond the slightly jazzy overtones of her debut EP to grandiose, ready-for-radio singer/songwriter pop for the ages.

I feel patronising calling it a rebirth, return to form or a self-rehabilitation from the brink. Let’s just call it evolution.

Listening to these four discs, you can really picture an entire nation of college students and twenty-somethings promoting their own gigs, designing their radio station playlists and folding their own record sleeves while staying up late to watch 120 Minutes.

This is a return to the Wu sound; in-house production, more Clan cameos and less material dictated by current trends commercial.

Recast[s] her matchless mountain holler and ever-sturdy songwriting genius in the milieu of gut-bucket blues riffs and blistering rock guitar, making Lynn sound not so much reinvigorated as reimagined, given a raucously purposeful, wildly authoritative new playground for her still-terrific proto-feminist (even in 2004) tropes.

There’s an obvious self-assurance on AWOBMOLG that’s been increasingly evident on his recent EP releases; a sense of things coming together and evolving into a sound that seems unhurried, unprompted and, best of all, natural.

On Sung Tongs, the group has deftly combined all the traces that ran through their earlier work into a vibrant and beautiful collage that flows as smoothly as Here Comes the Indian, with all the mood of Campfire Songs, and even more pop hooks than Spirit.

Whilst the songs on No You C’Mon don’t flow together as smoothly as those on Aw C’Mon, a number of them are of a similar ilk; lush, concise modern country that only Lambchop can do, the sound of a band from Nashville rather than a Nashville band.

Mike Skinner’s taken a big risk in doing this, but he’s found the bizarre and beautiful meeting point of The Specials, Danny Rampling and Serge Gainsbourg. A Grand Don’t Come For Free is a remarkable record.

It acts as a perfect counterpart to Rejoicing in the Hands, featuring the same elements that made its successor such a valued release, while incorporating enough new ideas to make it much more than Rejoicing in the Hands: Part Deux.

With a more succinct drollery and a better sense of studio control, Cee-Lo Green has outdone his fellow Atlantans [OutKast] on Cee-Lo Green is the Soul Machine.

Pyramid is not Songs: Ohia but the musical equivalent of A Season In Hell, not something one can take in often, but which is beautiful for the fact that it was completed at all.

It's crisper and clearer, but simultaneously thicker and murkier than before. The album isn't just dense, it's bloated—in the very best sense of the word.

The record is sprawling and beautiful, a genuine pop masterpiece through and through.

Far, far better than it has any right to be, an album that sounds like a natural progression of the band’s career and one that, if they’d made it instead of San Francisco, might just have held them together for a bit longer.

This band is so exciting it’s almost unbearable.