The main draw here is in Prodigy rediscovering his way with words.

It’s a classic first album: A band unpretentiously tangling various genres they--or even listeners--thought would never sound so brilliant together.

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

Brock’s idiosyncratic worldview, so much a part of what made Modest Mouse special to begin with, has left the building.

It’s still identifiably Low, but richer and more diverse than before.

You almost get the sense Leo must be embarrassed by how good his last record sounds, opting instead to appease some imaginary punk ethic to the detriment of his songs.

The experimental, lo-fi branding of his oeuvre is gone, but the originality of his sound continues to trump the nostalgic demons in his head.

Ultimately, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead displays a type of artistic growth almost alien to the genre.

It’s a shame that Stone and Saadiq fall for the name-dropping approach to making records; inserted like ad-breaks, the guests are easily the worst thing on the album, giving a strong whiff of one of those horrible kitchen-sink-and-rolodex stinkers in the middle of a really very good, if conservative, soul record.

It’s easily the gentlest, brightest record to be associated with the Animal Collective.

Turn the Light Out scales everything back—the drums, the guitars, the vocals—leaving us with a clean-cut, grown-up Ponys, trying to get comfortable in their own skin when they were just fine in someone else’s.

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

There is an immediacy and zest to the Rakes’ latest effort that is commendable, but it’s not that memorable.

The Fratellis are beyond infectious.

The musicianship on this album retains a professional, waxed sheen, and that’s part of the problem: Hammond sticks to the basics, employing pedestrian rock setups whether he’s punking along with gusto or putzing around on the beach.

If Louden Up Now was the sound of !!! trying to integrate their fusion of conflicting ideas and failing admirably, Myth Takes is the band not giving a damn and succeeding improbably at something even more interesting.

This is the band’s most listless, amelodic effort to date.

While they’ve enlarged their presence on record, they’ve also peopled their songs with themes and accusations more resonant than Funeral’s mournfulness.

National Anthem, is monochrome and even somewhat sterile, characteristics often overcome by Whiteman’s increasingly excellent craftsmanship.

The Weirdness comes off as another solid yet daffy Iggy Pop solo album. The performances are energetic, but Watt is a virtual non-factor.

RJD2 has made an record that simply doesn’t play to his strengths.

The explorations of Security aren’t exactly shattering, but they’re refreshing.

A showcase of a band who have learned lessons and improved upon them, quietly getting better and better until something really special emerges.

There is a contingent of hip-hop fans who have been impatiently waiting at least since Madvillainy for a record rooted in tradition that offers something just a bit more skewed and challenging. Abandoned Language is that album.

For an album about all the bad things that can happen to us, it sounds pretty damn good.

Their music though—and probably the reason they’re used to such great effect in “Friday Night Lights”—actually feels more compelling as an accompaniment to visual drama, in part because the internal drama of the songs themselves are really specific and their presentation is a little tired.

[Levi] has an impeccable ear for a hook and packs his album full of them.

The Cost is bleached of any sort of lifeblood, stumbling out of the gate and moping towards the finish line.

Like Trans Am’s late-90s material, this album is enjoyable without being astonishing.

So sure, yet another band of bombast, largesse, room-sound gone cathedral, but either way the Besnard Lakes have mastered their songcraft with this psychedelic oddity, which fits all too well with other wintry early-year indie releases.

Perhaps due to their prominence, Can Cladders works best when the strings are actually ditched.

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

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.

This is an album not entirely worthy of the patience it requires to be appreciated track by track.

A shame an NPR market supercilious of the mercenary likes of Sheryl Crow has forced her to record songs that Crow herself would consider models of autumnal acuity.

While not entirely mainstream, Tones of Town is also not all that interesting.

Those disappointed with Velocity’s, raw, live sound, will see this album as a return to form. Those that dug its easily digestible garage rock will, in turn, view New Magnetic Wonder as a step forward.

The second half of the album falls into a malaise as tempos slow and arrangements become more orthodox, placing Bloc Party closer to Coldplay than one would have thought possible two years ago.

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.

Rarely does an album ingratiate itself so immediately and so quickly wear out its welcome.

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.

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

Alright Still is nothing more than pop for people who hate pop music, poptimist Quorn, phony music for people who can't let go of their inhibitions (indie-bitions?) and have to have their music classified as REAL.

Perhaps it’s too easy to blame Fridmann for these new distractions, but I can’t imagine Ounsworth and the band leaping ahead this way without him. Here’s to hoping that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah move backward more lithely than they progress.

While the music remains modest, there are a few moments of gratifying lyrical incision and indecision befitting this being Jones’ first album bereft of covers.

Just go buy an album that isn’t this one.

With the impressive level of control, it’s understandable when it starts feeling like Adams is holding on a little too tightly.

Cryptograms is by no means a flawless record, but taking the time to speak its language, tap into the dueling forces that make it tick, is an intriguing reward.

By peppering in just enough new tricks to keep things interesting and stepping up the songwriting this time out, Visitations succeeds where Winchester Cathedral failed.

Here are nine really communicative almost-pop songs, subdued but no less ambitious follow-ups to similar tendencies on 2005’s The Runners Four.

It is a funereal album whose spark and anger is obscured like the smoldering foundations of a burnt out city.

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.

Hissing Fauna is severely front-loaded, not necessarily because the closing songs are duds, but more because the album’s first half is nearly flawless.

There are subtle shifts at work with the band, and most allow their shady songcraft to emerge from overt experimentalism--perhaps too aware of its own inventiveness--into the realms of "art-pop."

Transparent Things, then, sounds less the work of three programmers and more like a band that plays together and stays together—like Hot Chip holding it a little closer to the vest, maybe.

So what if there are bits of Soft Bulletin and Dusk at Cubist Castle all over the record? At least they managed to choose the bits that fit together well.

In Stormy Nights is by no means the first time Ghost have plugged in and upped the volume, but it is easily their most unhinged, aggressive record; they make a show of steamrolling their subtler instincts.

The songwriting isn’t bad, by any means... But Heumann’s big-picture lyrics—faith, truth, etc.—are as ceaselessly heavy-handed as his guitar work, giving the whole of Rites an overwrought feel, one that can border on comical depending on your mood.

It's not a perfect record, but it's perfected, about as good as the debut from a band that traffics in this kind of music can be at this point.

While lyrics have never been Mellencamp’s strongest suit, they’ve never been as clumsy and crotchety as this.

Ce is Caetano Veloso's 40th album—and the first in many years to make the hairs on the back of one's neck stand up.

Mos Def sounds positively lifeless and distant.

Nas caps a year of NYC-based disappointments with quite possibly the most crushing one yet.

While it could be asserted that More Fish is leftovers to Fishscale's ten-course spread, we're still talking about something well beyond your average table scraps.

At 11 tracks, it doesn’t exactly famish the vaults, and its instrumental-heavy tracklist prohibits it from being a good newbie recommendation.

The strange thing about The Inspiration is how it's posited as an alternative to the much-bullied "conscious rap," and yet, it's among the least fun albums released this year.

No one listens to Gwen Stefani to hear her rap. Or sing a sentimental power ballad. In fact, if there’s a Gwen song that can’t be described by putting two (or more) genres together, I’d suggest skipping it altogether.

Much like Aaliyah’s sophomore effort One In A Million a decade ago, Ciara: The Evolution is the sound of a babydiva starting to really find her voice.

On his few appearances on “The Re-Up,” Em sounds completely lost, grasping for a new subject for his roving mind, or even for a reason to keep rapping.

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

Too exciting for the underground (maybe), too weird for the overground (hopefully not), he deserves to be heard by both.

Kingdom Come is Jay-Z at his least inspired, and, yes, that includes the R. Kelly collaborations.

Ultimately, that’s the problem: No one can really decide where to take these songs, so everyone takes them everywhere.

Figuring out where each part is originally from will be fun for the fanatics, but isn’t necessary to enjoy the mix.

Orphans may not have something for everyone, but what’s missing says more about the listener than the record.

Jesse Lacey... still conjures up arresting images but they rarely add up to coherent songs—and nothing consistently cuts to the bone like Deja Entendu’s highlights.

The sheer amount of misfires makes Songs for Christmas impossible to recommend to anyone but the devoted Sufjanite.

Rarely has a band created a world-space so monolithic yet provided a listener with so many easy routes to the interior.

While Ys is ridiculously overwritten, over-performed and self-contained, her fables always sublimate into the hot fog of real emotions just before they calcify.

Its artistic detours are even more jarring than those of Worlds Apart. The good news is that its quality is far less erratic. The bad news is the reason why: it's almost uniformly awful.

For the most part Game sounds desperate, raw, and ravenously hungry.

The biggest problem might be Rice’s vocal technique. On O, he had a tendency to endearingly strain for notes he couldn’t reach. Now, it sounds like he’s purposefully written songs to allow him to overextend his thin voice.

His lyrics may be doggedly unspecific, but ear-worming hooks and top-shelf instrumentation largely rectify that shortcoming.

Get Evens is the aural embodiment of the sublimated rage of their debut. Though the instrumentation is still spare, it's meatier and more aggressive.

This is a lovingly crafted compilation that not only represents the raw live power of PJ Harvey but also tips a cap to John Peel and the raw power his sessions had on performers.

An irritating listen.

When the Deftones are successful, they seem to slow down time, expanding on floating moments of doubt and mystery. When they’re not busy getting bogged down in all those mini-moments, dragging the album through dread patches of sluggishness that is.

It's the same McKay on Pretty Little Head. Still the same pretensions, still the same confusions, still the same ability to overcome her own self-imposed handicaps to put out an absolute killer of an album.

The songs are still long, the rhythms are still organic, and in general Isis still sounds like Isis.

This is a goofy record of bubblegum punk, with Queen lapping at its edges and enough good tracks to justify the smattering of empty screamfests.

Threes is their most average album yet, sounding similar to their two previous full-lengths but lacking the confrontational loudness of Wiretap Scars or the precision of Porcelain.

It has some nice tracks, some experiments and more than a few keepers, and, yes, it’s almost exclusively a fan-only proposition.

The Walkmen’s version is difficult to recommend to anyone unfamiliar with Nilsson and Lennon’s album.

One of the better American rock albums of this year.

There’s no such dirty, beautiful reality on his new album, just grand empty gestures backed by production polish and symphonic schmaltz.

Press Play is like an episode of My Super Sweet 16: though lavishly decorated and probably an honor to be invited to, there's a megalomaniacal presence that ensures the whole party is about glorification of ego rather than actual fun.

And though the album sags a little towards the end, with a few shorter instrumental numbers, it’s still an invigorating journey, a caravan of cavorting musicians, careening through the countryside, stopping only to play festivals and funerals.

Its unbearable tendencies are avoidable because they're overshadowed by bursts of creativity.