Lots of handclaps, woo woo backing vocals, and laughs amid funny observations about contemporary urban hipster life reveal an assured and charming debut.

If Cut Chemist can recreate the effortless fusion of the album's second half, perhaps someday he can make an album worth listening to from beginning to end.

That’s not to say the album is a disappointment (it isn’t) or not great (it is, mostly), but after hitting their creative and commercial peak with Absolution and its subsequent breakthrough stateside, Black Holes and Revelations clearly reveals itself to be a transition record.

Fans of â??classicâ? psychedelic music will find few greater pleasures this year than Happy New Year.

Anyone expecting a pared down, contented Sufjan can bugger off. If anything, The Avalanche chases his caprice and whimsy further down the rabbit hole.

The Eraser is a triumph.

Tamborello’s incorporated the extended song structures of minimal into his newer constructs without the genre’s scope for subtle detailing and nuanced alteration.

Greedy Baby doesn’t make sense sans visuals, and even with them it makes… little sense.

Guillemots are constructing their own universe and inviting interested parties to join them within it. I can’t remember the last time a band did that so effectively and so invitingly.

It could be the soundtrack to death, love, pain, strength, joy, suffering, courage, despair, and faith all at the same time.

What’s most striking about the album is the realization that despite his reputation as a musical chameleon, all of Cex’s albums are pretty similar.

The overall lack of any real risk results in standard guitar anthem boilerplate.

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.

She’s found the perfect collaborator to match her voracious appetite for all things pop.

Keane have talked up Under the Iron Sea as being bleaker, more raw than their debut album. It is about the things they have seen over the last two years, the problems, the horrors, the sin. But Keane have not been uncovering the carcases of napalmed babies for the last two years. They’ve been playing music.

Leaving Songs sounds a lot like a Tindersticks album, one that eschews their more baroque offerings for mature balladry.

Brightblack Morning Light is an album that knows no restraint, and its palpable excess are the perfect fit for its first-light sensations.

Hope of the States haven’t completely given themselves up to mediocrity yet, but they’re well on their way.

News and Tributes is a solid album, and its high points are worth listening to over and over. Unfortunately, some of the weaker tracks were given primetime slots.

An excellent album.

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.

Lif’s greatest strength remains his pissy paranoia.

Sure, there are flashes of undeniable brilliance, but most certainly not the full wattage of the awakening sun as advertised--far from the record Chasny's capable of making.

This is their radio-rock record, and it's not a tribute, it's as close to the real thing as they've come since they actually had a chance at radio play back in the '90s.

A little bit of kitsch is important... Begin to Hope has enough of it to stand out, and enough ethics to keep the whole thing grounded.

At times, as with Segundo, it’s tempting to just let Molina pull you under.

Decemberunderground carries a distinct whiff of missed opportunities.

BYOP’s debut cascades on itself. Its compulsive, one-sitting punk is delivered with absolute self-conviction.

Tracyanne Campbell has a glassy, gorgeous voice, but it’s also a curiously inexpressive one. When she’s left to carry less than strong songs alone, they suffer as a result.

The Exchange Session’s second volume retreads the same path that Hebden and Reid took earlier, but they truly go places this time around.

For those of you familiar with the band’s debut, 2004’s Tiger, My Friend, I can make this simple: The Only Thing I Ever Wanted is just as good.

While charming, it’s still a little too forgettable to be really exciting on its own merits.

It’s a passionate and at times painful aural experience as a whole, but it’s one that has to be taken from start to finish.

Citrus is an outstanding record because it doesn't fixate on what makes great shoegazer music but what makes great pop music.

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

So we've got pop music too lightweight to do much more than fancy up the background and a conceptual underpinning, that, due to the seamless way it's blended into these songs, is near imperceptible.

Past a handful of listens this becomes quickly uninspired.

His effort to make the most tense, uncomfortable record in the world has resulted in something that actually feels pretty straightforward, uncomplicated, and digestible.

Those voices alone are enough to devastate, and they’re the reason this album deserves mention among the year’s best.

The Obliterati succeeds in proving that Mission of Burma is not only capable of a comeback and a return to form, but also has exponential potential to evolve and thrive as a working band.

The excessive genre-bending of their debut has been exchanged for a dilettantism honed to a much sharper point.

It’s the band’s throatiest, most pressing and urgent release to date.

This is a solid, sturdy set of songs befitting their rootsy-but-not-exactly-honky-tonk settings.

Really, though, Cabic needs more “Red Lantern Girls,” a gauzy folk workout that hides and seeks until a brutish electric guitar prods the rhythm and heads for higher ground. It is everything the rest of the album is not: aggressive, terse, and surprising.

So Amazin’ isn’t quite pop and it isn’t quite rebellion--it’s straight-up high school.

Instead of consolidating their respective strengths, Broken Boy Soldiers is White and Benson compromising them in favor of finding an agreeable but ultimately dull and colorless middle ground.

Sharp, intelligent, and (most importantly) highly enjoyable, Enemies Like This is probably the height of the group’s creative abilities.

Sounding (at best, mind you) like an uninspired Afghan Whigs tribute band, it recycles motifs, melody lines, production tricks, and lyrics from the back catalog. Part of the problem lies in the production--it's far too muddled, loud, and flat--but even the most gifted producer would have trouble making a good album out of the Dulli-by-numbers on display here.

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.

Color me unimpressed.

The songs... are as wonderful, as creative, as exquisitely saddening as ever.

It doesn’t matter how well you can thrash or shred if it doesn’t sound good, and rarely does a section of Bang Bang Rock and Roll sound as if it wasn’t well thought-out and created with the intent to entertain.

With “Crazy,” the duo hits its apex without really shrouding the rest of the album.

Smith’s abrupt changes in tempo, volume, and instrumentation are alternately inspiring and disorienting.

Just Like the Fambly Cat, even more than Grandaddy's past works, carries the weight of death.

Springtime is... the unveiling of a toothier sound that better reflects both Holland’s bloodiness and booziness.

It’s both business as usual and their most complex set of ideas to date.

Even the "there's a great album hiding in here!" cliché doesn't really apply, since if you conducted ten trials of picking fourteen songs at random, you'd end up with ten albums of near equal mediocrity.

It’s almost as good as ['Hearts & Bones'], and likely to be as undervalued, but don’t worry: give it 20 years and its cadenced ruminations and instantly dated production will get some love from the usual suspects.

Eyes Open is composed of broad, obvious songs with broad, obvious hooks, aimed straight for the hearts of as many people as the band can manage. All of this would be bad, horrible even, if it didn't work. But it does.

It wouldn’t be so bad if The Stills didn’t kill the majority of the newly minted loose-limbed percussion and flighty major key romps ("The Mountain")--with drivel choruses and intermediate tricks (flooding the speakers with a porridge of every conceivable instrument).

OK, it all gets a bit samey in the middle section. But Jake Kelly adds some nice instrumental flourishes, and Dawson once again proves winning and convincing as a simple troubadour who’s not a simpleton.

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

Daedelus does with electronic and Latin music here what he and others have already done with experimental hip-hop: boiling genre to an essence and re-imagining it with novel or illuminating instrumentation.

Mostly, the band sticks to their strengths, making music for a party that ended sometime in the 90s, with the occasional reggae inflection to differentiate it from previous albums.

There is very little on Operate that sounds like anywhere Gomez have been before.

We find Jewel going through the motions rather than providing us with a noteworthy movement and in the end these songs here are less artistic pronouncements and more the conclusion of a specific product line.

It's hard to imagine another album in 2006 doing a worse job of justifying its existence than Blood Money.

Song-for-song, they haven’t made an album this misstep-free since Vs.

"Progressive" doesn’t mean clocking in at over seven minutes no matter what. It doesn’t mean hitting every goddamn skin, tom-tom, and cowbell on your drum set. Being "Progressive" doesn’t justify an album cover that looks like a stoner stumbled upon a documentary on Mayan civilization. I’m not sure, but I think "Progressive" is about growth and change.

It’s not that Wolfmother are all that bad. It’s just that everything there is to say about them is best said by immediate reference to another band and Wolfmother always come up short in the comparison.

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

Their previous efforts have now paid off, culminating in a condensed treatise of confusion, longing, and maturation.

It's an album that has far more potential for emotional resonance than musical discovery. The arrangements contain few surprises, and the handful of simple acoustic performances quietly outshine the more elaborate productions.

While it's admirable that The Secret Machines are trying to solidify their niche as the go-to guys for soundtracking laser light shows (or at least My Morning Jacket for indoor kids), Ten Silver Drops is a sideways moonwalk that won't get them any further away from the planetarium circuit.

The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living is an exercise in empty nothingness. But it’s not Bacchanalian coked-out excess nothingness, it's the joyless hollow-eyed actions of a man who is waiting for the next fix and doesn't care what bullshit has to come out of his lips in order to get paid.

The Boss’ most lively release since Born in the USA.

Pick a Bigger Weapon would’ve made a truly killer party album, but two factors hold it back--no one cares about Riley’s politics, and he’s not nearly as clever as he thinks.

While the "darker follow-up to the breakthrough album" angle was an unavoidable cliché for Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday does their part by giving the more aggressive workouts a stronger sense of purpose.

Fans of Verlaine's Television-era storytelling will be disappointed to hear him so simultaneously unchanged and unforthcoming.

Wholly forgettable.

A Blessing and a Curse easily qualifies as the Truckers’ most straightforward album.

A dull, droning bit of mainstream rock.

Bitter Tea is probably my favorite Fiery Furnaces album to date, but it isn’t without snags.

One of the biggest surprises of the year.

Even The Bravery, easily the most similar band in approach to White Rose Movement and rightly derided for their style over substance rehashes of the past, at least had a couple of memorably fine songs. The White Rose Movement, on the other hand, have the style, but little substance to back it up.

These are songs that veer to and fro, frequently sounding as if they’re nearly about to run off the rails.

It is intermittently thrilling, the first record since Perfect to show any of that record’s gleaming promise, but it is nonetheless brought aground by some of the same problems that dogged the last two LPs.

At its best, Calexico does expand, opening the range of sounds to provide for new colors of expression; when it doesn't work, that open sound means a turn toward the basic, allowing prettiness to get in the way of sonic content.

They’re obviously enjoying success and using it to explore a wider musical range, but they haven’t translated that admirable tendency into a coherent vision.

On the whole, Animal Years seems dashed off. Of course, dashed off by a clever songwriter with a helluva voice makes Animal Years a decent album.

There’s a lingering sense that the product at the center of all the hubbub remains something less than its lofty reputation.

Todd Smith might be the last straw for many fed up with his current direction.

Pagode will probably be the best love album of the year (and maybe one of the best, period) because Zé has always understood that you can explore feelings without just expressing them.

This may be far too soon, more reflex than action, for the band to properly capitalize on their start.

Jacket Full of Danger is an unfocused album that lets his own kitschy gags grab him by the ankles.

In Colour trades much of the punch from their first self-titled full-length for a more tender (is that even possible?) and reflective muse.

This is a band that, rightfully, just sounds tired.