In The Reins is intelligent but natural, different but not queer.

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.

Young for Eternity is the record that US labelmates the Von Bondies should have made to follow-up Pawn Shoppe Heart, and the album that the White Stripes should make period.

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

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.

As eccentric as it is beautiful.

Every song is a savage burst of raw anger, taking Pink Flag’s sarcastic punk and updating it for the new millennium with cleaner production and even more minimalist arrangements.

Sure, the songs are serviceable, even great at times, but if you take away the new instruments, the tracks are spitting images of their younger brethren.

For a band who has struggled to make themselves heard and understood, God Save the Clientele may just be the Clientele casting some burdens to the wind, channeling all their adoration for Love and the Television Personalities with clear eyes, clear minds, and louder voices than they ever have before.

Ex Hex does have some problems, but they are minor in comparison to the thrill of hearing Timony rock out again.

Rather than winning over new converts, AWOO’s main achievement might be to delineate, skilfully but inescapably, the outer boundaries of its creators’ artistic reach.

Carrabba’s keening grandiloquence may have lost some of its most explicitly cathartic qualities, but The Shade of Poison Trees remains his best work in years.

It is arguable that Gold & Green is the link between Super AE and the Bores’ much feted neo-psych masterpiece, Vision Creation Newsun.

This increased humanism lends Fleischmann’s compositions an evolutionary sense of dynamism, thawing out his stern soundscapes.

All of their typical sentiments are there, but where their prior releases used spacey interludes and bridges as a recess from the hopelessness, the group employs these moments more sparingly.

That these songs sound like mashups to my ear is both their strength and their weakness--they’re good enough to remind you of the best work of the parties at hand, but the term implies that you’re not going to hear anything new, just two songs mashed together.

Cuts Across offers a surprisingly persuasive clutch of rock ‘n roll that beg for barnstorming live performances.

The moments of "hey, that sounds a bit like ..." are few, but notable; and perhaps unavoidable with such a distinctive vocal presence. In any case, these are welcome echoes from the past, not a weary retracing of footsteps.

That Harrison was evidently too busy to produce the entirety of Touch suggests a missed opportunity for a more cohesive and potentially even better album.

A truly soulful pop album, at least for one disc, Back to Basics is one of 2006’s best when Linda Perry’s fingerprints aren’t present.

Separate, the songs all sound great, but together, they don’t make a real album.

As it is, this record goes down really well on its own.

Where Jurado differs from someone like Jason Molina is in the vibrancy of the actual music.

Jarvis is strong enough, smart enough, and at home enough with its ancient rock-star concerns and unembellished songcraft, for "Running the World" to remain a bonus track. This album doesn't need rescuing.

A much smoother ride and more cohesive entity.

So what if the Darkness are nothing but a bunch of playacting nancy boys. They have an outstanding penchant for hooks [and] write witty and possibly sometimes moving lyrics.

These songs stay stuck with you like a lump in your throat.

THS’s move toward a purer aping of classic rock is mostly welcome and largely successful; the fallout is the loss of the band’s snaky, blunt riffing, their wit dissipating into a pool of honest rocking.

It’s not a classic, nor is it an embarrassment. It’s a disc which says: we’re the Fall, we’re still going and, frankly, you should bloody well be pleased about that. A statement with which I’m inclined to agree.

At first listen, N.B. sounds creepy. But ignore the lyrics, surrender yourself to the joys of pop songwriting and N.B. seems to approach perfection.

A highly enjoyable album... one that’s louder than the Liars, more fun than the (new) Strokes, and ten times more dynamic than the Arctic Monkeys.

This record is the first time the Fucking Champs have actually managed to capture the actual emotional colors of their own banality, rather than trying to piss a whole two-minute solo all over the place.

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

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.

There’s an attention to detail and storytelling nous built up by those previous concept albums that makes further listening and exploration of Happy Hollow that much more rewarding.

The question with Christ Illusion, as with any post-Seasons album, is simple: could these songs make it into Slayer's live set? The answer is yes, and more than the usual one or two.

It is simultaneously the most resplendent, accomplished record the band has made, with all kinds of songs... that retain the worst, most self-indulgent aspects of one of underground rock’s most consistently imperfect bands.

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

Sometimes the after school special feel of it takes its toll... But they win you back, because that's what underdogs do: they eventually win.

A retreat from overt tale-telling makes these songs less immediate and localized but potentially more personal, both for Jim and his listeners, as he strips away the surreality and specificity and renders his murky ruminations more universally resonant.

I Created Disco is a fun and mostly very listenable pop record which satisfies the modest ambitions it sets for itself.

I don't have the conscience to recommend Sojourner to the uninitiated, but as a document of what Molina acolytes already suffer, it's essential.

I suspect those left cold by Satan will find Icky Thump a welcome reheating.

Cash takes time to recapture these relationships through simple, detailed moments; at times with grief, and other times with the joy of their memory.

An immensely pleasing and happy album.

I’m tired of being simply “satisfied” by the Sea and Cake.

The Maginot Line has a title almost as dreary and foreboding as The North Sea had, a sense of vast futility and inescapable fate, and like that first album, the title belies the often bright and sparkling parts of the music.

What Marry Me may lack in innovation, it makes up for in attitude and execution.

Fiasco is actually an absolutely dazzling emcee and a genuinely nuanced personality, and both of these things are incredibly rare in hip-hop in 2006.

It’s a highly idiosyncratic album that very few will appreciate every facet of. However, even with a very minimal knowledge of the source material, there’s much to love.

Except for Ghostface, he's probably rhyming as well as anyone around right now.

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.

A quiet, thoughtful, but never uninteresting album.

The Books have toned down the weird, smoothed down the edges, and created their most homogenous record yet. Lucky for us, the homogenous version of The Books is still probably ten times more interesting than your favorite band at their most creative.

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

MoM, for their part, sound more and more comfortable with a vocalist in front of them.

Even if the album sounds more restrained, there is nothing holding back the quality of the material.

Proof of Youth is a satisfying sophomore effort.

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

It doesn't hurt that she's accompanied by the Drive-By Truckers and a handful of old Muscle Shoals session men, but it's still her voice and interpretive skills that carry the record.

A worthy addition to the catalog.

The album is one of the few anti-industry freakouts that have appealed to me on both a conceptual and musical level, so whether or not you are familiar with Busdriver’s skittering flow or innovative song structure, it’s worth the time to see why he’s so damn mad after all.

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.

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

Perhaps the biggest draw of the album--its sheer fragility and unlikeliness, amidst throngs of over-arranged pseudo-chamber indie records.

Much of the album bears more than a passing resemblance to the second half of [Daft Punk's] Discovery.

His pieces match open, lovely music with lyrics depicting people in struggle.... Individual songs take on various moods, but the album never dips fully to the bleak.

Pencil Ne-Yo in as R&B rookie of the year--and don’t be surprised if no one trumps him before 2006 is gone.

Summer succeeds largely because it forces Oldham’s songs into unfamiliar positions.

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

Beyoncé has a presence, a character which is totally unique to her, and B’Day’s utterly imbued with it.

It has a beautiful simplicity that belies its sophistication.

If there’s a single quality that ties these songs together, it’s consistency of scope and sound.

While sometimes Classics sees the group straying from their conceptual center, it’s never without Ratatat’s unmistakable identity and indelible gentle humor.

As an introductory My Morning Jacket mixtape, Okonokos is top-shelf.

You can write off some of Cease to Begin’s bland regionalisms as lacking in spice. But if, come midnight, Marry Song's' serpentine gospel finds home in your head, you better get up and read.

Mercury Rev... mostly eschew their distinctive brand of chamber pop, scaling back the saturated psychedelic orchestral flourishes for something a bit more terrestrial. In doing so they’ve fashioned the perfect complement to Dunger’s emotional voice and poignant songs of love lost.

In its no-frills pleasures, A Bigger Bang recalls Some Girls and Emotional Rescue, two great meaningless albums.

Stellastarr* pushes its new grasp of tension and release, and the album shows their increased sense of cohesion.

Rehashed Bob Mould still beats most of what’s out there, though, so the album has its strengths.

Despite the overbearing length and the sometimes lazy lyrics, Kidnapped by Neptune is a strong release in a year of strong releases.

Load Blown does more than enough to keep "very" and "awfully," respectively, in the mix.

The music from the Envelopes’ first LP, Demon, is so loose and frivolous it feels like the Swedish group wasn’t even aware that the mics were hot.

The album sounds simultaneously familiar, yet alien.

Luckily, his affable spunk grounds much of the exploration, yet, at some point, the line between circumstance and good songwriting becomes suspiciously blurred.

They sound laid back. They sound like they’re having a blast. They sound, well, loose.

Parts of Good Bad Not Evil have some fascinating sonic touches.

Close listening is rewarding--the boys have a knack for crafting intricate songs that lean heavily on texture and subtle interplay--but perhaps a bit too gentle.

Plague Park shows him mostly nailing the fine bristle of “Modern World” and “Same Ghost Every Night.”

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

It’s obvious that Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler have not lost a bit of the touch that made them famous in the early 1990s.

Quality is a very conflicted album. On one hand, many of the tracks are close to the level mind blowing, production and rhyme wise. On the other hand, some of the tracks are just plain boring and muddy.

That vocal in 'The Kill Tone Two' is unfortunate, because the rest of the album approaches some spectacular peaks.

The album, like most of Vanderslice’s albums, meanders along like a pleasant afternoon: it is all fair weather and blithe breezes, fairly consistent in both tone and tempo.

Musically, he’s ditched the clean, plainly instrumented indie-country schlep of his previous efforts for something brassy, something downright soulful.

Where this release stands out is in overall sound and songwriting.

It’s a little disjointed, more enigmatic, and more confounding than its predecessors: a gentle, mysterious giant of an album that could only have been created by a father.

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.