Each sound swerves about unpredictably, as free-willed as particles twisting through a vast nothingness, powerful and intricate in their brutal simplicity.

Starry Mind is both an effortless listen and a taxing one, blending easily into one's surroundings while also rewarding intense examination.

Rather than attempt to recruit other players and resume business as usual, Broadcast subsumes House’s spectral compositions within a framework that suits every one of the duo’s strengths. If there’s anything scary about this at all, it’s the ease with which they’ve made the corpse of pop songcraft climb from its grave and walk anew.

100 Days is a straightforward progression of rhythm and blues, but on the gut level, well, words like "modern" or "derivative" become fairly worthless.

It's Dirty Three as they've always been, testing their limits, but still producing some of the prettiest and most artful music around.

For new listeners, this is the most accessible Sand album to date, but for veteran Sand nuts, this may be... well, just different.

This album sounds in many ways like an amalgamation of her previous work.

The Eternal is accessible, listenable, and all the rest: another consistent album from the consistent rock band Sonic Youth.

It’s a soothing cushion of chaos, like a bloody valentine, a buzzing saw, and an amazing star exploding into particle dust.

The solution to enjoying this album, then, is to not ask it to provide heavy drama, high art, or fiery revolt – it's just pop music with a slight twist, and it's first and foremost about having a good time inhabiting glamorous guises and histrionic voices.

There are hooks, and as usual Pink has an uncanny ability to worm his 80s-worshipping melodies and one-liners into your head whether you want them there or not, but the grand effect of Dedicated to Bobby Jameson is that of a restless mind finally beginning to slow down, settling into its patterns rather than excitedly seeking new ones, and struggling with one of the most unavoidable, stinging realities of being alive: disappointment.

Earth's greatest strength is also its structural weakness; to continually enact the tremulousness of all origins is to refuse to get going, to depart

This is frivolous, immaculate music.

Truelove’s Gutter abandons the lush strings and complex production of previous work for a more straightforward style, and the results bring to mind the honest, plainspoken albums that Cash and Jones recorded in the mid-70s.

It’s not an incredibly remarkable record, but when a band is this consistent for this long, it’s hard to fault it.

It’s a gracefully self-contained ecology--a sonic environment rich with empty and warm spaces, within which the listener is urged to breathe more easily and share in a queer feeling of belonging.

Downright seductive.

Double Cup sounds like an album Rashad has been gearing up to make, but instead of abandoning the footwork style he has championed throughout his career, he’s scoping its potential on nonconformist terms. And from the perspective of the listener, it’s an absolute treat.

It’s precisely because of the transience and mutability of Open as a whole that its fleeting moments of splendor prove all the more affecting and beautiful, despite the possible contention that--because of the often contradictory accompaniment--these might not be moments of splendor at all.

Vs. Children is a pleasant but uncaptivating album, and I’m inclined to believe, especially when confronted by his album’s deliriously enchanting highlights, that Ashworth is spreading himself a little thin at his current pace.

On top of being instrumentally impressive, One Life Stand is Hot Chip’s most emotional release.

Filled with quirky and inventive pop songs packed with sultry harmonies and an immense level of musical intuitiveness.

What makes The Historical Conquests Of... a great album and not just Ritter’s foray into stylistic versatility is the integrity of his musicianship. The album is thorough; it is complete.

Glass Boys is the best album Fucked Up have released so far, by virtue of it being the “laziest” collection of their career.

@#%&*! Smilers walks its own path as a uniquely beautiful addition to Mann’s already impressive catalogue.

In a word, Gloss Drop just sounds confused, and its structures don't challenge or excite.

There is a creeping charm to tracks that seem initially off.

Level Live Wires, is almost a pitch-perfect continuation of 2005's "Burner."

The spacious long-form approach on these eight tracks really showcase Schott’s insistent, tactile, and conversation-with-yourself lonesome performance style. It’s great loner music, for those who own this about themselves but are ever casting a tentative eye toward the throng.

It may be more accomplished and accessible than its forebear, yet it mostly comes across as a tad inconsequential, running through one nice song to the next without ever really being anything more than “nice.”

Stridulum was just a warm-up for Conatus, giving Zola Jesus the opportunity to gain confidence in traditional song forms so that she could burst out with a compositionally and emotionally varied set next time out.

Like a good term paper, much of Graduation sounds great in theory but flounders in its execution.

The Menham Street Band realizes the vision of No Time For Dreaming, with Brenneck at the helm. More Memphis than Detroit, they're always present but never pretentious.

As an unsettling exercise in pop terrorism, The Horror is a rare treat.

It's hard to paint this as anything other than what it is: a professional-sounding album of radio-friendly pop. It's as bad as that sounds.

This is a profound and giving music.

Despite possessing a somewhat dour countenance, the main effect of this record is a sort of replenishment.

The music tries to express what words can't, which makes this Animal Collective’s most combustive, "live" record yet.

Here’s Yo La Tengo as embracing, alienating, and prolific as ever, with another strong new album, Popular Music.

That Toro Y Moi's new record Underneath the Pine is distinctly a product of his songwriting, without sounding exactly like his 2010 debut, suggests that chillwave may still have some legs to it after all.

Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard it before... it’s taking drugs to make music to take drugs to, or something. But it’s still pretty damn fun, and Black Mountain do it with a higher idea-per-song ratio than most of their fellow fetishists.

True Minds continues a proud tradition of celebrating dead ends and lost causes.

With Personal Record, Eleanor commits even more strongly to straightforward, sentimental, and concise songcraft.

Self-referential, unified, and insanely catchy, American Idiot's positives outweigh its clichéd delivery and ironic medium for corporate America critique.

Anti-Pop Consortium are still vital enough to keep the momentum they lost, in dreadfully untimely fashion, when they inexplicably broke up in 02.

As far as songwriting goes, i follows the typical Magnetic Fields album standard of several great songs balanced with a couple unremarkable ones, with the rest being simply really good.

For this record, the Brewises again borrow generously from late-60s and early-70s psychedelic rock (not to mention the first British Invasion), all pervasive vocal harmonies, whining guitar tones, bouncing bass, and crisp, dampened drumming.

No Color isn't a bad album by any means - it's great at times, never less than good, and certainly better than could reasonably have been expected - but there's no sign here of return or retreat to their old strengths.

Trials and Errors could be looked at as vindication for Molina given his choice to move on from his Songs: Ohia days; but as an essential live album, [it] leaves much to be desired.

Known for their micromanaged and micromanaging tracks, it’s fascinating to see that even their words about themselves are efficient, each phrase and constituent particular effervescent in their appearance and disappearance, yet wholeheartedly lunging themselves into place, forming a whole crystalline and formative structure.

All this studious box-ticking and attention-to-detail comes at a price, which is that II becomes more of a tribute to the music of yesteryear than, say, a work of art that’s relevant to the world surrounding it.

TMLT feels like the Titus Andronicus record par excellence, it pushes and shoves at the boundaries of what such a record could or should conceivably sound like.

Heavy and heartbreaking, teeming with a warm, analog energy, Snow looks backward at each defining element that made the band so memorable to begin with. But like many of the best moments, maybe you just had to be there.

Fair or not, An Imaginary Country can best be described as middling: competent, but certainly not what we all were hoping for from an artist whose work up to this point has been so unequivocally stirring.

If they decide to get serious about being a band and not just a project, maybe next record they could take us to their own personal woods, instead of just telling us about boring generalized woods.

Abyss neatly encompasses the totality of her career, synthesizing the artist’s prolific catalog into her strongest and most ambitious album yet, a cavernous chasm filled with beauty, brutality, and endless possibility.

Garden of Delete is the exceptional post-performance of the readability conjured in the wake of OPN’s work, and as a result, it critiques experimental culture’s desire to fetishize.

Fearing that these songs were indicative of indie-pop conformity would not only be ignoring the group's rich and varied history with melody and rhythm, but also underestimating the ingenuity and convictions that Longstreth has consistently boasted throughout his recorded career.

The straightforward manner in which Disappears present themselves makes it easy to take the album at face value and enjoy its vibe and vigor without worrying about its place in the broader canon.

R.E.M. do sound like a band again, but they don’t sound like a band very much apart from their peers.

There’s a newfound purpose to his dilettantism, one that invests the album with more weight than anyone had any right to expect.

Nouns sounds as homemade as something released on a Warner Music affiliate could be. It’s crafted with a sense of pleasant haphazardness, gelling into one of those rare situations where everything that is thrown at the wall sticks.

Maybe that's the key to the whole album, how it can seem to be a blog-fisher one moment and slap you upside the head another: it dissolves before you actually know what hit you. But for a lot of us, that's all the more reason to dive right back in.

Shows Skinny Puppy at the top of their game once again.

If you like gorgeous folk, then this album is for you. If you don’t, well, The Hold Steady released something not that long ago.

Real Estate might not be the best classicist-leaning pop record of the year (that dubious honor goes to the more stylistically varied "Album," by Girls), but it certainly is the most confident, the most assured, and the most unassuming.

Despite any missteps, Bermuda Drain is laudable simply for its willingness to branch out and discover new ways of expression.

It involves not a disconnection from, but an exploration of the material potential in his instrument(s): an excursion to the outer limits of instrumentality, a commitment to resonance as the product of granular viscera: of throats and diaphragms and guts and lungs.

Ishi may be a lullaby, calling Ishi’s and Gengras’ friends to rest, but ultimately it imparts a peace to all who oscillate within the flux of the universe.

Contact is aggregated purge and celebration past the self, flesh seared back and stomp soldered to somnambulism.

On The Echoing Green, Cantu-Ledesma has brought a newfound clarity to his work, carving distinct shapes of mellifluous guitar lines to impose against his towering sonic architecture.

As ever, the Brooklyn four-piece triumph when they succumb to the dreamier elements of their work, of which Expect the Best carries just enough to sustain the listener across the finish line.

Phases nevertheless reaffirms its singer’s preeminence in the current milieu of indie rock. Pulling from material as recent as January and as early as 2010, the album aggregates Olsen’s previously unreleased work into a collection that vacillates between retrospection and contemporariness.

In spite of every effort and explicit claim to the contrary, it doesn't really sound like they're having that much fun.

You could diagnose I, Gemini as a frustrating text, a scattershot indulgence that only occasionally succeeds as a collection of songs: it is.

COW makes no claims to reinvent the wheel. Yet its heightened attention to detail marks a new focus for the duo, who, with less tools than ever before, manage to find a sound that’s wistful, wide-eyed, and surprisingly full of sounds new to the act, if still par for the course within the wider realm of contemporary composition.

Ripatti has extended himself beyond what reticence he may typically exhibit: his generosity and, yes, conviviality have birthed another notch in an already remarkable oeuvre.

Here she sounds more focused, and her delivery more triumphant.

Even if it frontloads the strongest and newest material, Black Velvet provides a largely engaging second side. The one exception being his cover of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” originally released as a single in 2011, which feels somehow more gimmicky than the (solid, even if it highlights how cloying Cobain’s lyrics could be) Nirvana cover preceding it.

Sagittarian Domain is a noble quasi-failure, an enjoyable and driven jam that, despite its reliance on certain tired tropes of its obvious Krautrock influences, nevertheless succeeds when it focuses its exploration on texture.

Their liquid funk/R&B/hip-hop hybrid has never been more refined.

Aloha sound more like Genesis than ever.

He continues to chart new territory, using his latest album to highlight sonic textures and what they seem to suggest about a metaphorical city. Working within those constraints, he's captured the nuance of living in many real cities and, in so doing, has crafted one of the stronger releases you'll hear this year.

If you were hoping for a predictable outing from Ben Chasny, you won't find it on The Sun Awakens.

Schoolboy Q is neither a great lyricist nor a technically dazzling rapper.... Happily then, the production on Oxymoron is uniformly solid.

Ultimately, this album is a useful index to effects and samples you might want to import into Ableton Live at this moment, but not much more than that.

Tragicomedies isn't terrible, but its significance hinges on two established and already surpassed mediums.

It’s breathtaking, it’s assured, it’s a perfect finale, it LIVES UP TO THE HYPE.

Fortunately, It's All True is every bit as great as their early releases promised.

Satanic Panic in the Attic is a typically sprawling piece of music for Of Montreal. It runs only 43 minutes, but in that space, the band manage to throw in everything but the kitchen sink in winsome pop experimentation.

Zayna Jumma has a similar clarity, allowing listeners to immerse themselves, for a spell, in the special magic that Group Doueh have made their own.

Reiterating a few of the Tonebank-Rhythm-Ko-esque grooves that we’ve heard before, albeit with a darker, occasionally shoegazy approach this time.

There are no weak tracks on Breakup Song, and the album unfolds at a natural pace. Just short enough to resist sagging at the middle, it also ends with a quartet of songs that are more radio-friendly than anything the band has ever done.

Despite the modern production quality, the overall feel of Ballad Of The Broken Seas is unerringly timeless.

Bright and Vivid is a solid follow-up, one that delivers the same catchy songwriting as Calder's debut while simultaneously opening her work up to a broader instrumental pallet.

It is a welcome return home to a band that had been on quite the bender.

Xiu Xiu is so earnestly committed to its project that its music inevitably bursts through its own irony to the other side.

Ghostface and Younge’s filmic vision comes together with great aplomb, and yields one of the bloodiest, most ambitious, and straight-up funnest hip-hop albums of 2013.