Despite a couple of weaker links, Somewhere Else is extremely well put-together, and spilling over with appealing melodies, wit, and truth.

Despite its big, dumb rock ‘n’ roll template and primary color lyrics, albums like Lost in the Dream can be as restorative of faith in old metaphors and storytelling tropes

G I R L is safe, universal, and unforgivably dull. It should be a huge hit.

People have finally started to give this band its due attention, and with Future Islands’s virtually unmatched ability to make such a wide variety of lived experience sound unwaveringly electrifying, it’s no wonder why.

This is a break-up album, a cohesive work embodying a singular mood, and Nadler, like any great artist, sets the scene with such careful, immersive depth that it can be difficult to the seams in her work until you explore every inch.

The Beets’ simplicity was one of their strengths, but N.A.P. is the sound of Wauters realizing that in music, as in life, complexity brings richness, and often greater rewards.

Her writing on Real Hair sacrifices none of Major Arcana’s verve or crystalline observations in spite of being notably denser, with Dupuis layering syllable over syllable, image over image, until these songs should burst apart.

Transgender Dysphoria Blues isn’t a perfect record, but goddamn if it isn’t an important one, and more worthy of your time than ninety-percent of the more fashionable sounds coming out of whatever Bushwick loft party the Times scopes this weekend.

The charms of Harlem River are hard to explain, as this record thrives on a certain groove, a certain verve, that makes it an overall pleasure to listen to.

It’s the music here, not the sharp-toothed lyricism, which sets the record so far apart from the rest of the field.

Throughout, as ever, it’s Stewart’s voice that grounds the music in something recognizably human, his inexhaustibly elastic voice capable of so much but never able to be anything less than beautiful.

It comes into the world jubilantly, then spends the next forty minutes kicking and screaming against your ideas of what you can landscape it against. It dies with a characteristically quick whimper. No cheap shots against Explosions in the Sky, I promise, but that’s not pretty. It is beautiful.

Hynes expands his melancholy pop palette just slightly enough on Cupid Deluxe to create an album at once slickly cohesive and subtly textured.

The finest songs here are as solid as any other rock music you’ll find in 2013.

Surfing Strange is a tight and coherent little album whose greatest strength lies in its youthful energy and sense of the ups and downs of the early twenties--the lows of uncertainty and malaise, and the highs of excitement and anticipation.

It’s an interesting, intermittently excellent album from a skilled group that could still use a little help in getting out of their own way.

It wavers back and forth between showcasing the band’s strengths and having fun in the moment, more like a live show than a unified statement.

The saving grace of Uncanney Valley is its resolute tenderness, an emotion the band never coaxed out of their twenty-something gloom.

While Lightning Bolt may fall somewhat shy of that goal ["the Best Album"], it is a more than solid effort to satisfy the legions of fanboys born between ’77 and ’84, and a convincing argument for their continued existence.

As a rap record, it excels.

Run Fast has many moments of darkness, but ultimately it’s a celebration: of growing up, of surviving, of wading through shit and coming out the other side.

The Worse Things Get is powerful and assured, and in making true of its promise--to fight harder, and to love one’s self in the face of adversity--it pulls off one of the hardest feats there is.

You’d think that an album with somewhat conventional music that eschews a conventional sense of arc, narrative or otherwise, would come off awkward or ineffectual, but with Stitches there is aesthetic, textural immediacy and, even more importantly, immaculate craftmanship to help it make an impact from the very first listen.

Ejimiwe’s nervous energy makes Some Say I So I Say Light exhilarating, whether it’s a lucid dream or a sleep-deprived reality, and fills it with moments that you might mistake for codas.

A relatively safe debut where much of the takeaway is the salivating at Grande’s potential.

It’s subtly more adventurous, and certainly scarier, in the way that even mundane things are always scarier in dreams, filtered through a disordered mind, revealing painful truths in unexpected places.

It’s an expert turn by seasoned professions thoroughly in their own comfort zone.

It’s an earnest and worthy effort to prove that this band can matter without the PMRC stickering its album cover.