New Jersey trio Screaming Females was one of those overnight sensations that was four years in the making. (As if to prove it, their self-released 2006 debut, Baby Teeth, got a concurrent reissue by Don Giovanni, the label behind this new disc.) For those who managed not to hear the group, Castle Talk backs up the blog buzz: Even on record Marisa Paternoster is a force, a sharp and bold vocal presence who tosses off wicked guitar lines, as on the simple and infectious “I Don’t Mind It.” Her piercing axe-work is one of the band’s defining traits, but she’s mastered a mature-beyond-her-years vocal delivery as well, sounding defiantly weary (though hardly defeated) on “Boss,” among others. “Normal” is the sort of song that suggests Screaming Females are more than just a flash in your blogspot, too; it brings to mind a harder-edged take on ’80s girl-pop, like the band the Runaways’ kid sisters formed after getting a big whiff of New Wave.

After years of being lumped into the “post-rock” ghetto (whatever and wherever that is), the roving band known as Windsor for the Derby revealed its true genre on Against Love. What this now Austin-based band plays is called “music,” and on this album the Windsor sound took many excellent forms. “Autumn Song” cooks itself up to a quasi-shoegaze blaze (kind of like a marriage of Seefeel and Yo La Tengo), while “Queen of the Sun” and the spectral “Alex Lucero” similarly slow-burn themselves into a shimmering, heady sound. On the opening title track, as well as “Moon Shadows” and the choral-abstraction “Tropical Depression,” the band — led by core-members Dan Matz and Jason McNeeley — go into instrumental reverie, at times (again) evoking Yo La at its most haunting. On “After Love” and “Our Love’s a Calamity” (both somewhat sunny-sounding, it should be noted), Matz and McNeeley take center stage as pop-songwriters, with plenty of picked, jangly guitars and sweet harmonizing. Now that the genre-wars of the ’90s are over, Windsor for the Derby can be known for simply being good — at whatever they decide to do.

New genre coinage this year that (thankfully) did not stick: indie-chamber-classical-folk-pop. But it’s an accurate description of All We Grow, the debut from Sean Carey, a member of Bon Iver’s band and a student of classical (and classy) percussion, who crafted an album of meditative, artfully repetitive songs that pivot on sparkling piano figures and a learned sense of patience. Check out the way those looped vocals, keys and synth on “In the Dirt” circle around for a good three minutes-plus before a — a handclap! A handclap rises to introduce a modestly thumped bass drum (not to mention goosebumps on your arm). Carey avoids being too precious with his skills; while the percussion on “Action” is clearly the lead instrument it’s hardly academic (though it could be described as smart). Representative of the album’s best traits is “We Fell,” a soaring shimmer of a song that could be a Philip Glass attempt at indie-pop. Grow on, Sean!

What a charming and unexpected thing this Woom album was! The duo formerly known as Fertile Crescent disappeared into a barn in Massachusetts in 2009 and emerged with a new name and this wonderful record, which recalls the honesty and simplicity of Beat Happening, Young Marble Giants, Fish & Roses and even the Velvet Underground, without sounding much like any of them — or anyone else. Muu’s Way sounds as if it was made in a vacuum, joyously unburdened by years of underground pop experimentalism. Witness “The Hunt,“ which makes rhythms out of the sounds of breathing and eventually brings in a keyboard part that recalls “96 Tears” on a giddy sugar high. Like most of the other nine songs, it leaves plenty of space between guitar strums and clickity-clacking beats (constructed, seemingly, from whatever objects were lying around); the music itself feels like it’s breathing. “Quetzalcoatl’s Ship” actually does resemble Beat Hap a little, at least in its intro, before the engagingly hesitant pop creation springs to life (with ocean sounds swirling behind). “Under Muu” is almost nothing but the strumming of an acoustic guitar, and never has something so simple sounded so monumental; much the same could be said about the album as a whole.

The galvanizing Canadian noise-dance duo Crystal Castles developed a saner, less abrasive side on its second album (which technically is self-titled). Which isn’t to suggest that you won’t find serrated noise to spasmodically dance along to here: album opener “Fainting Spells” and the gasping-for-air “Doe Deer” each come hard and distorted. But despite titles such as “Violent Dreams,” “Pap Smear” and “Suffocation,” most of this darkly alluring album finds Ethan Kath and Alice Glass moving toward a center that, for them, could be seen as the best of both worlds: shimmering synthetic melodies that rise to almost unbearable heights without that attacking stance. Check out the glisteningly chilly “Not in Love” and “Baptism,” on which aggressive staccato synths enter and depart, leaving space for a coolly aloof yet still fist-pumping beat.

Sometimes it seems like Black Mountain is just toying with us — such as within the first two minutes of “The Hair Song,“ the opening track on the Vancouver band’s new album, Wilderness Heart. Without breaking a sweat, the group runs through satisfyingly crushing rawk, dropping proto-metal and prog signifiers and quoting a Zep riff among hand-claps and perfectly balanced male-female vocals. Within that four-minute song they say more than most bands do on entire albums. The rest of Wilderness Heart similarly dives into different corners of longhair-rock, highly stylized but none the lesser for it: “Rollercoaster” reconnects with turn-of-the-’70s blues-rock before exploding into post-Sabbathian bottom-heaviness; “Let Spirits Ride” evokes a hybrid of early Motörhead and mid-’80s thrash-manic Metallica; the title track blends melody and mass (Black Mountain has always had a great drum sound) to try and break on through to...whatever’s on the other side. All the while, as they drop hints and winks toward their influences, Black Mountain steers well clear of ironic statement. This rock is for real.

Composer, producer, pianist, ring-tone pioneer: Max Richter has internalized more apps than your phone. Infra, his latest, is a collaboration with the choreographer Wayne McGregor, written for the Royal Ballet and premiered at the Royal Opera House late in 2008. While the music is stark and lovely on its own the fact of its creation is helpful to the imagination, picturing dancers finding their place in these sweeping but often somewhat opaque pieces. Dominated by strings and piano but also populated with static and other sonic ephemera lurking around the fringes of your ear-field (suggesting menace, alienness, dissociationness and other -nesses), Infra is a sumptuous listen; I hope to find video of the choreography that McGregor came up with, especially for the transition from “Infra 3” to “Journey 2.”

Take two of the more significant German artists of the past 30 years and put them together — and you get something that’s very, very German. You also get one of 2010’s most uniquely stark and deeply affecting records, summing the powers of Alva Noto (a.k.a. Carsten Nicolai) and Blixa Bargeld, frontman of Einsturzende Neubauten and longtime guitarist for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Noto’s stock in trade for years has been the minimal but potent marking of negative space, striking black soundfields with electronic events; Bargeld, in addition to his well-known work in rock and industrial forms, has long maintained an amorphous, extended interest in voice work and (seriously) storytelling in languages not his own. Working together for a few years now, the pair makes an awesome sound on Mimikry: Bargeld is an underrated vocalist, speaking and singing at odd angles and making every breath a study in tension; Noto is in top form, spurred into his most dramatic crypto-techno work in years.

This was rather unexpected. And while it wasn’t televised, Gil Scott-Heron’s powerful new album — his first in more than a decade, and after just as long a period of run-ins with the law — was certainly blogged about, hailed and celebrated. And with good reason: Heron, who’ll always be identified with his landmark piece “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” may be a little bit worse for the wear of a hard life, but I’m New Here is a moving document, one in which his narrative and that of Black America — and in no small way, America period — blaze into life. Singing and speaking in his singular gruff baritone, which hides nothing of his experience, Scott-Heron voices truths ranging from the personal to the political over a variety of deep productions: spare piano, drama-inducing beats both electronic and real, and cavernous space in which his voice can reverberate like thunder across a night sky. Including covers of songs by Robert Johnson and Bill Callahan, I’m New Here is the kind of record that, from the outside, you’d probably try to associate with the radical African-American art movements of the early ’70s. But even shot through with strains of gospel and blues and a potent sense of history, this is a thoroughly modern record, and absolutely necessary.

Sharon Van Etten’s second full-length effort was one of the best records to come out of NYC this year, no lie. The title is meant to be seen in lowercase, a softly ironic statement from a humbly galvanizing singer and songwriter. After a debut, Because I Was in Love, on which Van Etten was accompanied mainly by just her guitar, the Brooklynite (by way of New Jersey) brings on a backing band for Epic, and the results are nothing less than flabbergasting. After the opening “A Crime” — just her and a full-bodied strum, with the crushing refrain, “Never let myself love like that again” — comes the devastating “Peace Signs,” a kick-drum thump building a tension sent into the stratosphere by Van Etten’s cryptic yet paralyzing lyrics and voice: “I still dream that I think of you / In the calm of the night and I don’t know what to do / Peace sigh-igh-igh-igns!” And that'’s just the first two songs! The remaining five are no less rewarding, alternately punishing and renewing (especially “One Day,” a lovely, lilting waltz) and more genuinely epic than anything you’ve ever called “epic.”

Keyboardist Sarah Barthel and guitarist Joshua Carter are Phantogram, and while they may live in Saratoga Springs, NY, they’ve got none of the Americana twang or bedroom preciousness you might expect from small-town lifers. This indie rock is straight cool — purring vocals (from both of them) over slick beats and driving chords, evoking images of asphalt roads and rain-speckled windshields. At times, the arrangements approach M83’s recent new-wave lushness, and the more pared-back moments, especially on the Barthel-voiced “10,000 Claps,” recall Feist at her moodiest. This album collected the four tracks from Phantogram’s excellent 2009 debut EP, along with seven brand-new recordings. We’re ready for more!

Kieran Hebden’s been so busy with mixes and his many collaborations with the late Steve Reid that it’s been five years since we last got a Four Tet long-player. There Is Love in You is front-loaded with vocal tracks, but opener “Angel Echoes” clips vocal samples in a weirdly alienating way while “Love Cry” loops a breathy monotone delivery of the two title words. The sonic signature of Four Tet remains intact: a substantial underpinning of thwapping beats over which quietly insistent patterns are woven via harp, shimmering synths, music boxes, or similarly delicate-sounding instruments. Fans of Hebden’s iconic album Rounds found themselves equally captivated this year by There Is Love in You.

Ah, la belle Charlotte. Given everything we know about her — the impeccable pedigree, the great films, the outright personification of roughly 50 years of cool French culture, all contained in that lithe figure — it can be hard to hear her music with clear, unbiased ears. But do try; she is such a great artist. Among other things, great artists surround themselves with the right people, and Ms. Gainsbourg’s musical union on IRM with Beck is a front-to-back winner. The yearning whisper-spoken vox, the pop arrangements that belong to no single era but borrow from them all, the sense of humble cool that drifts through every note...le wow. These songs are so simple, yet hard to describe, like “Me and Jane Doe”: Dock-side bay chantey singalong love song? Granted, in these hands, everything on IRM is a love song of one sort or another — the cosmopolitan swoon of “Time of the Assassins,” the quasi-Portishead-isms of “Master’s Hand” and “Trick Pony,” the steaming pulse of the title track...just awesome, all of it. The year would’ve been so much less cool without her.

Suuns provided one of our favorite debuts of the year, a leftfield blast from the north. This Montreal quartet does that thing where they kinda sound like a different band on each track — but, a different good band. There is a signature sound on Zeroes QC (“QC” being the postal code for Quebec, among other things): a slow, heavy, deliberate bass vibration that rumbles through many of the songs, such as the opening “Armed for Peace” (which evokes Yeah Yeah Yeahs if they were only gritty and not glammy). It’s also present in the following “Gaze,” which could stand toe-to-toe with any big rock production from the early ’90s. And that’s just the two tracks that start the album; left to come are explosive punk-funk, more groovy darkness and droning psych-blues. We’re already anxious for these Suuns to rise again!

The slyly named Pantha Du Prince is German techno producer Hendrick Weber, who in his eight or so years of action (mostly confined to the Eurocentric electronic-music world) has dropped a couple of well-liked albums along with a small handful of singles. Black Noise was his coming-out party both Stateside and in the less techno-exclusive indie world (note the Rough Trade logo on the back), and it rippled across scene boundaries. Credit Weber’s style: clean and crisp but utterly approachable and warm, with a mind for techno-adornment that’s garnered appropriate mentions of both the best first-wave shoegazers and the Detroit/Berlin techno axis of rhythmic power. “Stick to My Side” features a winning vocal from Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox, making for the most obvious bridge between Weber’s techno provenance and the indie scene he’s now exposed to, but his textural brilliance is even more apparent on “The Splendour,” with melodic curlicues swimming between beats, and “Bohemian Forest,” which suggests a low-key version of Thomas Brinkmann’s funky-tech excursions. Black Noise is an hour-plus of full-color techno, deep grooves that are safe for the groove-challenged.

If Janelle Monae wasn’t so good, and so dedicated to her unique vision, her R&B robot persona might come off as just shtick. But The ArchAndroid, her long-awaited debut album (Metropolis, the EP that burst her onto the scene, came out in 2007 — ancient history in the pop world!), is really good, 2010’s finest funky pop record, and even if you decide to ignore the androidal side of the story, the moments when it really comes through distinguish Monae from the masses of would-be look-at-me divas. “Dance or Die” and “Cold War” hit as hard as anything you’ll find in today’s pop scene, but the slinky, synthy space-age swirl of “Sir Greendown” is the sort of thing that should put the world on notice: Janelle Monae is the real futuristic deal right now, gimmick and all.

Because they’ve scattered from view — apparently having reconstituted all together in Los Angeles — it feels like Liars are the lost boys of the ’00s NYC scene. Sisterworld showed that, in fact, they could be the most creative outfit to emerge from that heady era. Sisterworld exhibits all the darkness of the trio’s past efforts bound up in a sinister, creepy restraint; you keep waiting for an attack that never fully comes. In lesser hands this could be a lacking, but Liars bring to life a thoroughly modern disquiet, an unease that crawls, skinned knees and dirt-smeared face, right up to you and demands answers for the massive feeling of displacement that comes with a society almost totally severed from its roots. This is our malaise! Liars have simply chosen to own up to it. Dig the menacing tumble of “Our Evolution” and the punk roar of “The Overachievers,” the closest thing to “normal” that these guys get.

Is it possible for Kompakt to spearhead a Kompakt revival? Techno’s most reliable label has almost become too reliable of late, but Jatoma harked back to the fresh, dubby, harder to pin down sound that characterized the Cologne imprint’s early years about a decade ago. In true fashion, Kompakt even dropped hints that this anonymous trio includes a famous producer or two. But those hijinks matter not in the face of tracks like “Manipura,” which surrounds a firm but swinging 4/4 with twinkling filigree and burbling synths. “Paper Lights” similarly decorates its sublime thump with bright colors and an easy vibe: a funky summer-afternoon techno. The more nocturnal sounds here, such as the sci-fi playground of “Bou” and the submerged vibe of “Wood Face” (which is kinda like a Pole track with more ambition), hit closer to home, but Jatoma’s full-length debut is creative and inventive throughout.

Swim, the latest attempt by Dan Snaith to meld laptop means with pop ways, converted a lot of longtime naysayers. In Snaith’s own telling, Swim is the most original piece of music he’s drummed up yet, and we believe it: This is a sparkling set of warmly organic pop numbers brought into the world via electronic means; it’s the kind of feat so many musicians (and critics) talk about, but we’re hard-pressed to think of anyone who’s done it better. The rhythms are all easy (as in, you’ll be swinging your hips around before you realize you’re doing it) and in full service of Caribou’s brightly chiming melodies — but his inventiveness lies on the electronics side as well: Check out “Bowls,” a track that begins with a muffled but insistent 4/4 beat and soft metal clangs before a few ample guitar strums open up new vistas in techno-pop. It’s really so hard to dislike, so easy on the ears, and so rewarding at the same time. Plenty of similarly eye-opening moments await; c’mon in, the water’s great.

Junip’s Fields is a pure joy; we instantly knew it would be one of our favorite albums of 2010. This Swedish trio, led by the enormously gifted singer-songwriter Jose Gonzalez, has been around more or less since the late 1990s, releasing an EP and a few singles years ago, but the band went on hiatus when Gonzalez’s solo career took off in 2005. Junip’s proper full-length debut is a bit like a Gonzalez record with some muscle. The addition of drums, bass and keys nicely rounds out these delightful songs without obscuring Gonzalez’s warm and soulful voice, one of the most wondrous in indie rock today. You can see that these guys have spent a while getting their sound down, producing an album that’s tight and atmospheric with melodic songs echoing classic rock while always sounding fresh. Highest recommendation!

Titus Andronicus dedicated their sophomore release to the Civil War — the USS Monitor was a Union battleship — and enlisted members of Vivian Girls, Deer Tick, the Hold Steady and Wye Oak to help in their exploration of crippling self-doubt and hard-earned resolve. While most of the music follows a man as he tries to escape his New Jersey home for Boston in the mid-19th century, a smattering of modern references keeps The Monitor feeling distinctly autobiographical (one song includes the lyric, “I’ve destroyed everything that wouldn’t make me more like Bruce Springsteen”). All of it, however, boasts the band’s trademark ragged, blustering vulnerability, literate lyricism, and yell-along anthemic choruses that get fans leaping with abandon at Titus’s live shows.

One of the most plainly pretty records to burp out of 2010 in any genre, The Soft Wave is the work of Alexis Georgopoulos, a member of the Alps (another Sound Fix fave) and former member of Tussle. As Arp, Georgopoulos goes deep with analog synthesizers, that creamy, lowercase-p progressive sound, burbling and radiating like a ’70s Krautrock band on holiday at Club Med. The Soft Wave contains nine exquisitely plush yet minimal tracks — these finely spun notes seem to just phase into existence, pulse and throb gently, and take their position in a sky of Olympian purity. Overstated things just a bit there, but man is this stuff sublime. The Soft Wave. Yes. We dig it. You do too.

It might be only now that we’ve fully processed the fact that Merge Records, home of Superchunk and lots of other canonical indie bands, captured the No. 1 slot on the Billboard charts with this album. (Maybe it wasn’t loaded with the significance of Nirvana knocking off Michael Jackson, but hey.) Montreal’s most popular export since poutine finally came through with album No. 3, a meditation/dissertation on the particular state of ennui plaguing the Western middle classes that struck a massive chord (sold-out dates at Madison Square Garden, among other grand halls). Arcade Fire remain mercurial, willing to inspect the lives of not only Joe and Mary Q. Bourgeois (on the ringing “Modern Man”) but also holding the mirror up to their own fans on “Rococo.” Those songs might best sketch the thematic outlines of The Suburbs, but they aren’t the actual best songs; try the nicely ’70s-ish “City with No Children” (which has the simplest and possibly best melody on the album), the airy and dramatic “Deep Blue” and “Suburban War,” which seems closest to what might be the band’s own vantage point and which builds to a prototypically rousing Arcade Fire climax. There are a lot of promises broken and unfulfilled within the songs on The Suburbs, but the band itself keeps renewing its own.

Of all the bands that Captured Tracks introduced us too this year — good, bad and in between — Wild Nothing is undoubtedly the best. Gemini is the latest record from Virginia pop genius Jack Tatum, and he wears his influences all over his sleeve, his shirtfront and his pants: indie-pop of the ’80s and early ’90s (Creation and Factory, sure, but just as much a Sarah label vibe), all bound together by classic indie-mope songwriting, which he smartly pairs with winsome, crisp arrangements. So many songs here for mixtape crushes and the quotidian heartache-slash-escapist-lust of your life, from the opening “Live in Dreams” (wow, that keyboard break is the living definition of glistening) and the mid-period 4AD-feyness of “Drifter” to the New Orderesque “Bored Games” and “The Witching Hour,” which vaguely suggests Prefab Sprout on a gloomy trip. If all these references mean nothing to you, then just check out this album and fall in love — promise.

This album sent echoes across the indie-rock diaspora this year, just as the Morning Benders themselves relocated from Berkeley to Brooklyn. We’re not even talking about how Big Echo placed songs in high-profile commercials, either; tunes like “Wet Cement” showcased a band coming into its own, bringing together classic indie melodies with modestly innovative percussion (a danceable beat that doesn’t sound like dance music, a clattering handclap rhythm, one big floor-tom and lots of open space). Part of that could be the work of co-producer (and Grizzly Bear bassist) Chris Taylor, no novice when it comes to spatially oriented music, but regardless, it’s the band with the songs (and Chris Chu’s high, spirited vocals, which slightly resemble Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig). Big Echo established the Morning Benders as major players in the indie sweepstakes in 2010; this is one band whose next move we’re anxious to hear.

An ’80s-gazing artist out of Brooklyn in 2010, you say? How could that be new and special? But Twin Shadow is just that, and Forget is a result of some unironic appreciation for the over-referenced decade by one George Lewis Jr. As Twin Shadow, he croons convincingly over glitteringly precise arrangements of keyboards, basslines, drums and glassy guitars. “I Can’t Wait” sounds like the song that finally convinces you — the nerdy high-school kid in you — to move your hips a little and ask that cute girl to dance with you already (c’mon, you’ve had a crush on her since 5th grade!). “Shooting Holes” finds some space in Bryan Ferry’s nightclub for the less overtly glamorous among us, while “Slow” displays the urgency of ’80s youth and “Forget” its star-crossed romanticism.

What can we say? What can anyone say about Kanye West in 2010? For one thing, the dude himself says so freakin’ much — about himself! Like, where are we supposed to get a word in edgewise? The truth of the matter is that Kanye is one of the best pop stars America’s ever had — best as in, he’s almost completely insane and knows it; and he delivers on exactly what we ask of our pop stars, namely to reflect some aspect of ourselves, our aspirations and doubts and dreams, writ large (real large in this case). And yeah, he’s really that good. He backs it all up. He can hardly rap but nonetheless does it brilliantly, and he writes rhymes that are just too good, too damn good. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is maximal in just about every way, a full-bore blast of melody, tension, beats and rhymes that always seem better than they should be. There’s no doubt that you have some opinion of Kanye already, informed by his stupid-ass antics, awesomely crazy proclamations and over-coverage in the media. Try putting all that aside and sitting with the music a bit, and see how you feel about just that, just the music. He’s the enormous, difficult, unbearable, rewarding pop star that this country deserves.

This album was going to be talked about no matter what — but Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest is such a complete and full work of pop artistry that you can expect to see it on pretty much everyone’s lists this year. For their fourth and possibly best full-length, Bradford Cox & Co. for the most part pulled way back, recording themselves and letting nu-slacker tunes like “Sailing,” with its spare, musing-on-a-sunny-afternoon vibe, and the opening “Earthquake” glisten in the open air. Throughout the album the guitars take on playfully fuzzy textures, even within nimble, bouncing tunes like “Revival” and “Coronado.” Yet while a sense of made-by-hand craft is prominent, there are plenty of surprises: After four of-a-piece songs start the album, “Memory Boy” explodes with a sort of shinier fidelity and a melodic sensibility that takes in so much great pop of the past five decades. By the time you get to “He Would Have Laughed,” the sparklingly abstruse album-ending tribute to the late Jay Reatard, you’ll be fully charmed.

A bona fide underground “supergroup”! Whether or not you know their work, Sir Richard Bishop (guitar, piano; Sun City Girls), Chris Corsano (drums) and Ben Chasny (guitar; Six Organs of Admittance) are all bad muthas of the highest water. For their first trio date as Rangda, these astral-traveling citizens of earth cut loose: “Waldorf Hysteria” launches False Flag in a detonation of free-rock guitar wizardry and multidirectional drumming, while the subsequent “Bull Lore” blends Sabbath-esque dread with a blazing solo line that eventually elevates the entire six-minute piece to the top of some misty mountain. False Flag’s six songs alternate like that: free-form freakouts of a fabulously furry nature trading off with more composed pieces, showing the true inside-outside brilliance of these three dude-kings. Truly exciting music.

More than any other New York artist this year, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy represented the barometer of the city’s musical health. If that was a high-pressure role, Murphy sounded unfazed, loose and confident — and most important, fun and playful in a predictably meta way — on his third album, This Is Happening. With Murphy’s chief co-conspirators from the LCD live band (Gavin Russom, Nancy Whang, Pat Mahoney) pitching in on some songwriting, This Is Happening felt more like the well-rounded work of several like-minded friends than of one anxious, talented guy. The puzzling thing is why they chose “Drunk Girls” — bouncy and lyrically layered but not one of the album’s strongest cuts — as the first single. The effortlessly moving (though sad) “All I Want” would’ve done well, or the statuesque, Bowie-evoking “I Can Change.” At eight minutes-plus, the funky floor-filler “Pow Pow” is a little long in its album form to be a single, but it might be the best track here, with Murphy speak-singing his way through the album’s most cutting lyrics as well. This is the album that NYC danced to (and analyzed) all summer long. As Murphy says on “Pow Pow”: “There’s advantages to both.”

At the beginning, when she emerged on the scene early last decade, Sharon Jones was “just” (not to be dismissive) a good soul singer with an interesting back story. With the arrival of her fourth album, I Learned the Hard Way, the former corrections officer at Riker’s has clearly transcended her (admittedly cool) influences; instead of playing within a style mapped out by past greats, Jones and the band she’s grown alongside, the Dap-Kings, have now become great artists in their own right, thoroughly retro for the modern age and with high-test songwriting to match the chops they’ve always shown. They really haven’t done anything but be good, and play a lot, with themselves and plenty of others (the Dap-Kings quietly helped make Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black so great, for example), on their path to defining themselves as more than just excellent stylists. You won’t find a dud here, but everything that made I Learned the Hard Way the first necessary album of last summer can be found on the title track.

Best reinvention of the year went to Jana Hunter, who, as the first artist signed to Devendra Banhart’s label, has been saddled with the “freak-folk” tag for the past half-decade or so. With her new outfit Lower Dens, though, Hunter brings her often appealingly drowsy vocals — which had maybe taken her as far as they could alone — into a coolly understated full-band context, a low-light environment that provides the slightly laconic Hunter plenty of space to hide in and emerge from. Lower Dens traffic not in folk-rock but a versatile, wounded sort of shoegaze, sometimes recalling Galaxie 500 on a late-night bender or a modern updating of a certain old Factory label aesthetic (as with the glassy guitars and rising, rousing intensity of the winning “Hospice Gates”). For Hunter’s first recorded effort since 2007, Lower Dens made for a welcome and surprising return.

One of the most accomplished and beloved underground bands of the past quarter-century unveiled its final studio album this year, recorded in 2007 just prior to the untimely death of drummer and all-around demonic presence Charles Gocher. This is not some last hiccup from the bottom of the vaults, either — Funeral Mariachi is one of the richest, most beautiful recordings in Sun City Girls’ extensive catalog, an indulgence of the band’s trademark pan-ethnic adventurousness, fettucini-westernisms and hallucinatory opium-den folk songs. In fact, this album is not at all a bad place to begin for the uninitiated; it’s warmer and more tender on the ear than many of SCGs’ other recordings. The soft desert gallop of “This Is My Name” scores the end of a long dusty road ridden, while “Holy Ground” and “Black Orchid” reveal the depth of the virtuosic playing that was at the core of everything SCGs did. This band was good down to the very last note. Sun City Girls are dead, long may they reign.

Possibly the year’s most evocative “ambient” album, rough waves set in mellow seas, a sound to placate all fans of shoegaze and the like. Quite a bit like the Books, the Fun Years is a duo that deploys familiar tools (guitar loops, feedback, a PhD, dry internal humor, textures of varying textures and some computerized trickery) to create music of distinct singularity. Vini Reilly (a.k.a. Durutti Column) would seem to be a prime influence, but guitarist Ben Recht and his partner Isaac Sparks — who’s credited with just “turntable” but that seems slightly impossible — have no shortage of their own ideas. A definite must-have for the discerning, searching fan of modern ambient and electric guitar music.

We normally don’t list reissues in with our Top 50, but we’re happy to make an exception for this wickedly cool Zambian rock record — and besides, to whom among us was this not a new record? Amanaz recorded this mellow killer in 1973, under the influence of the US/UK and European psych-rock that had penetrated the dark continent, and it is vibey like cigarette smoke in a dimly lit room, sweet as anything to come out of the modern psych-folk-puh-whatevah scene. Killer hill-climbing bass lines, the flame of a few blazing leads in the dark, a smattering of fuzz, the occasional nod to place (the title track — just, wow) and an atmosphere that could not be re-created all add up to the latest vital reissue from the sprawling psych-rock diaspora.

The Waves sounds like the last shoegaze album ever, an expansive coda that finds airy mournfulness in a nonstop wash of guitar and vocals that open up like a desert sky. Tamaryn’s namesake singer, a New Zealand ex-pat now living in San Francisco, has a special voice: feminine yet woolen and full-bodied, a sound that merges dramatically with the sweeping guitars and which carries the album’s tone so well it’ll practically break your heart. “Haze Interior” might be the most accurate song title of the year, with the awakening, semi-hopeful vibe of “Dawning” following suit. But The Waves is one of those albums that saves the best for last: The closing “Mild Confusion” rings out, the guitar stabbing upward while Tamaryn herself holds the vocal center, raising goosebumps and hopes for another record soon.

San Francisco trio the Alps turns style into substance on their gently affecting (and at times subtly unnerving) fourth album, Le Voyage. This instrumental record provides one visually stimulating track after another, but transcends the tired “imaginary soundtrack” realm; the Alps don’t need anyone to shoot a film to go with their music, so powerfully evocative it is. After one of the album’s few short pieces that veer into collage-like sound-art, the dynamic “Crossing the Sands” weds that visual — marauders stalking across a barren desert-scape on horseback — to a hypnotic bassline and copious wah-wah guitar, like Sabbath riffing on Zeppelin’s wanderlust fantasies. Le Voyage is clearly about that — the journey rather than the destination. This might’ve been our collective favorite record over the spring and summer.

This one knocked us sideways a couple of months ago, and we’ve been frantically pushing it on every adventurous set of ears to enter the store since. This band is worth all the Mars Voltas in the world, and if you survive the awesome 13 minutes of opening track “Starhammer,” you’ll know what we mean: Its crunching stoner-rock riffs act to unlock new galaxies of bold sound in stunning new formations. Seriously, there is more going on in this one song than most bands get around to in their entire career, and it isn’t just rock. For Motorpsycho, that’s merely a gateway to sprawling arrangements that could enthrall fans of Yes and King Crimson, but also Black Sabbath, as well as heavy jazz-rock experimentalists. So much in here!

Surfer Blood was the first big blog band of the year, but it’s held up: Astro Coast, the debut full-length from these South Floridians, packs an ocean’s worth of trend-free guitar-pop hooks into its 10 songs. Strangely, the band that Surfer Blood calls to mind most is Vampire Weekend — without the Afro-Caucasian affectations (and the No. 1 Billboard debut). Frontman John Paul Pitts seems to have been born with reverb already on his clear-blue-water voice, which glides over effortlessly crisp guitar figures and spare arrangements that make the album both airy and substantial — and lasting.

The L.A. post-punk duo that’s become almost synonymous with the all-ages DIY scene is caught beatifully here in its awkward growing-up phase, but as they’ve done on their two previous albums (and pile of singles and EPs), No Age strike a perfect balance between noise and melody, experimentation and sincerity. Over thrashing drums and squealing guitar feedback, Dean Allen Spunt’s charmingly disaffected monotone vocals carry forth one catchy hook after another. In amongst the riffs and melodies, the especially catchy “Glitter” shows the band’s increasing capacity for tenderness with lyrics like “I want you back underneath my skin.” More than any other indie-rock band, No Age is a straight-up rush, the feeling of being alive. Everything in Between is the sound of that vibrant band in full stride.

A huge statement from the Black Keys this year, Brothers essentially announced, “ We’re an American band.” And a damn good one. The casually swaggering Brothers is the Black Keys’ eighth album (not including the eye-opening Blakroc project of last year), and you’d be hard-pressed to find a band more comfortable with itself. Dig the way “ Howlin’ for You” exists as both a fuzz-blues tune and (with a Bo Diddley beat) as a total shake-yo’-ass imperative. Of course, to be truly great involves a band transcending its influences, which the Keys get around to on memorable songs like “ I’m Not the One” and “ Too Afraid to Love You,” reaching deep into blues mysticism to pull out something unique.

The Cleveland trio Emeralds sprung from the noise underground this year into global prominence, as proved by the massive Does It Look Like I’m Here? coming out on the fabled Vienna label Mego. Emeralds have never sat comfortably in the “noise” bin anyway, and have in fact been building to the gorgeous kosmische sounds heard on Does It Look for a while. Put simply, it’s one thing to say your band uses guitars, analog synthesizers, electronics and sequencer; it’s another thing to use them as Emeralds does: reaching back and grabbing the Teutonic psychedelia of the ’70s by the ass and hurling it into the present, with spires of synths cascading upward to heaven, their heights marked and tracked by Mark McGuire’s sympatico guitar work and, on tracks like “Genetic,” a choir of fallen angels. While Emeralds have favored longer tracks in the past, Does It Look is broken into 12 mostly shorter pieces, each with its own way of saying “beautiful.” Everything just bursts with color and intensity.

Warp is really cornering the market on dope-friendly electronic grooves; together with Gonjasufi (see below), Steven Ellison, the artist known as Flying Lotus, is making Southern California safe for progressive beat experimentation. Cosmogramma is a jaw-droppingly awesome leap forward in imagination and creativity. The stylistic eclecticism evident on his previous record, Los Angeles, expands spectacularly on Cosmogramma: drum ’n’ bass, trip-hop, jungle, glitch, and dubstep (and probably more stuff I can’t recognize or name) beats mix with ambient, fusion jazz, mellow funk, and collaborations with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane (son of John and Alice Coltrane, the latter being Ellison’s great aunt) and others (including Thom Yorke). The man can even make music from ping-pong balls. Proof positive that there’s still so much unexplored terrain out there!

Just a couple of years into his career, Ty Segall is shaping up to be one of those fractured-genius sorta rockers, in the style of his buddy Johnny Dwyer (of the Oh Sees). After dropping a debut slice of garage-brilliance, Lemons, last year on the great Goner imprint of Memphis, he promptly returned with an equally good (vinyl-only) duo album with pal Mikal Cronin called Reverse Shark Attack, as well as a few seven-inches and at least one split-cassette. In short order he hit again with his second full-length effort for Goner, Melted, and not only is Segall not running out of quality material, it became an immediate candidate for album of the year. While it uses his familiar raw and reverby garage sound as a foundation, it’s clear that Segall’s ambitions are only bounded by the number of records he can pump out. “Finger” begins softly before erupting into a slow, almost glammy march of menace; the following cut, “Caesar,” practically skips along in comparison, using a flicked acoustic guitar and a wryly disaffected vocal to strangely recall early-’70s Stones. All of Melted goes like this: expertly played garage-fuzz with Segall’s awesome songwriting elevating every number out of style and into substance. Get to know this Bay Area kid now, before his discography becomes dauntingly large!

These distorted, psych-groove pastiche recordings kept us bewitched all year. The result of the shamanic singer Gonjasufi’s collaboration with producer Gaslight Killer — samples of sitar, eastern chanting, and ’60s folk abound — sounds so vitally indolent and cool, it’s as if it’s distilled from some languid human body rhythm. But this debut isn’t all dub and smoke; around the middle, the music leans into a couple of sodden, massively distorted guitar riffs, gamely matched by Gonja’s most caustic Captain Beefheart (RIP) croak. Then we’re treated to some bass-heavy leftfield blipwork and falsetto vocals. But even as every song sounds like a subgenre unto itself, Gonjasufi still manages to sound powerfully consistent. It’s gotta be those grooves.

With each new release, the National becomes less of an indie presence and more of a (not an insult!) cool mainstream band. It’s appropriate, though, that after two albums on Beggars Banquet, the National switched to affiliate label 4AD, because this album has more of that sound to it — a little quieter and less brassily anthemic, more subtly concerned with texture. The band is still instantly recognizable, as proven by all our customers who took note when we played High Violet in-store before the release date; it’s not as though there was a major reworking of the trademark National sound. But even richer production brought with it a greater variety of instrumental timbres. The most important one, though — Matt Berninger’s utterly distinctive singing — remains the focus, and the group’s knack for grand crescendos is only improved by having more instrumental tools with which to build them up.

The first non-archival Swans album since 1996 had plenty to live up to; every single one of us old fans wanted the kids to know just how heavy heavy could be. And My Father did not disappoint. Of course it isn’t as outwardly raw and brutal as the band’s earlier incarnation, but Swan king Michael Gira reimported everything he’s learned with his main current outlet, Angels of Light, and delivered a modern monster of a record that does indeed stand up to the Swans legacy. And while it’s definitely got a lot of the jagged edges, jolting noises and outright massiveness that distinguished Swans during their ’80s/’90s heyday, what really makes My Father such a powerful work is the weightiness of Gira’s bared soul. That said, the fact that some long-time Swans regulars returned to the fold, most crucially guitarist Norman Westberg, can’t be overlooked. Whether or not Swans make another lick of music, Gira & Co. more than simply did right by their history: They dropped possibly the year’s most extreme, visceral pieces of music. And 28 years since the band’s formation, it still has the ability to shock us all.

The boundary between techno chill and pop-analog warmth was torn down once and for all on Matthew Dear’s latest opus, Black City. Granted, Dear, one of America’s most in-demand remixers, had been encroaching on this terrain for about a decade. But Black City is an art-rock record posing in techno garb on a late-night dancefloor: Dear’s machines bleed and feel and yearn, something that’s clear long before you get to the piano-driven album-closer, “Gem.” The opening track, “Honey,” strikes an almost noirish vibe via its slinky pacing, while “Soil to Seed” shows that even a potential dance-floor hit can come across just as warmly vibrant as any acoustic-guitar jam. “I Can’t Feel” teeters perilously between menace and fear, while a shuffling beat props up the song’s robotic yet very real sentiment. It’s just one of many tales in the Black City.

Before Today, SoCal weirdo Ariel Pink’s ninth (we think) full-length release, was recorded not at home (as in the past) but in a studio, making these flights especially fancy. That was key to making this album one of the year’s best: While his mystical home-recorded trips through another dimension’s AM-radio dial are always fascinating, world-conquering songs like “Bright Lit Blue Skies” simply must have that studio muscle. It wasn’t as if he stifled any of his creative urges though; Pink slips his way through a typically vast array of pop moves at mind-boggling speed: The bizarrely cool opening track, “Hot Body Rub,” recalls the early-’80s goth-pop of Eyeless in Gaza and Tones on Tail, while his so-normal-it’s-weird take on pop music — hooks, synths and funky basslines — define the album through songs like “Beverly Kills” (upbeat) and “Round and Round” (a pensive grooviness that becomes positively triumphant). He’s the only artist we can think of who can keep doing the same thing and have it sound different every single time. This time it was different and brilliant.