Top 10 Albums

10. Car Seat Headrest, Teens of Style (Matador Records)
Given the dearth of rock records on this year’s list, it’s easy to assume we need more guys like 22 year-old Will Toledo in our lives. Teens of Style is a spark of an album, like Is This It?, On the Mouth, or Slanted and Enchanted. It has an immediacy …

New Zealand is a thing. When you're describing music, it's a thing you use to describe certain music. And what is the definable NZ sound, you may ask. Well

It’s a tough task to try to define or even place punk in the 21st century. If only because I was never punk, I don't feel like punk is a salvation, but I do feel

Everyday in Brooklyn—Williamsburg, to be more specific—hundreds of wannabe career musicians are wallowing down a boulevard of broken

There's a constant debate among my music snob peers as to whether our '90s obsessions—Pavement, GBV, Olivia Tremor Control, Bjork—will stand the test

Jessica Jalbert is a sorceress, but you shouldn't feel out of the loop if you've never heard the name. Doing a little research, one finds that Jalbert released

Dick Diver, despite the alliteration, isn't a name that rolls off the tongue. Even as a reference to an F. Scott Fitzgerald character, it also doesn't do much to

Please don’t tell me how good a Sleater-Kinney album is in 2015. This isn't supposed to be some regenerative proclamation in a new year of music. It is

On Dear Catastrophe Waitress and The Life Pursuit, Stuart Murdoch was having fun, dancing for the sake of dancing rather than

Top 10 Albums

10. PC Music, DISown Radio Mix (self-released)
It’s rare that I’ll include any kind of mixtape on a year-end list (actually I’m pretty sure it’s unprecedented, unless I included Diplo’s first mix for MIA years back), but what the shadowy, commercially bent PC Music enclave did with utopian electronic pop throughout the course of the year was undeniable. I spent much more …