With 2011 behind us, most music websites and publications have since moved on from their 'best of the year' lists. The rankings provide the perfect opportunity to catch up on any albums that may have slipped under the radar the first time around, and also revisit some old(ish) favorites. Despite ...

Winter break is finally over for us, which means it's time to start looking forward to the next new batch of presents - 2012's new music releases! There's an exhaustingly long list of artists who have music coming out in the months to come, and we whittled it down to our list of the 20 most ...

The qualities that make a good album are generally different than those that make a good song. Sure, good music is good music, and a great album needs great songs, but it also needs something extra. Cohesion, usually, and if not that, a long supply of intrigue or suspense. It should take the ...

Generally speaking, there's no such thing as a bad year for music, it's really just a matter of how deep you care to dig to find the good stuff. However, this year didn't take all that much digging to find some truly amazing music. In fact, 2011 was a more difficult year than usual to fit into a ...

The big story about music in the ’00s was that people were pirating more music than buying it, but the interesting side effect is that more artists are literally giving their music away. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in hip-hop, where mixtapes are widely circulated over the internet, free of ...

Metal lends itself pretty naturally to controversy, but 2011 seemed like an especially divisive year for extreme music. And for that matter, a pretty weird one. While some of the best albums in metal this year came from artists who caused as much blog-comment rants as they did praise, some ...

Consensus can be a difficult thing to build among a group of critics. In any given group, there’s bound to be a certain faction that prefers dance music, another that sticks more closely to hip-hop, and a good many who still find plenty to love about a good guitar riff. We share thoughts on our ...

Every year, music critics like myself go through a seasonal ritual of compartmentalizing the previous 11 months of music into some kind of taxonomical order. We assemble lists of our favorite albums of the year, our favorite songs, reissues, debuts, genre-specific sub-lists and miscellanea. We do ...

Next week, we begin to unveil our annual lists of the best albums and songs of the year. But before we get there, it seemed only fair that we look back to months past to dig up some of the releases we never got around to praising when they were a little fresher. However, that doesn’t mean these ...

Buying gifts is always frustrating during the holiday season. Shops are crowded, the endless loops of Christmas music grows old very quickly, and everything starts to look the same after a while. And it doesn’t get any easier when you’re shopping for people that spend most of their time listening ...