Where is the outrage, America? I mean, you've got yourself a band that's playing at a ridiculously, historically high level. Head and shoulders above its peers, really, on an album that, c'mon, ranks squarely in the middle of its recorded output. A band that flaunts an unholy cocktail of performance enhancers — a blend of liquor, blow and whatever the weird guy in the back of the party just scared up. Yes, Craig Finn and The Hold Steady are the Barry Bonds of rock 'n' roll: totally juiced and not giving a damn. Because when you're this good, what do you care about the sniffling indie kids? Boys and Girls in America is not the overarching, laser-guided masterstroke that was last year's Separation Sunday. It's the sound of coming down from a massive high. It's residual kicks and tremors. The strokes on the band's third album are broader: general truths, as opposed to microscopic character studies. But the touchstones that propelled the band to the top of the heap — the monster riffs ("Massive Nights"), the been-there/done-that fascination with seedy underworlds ("Chips Ahoy!"), the Dennis Miller-before-9/11-fried-his-brain cultural references ("Stuck Between Stations") — step up and out on Boys and Girls. Meaning that even when The Hold Steady are taking a blow, they're still the hottest thing going. MVPs, even on an off year.

This was the year the world danced to Regina Spektor. Oh yes you did. That song with the peppy staccato strings you were bobbing your head to in Kohl's? There was nobody there who knew but I'm telling you it was "Fidelity," and hell, yes, it's catchy. And it's about building a wall around your heart and going stir-crazy in there with it. Dark stuff, but it's OK to keep dancing. That's pretty much the fortune inside Begin to Hope: That it's OK. To do it all wrong, to tell strangers personal things, to still like "November Rain" after all these years. "This is how it works," she announces, launching into the most unabashed pop treatise of humanist affirmation since that fake-ass Vonnegut graduation speech: "You're young until you're not. You love until you don't. You try until you can't. You laugh until you cry. You cry until you laugh, and everyone must breathe until their dying breath." And for every five moments of piano-punching joy, there's a crash of harsh, pretty truth and at least one unexpected vocal flourish — a grunt, a sudden exhalation like popping a soda can, a word like "boobs" stretched out in a comic croon. It's like nothing you've ever danced to but that's OK. It's OK.

Since the first Cat Power record hit the shelves more than a decade ago, Chan Marshall has been as well-known for onstage nervous breakdowns and pathologically odd behavior as she has been for her effortlessly sad, creepy songs. The Greatest, her seventh long player, should put paid to that. Recorded in Memphis with the majority of the Hi Records rhythm section (i.e. the band that locked in behind Ann Peebles and scaled the charts with Al Green), The Greatest puts the spotlight on Marshall's smoky and sultrier-than-previous pipes, and she delivers on a dozen focused, soul-inflected tracks that feel as natural and lived-in as the southern R&B that inspired them. Sure, the novelty of the arrangement could justify calling it Chan in Memphis, but that only tells half the story. This is the sound of an artist getting her shit together, and as anyone familiar with Lou Reed's Blue Mask or The Replacements' All Shook Down can tell you, these kinds of records are typically dodgy affairs. Which all serves to make The Greatest even more of a triumph.

Into the center of Fox Confessor's cold, lonesome soul, Neko Case drops a single pocket of warmth: a swaying, heartsick ballad called "That Teenage Feeling." The song is brief and perfectly structured: It opens with a tiny, pirouetting harpsichord and Case intoning an edgy minor-seventh. It clicks over suddenly to the major and builds and builds and crests when Case's brave friend turns to her and says, "I don't care if forever never comes/ 'cause I'm holding out for that teenage feeling." That feeling is both elusive and illusive and that's exactly what Fox Confessor is about: chasing something you know you're never going to get because you're not quite sure what you'd do otherwise. Case's voice, rich and full and aching, is perfectly suited to these kind of plaints, and she swoons and heaves like a flickering '50s crooner in an old black-and-white newsreel. Through it all, the piece that provides wholeness — for the accident victim in "Star Witness," the lover in "Hold On, Hold On" — is always brushing against the fingertips, present enough to give proof of its existence, but distant enough to create despair. That Case keeps reaching is what makes Fox Confessor such a marvelous heartbreak.

Every 10 seconds of Ys could have been songs of their own but instead Newsom employed the services of audio geniuses Van Dyke Parks, Steve Albini and Jim O'Rourke to flesh out her ideas and string 'em all together. Thank heavens; the end result is an album's worth of music and poetry (yes, poetry!) that refuses to cede any facet of its brilliant spirit. Don't waste your time overthinking the usage of "thee" — you'd be totally missing the point.

From the outset, Orphans seems like three easily separated volumes of loud songs, quiet songs and uneasily placed carnival songs, new and rare. But when does Waits do anything simple? And when was the last time an entire work of his sounded as roundly sensitive and cohesive as all this? Orphans finds the merry-widow-waltzing bastard tackling experimental bashers, rugged tone poems, trashed theater songs and junkyard blues more viscerally than on any of his previous efforts. He digs deep within covers of songs from Disney, Skip Spence and The Ramones as if he were summoning each from the grave. He pulls lounge jazz from his crumbled hat like he hasn't in 20 years. He manages to wearily, lyrically detail the poignancy and heartache of romance, war and dippy minutiae like no poet since Dylan, and bawls, yells, bleats, hollers, barks and croons like no one else ever could.

Nearing elder-statesmen status after 20 years in the biz, Yo La Tengo continues to reinvent itself with each new release. Scratch that: Practically every song on their 12th album takes off in some previously unexplored direction, from the falsetto dancefloor brush-off of "Mr. Tough" to the swinging horn lines of "Beanbag Chair." Tough as the three-year waits between albums can be, it's worth it when the result is a collection this varied, confident and coherent. Now if only someone could explain what "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind" means.

A triumph, sure, but it didn't come out of nowhere. The first indication of where Ghost might be headed was "Maxine," the Thelma/Louise drug-'n'-slug story that hit early in 2001's Bulletproof Wallets. Ever since then it's been a steady process of refinement — a process that reaches its peak with "Shakey Dog," the first song on Fishscale and the best piece of popular music recorded in 2006, bar none. In it, Ghost and his cohort Frank race uptown to recover stolen drugs from a pair of crooked dealers. The song is a masterpiece of tiny details: An old woman they pass on the staircase is invested with a dizzying backstory; Ghost breaks down in sizzling detail what the swindlers are eating when he and Frank arrive. Fishscale maintains such lyrical heights throughout, blending humid '70s soul hooks with Ghost's peerless delivery and the kind of writing that fell out of fashion when rap's focus shifted from the coasts. The title is slang for the purest form of coke, but the drugs are just a MacGuffin; the real raw product is Ghost's cunning verse. If Fishscale is any indication, he has a limitless supply.

Just when the idea of a classically forward-thinking rock album seemed even more an anachronism than ever, Sonic Youth shocked us all with a wonderful collection of short, catchy, sexy, snarling songs. Not drones, not installation pieces. Songs. On highlights like "Incinerate," "Jams Run Free" and the insanely exciting "Pink Steam," the clang and squall of Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo's guitars are put into service for linear but enthralling crescendos. Moore and Kim Gordon sing of complicated, heady love (L-U-V) as a balm from a world gone crazy. And Steve Shelley nearly outshines them all with supple, swinging rhythms that prove he's Charlie Watts. If nothing else, Rather Ripped is positively haunted by the ghost of New York bohemia; Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine hover in the corners, reminders of when we could imagine that The Big Apple wasn't home to quite so many douchebags.

Like "Hey Ya" before it, "Crazy" became ubiquitous on its merits, and admit it, you still hesitate a bit before switching stations on either one. Gnarls' debut is a Morricone-goes-to-Motown fever dream, the most candy-colored picture of madness this side of a Hunter S. Thompson children's book. Dashing from breakbeat gospel to goofy novelty to neo-soul gloss like the country's in the throes of a Ritalin shortage, Elsewhere necessarily stumbles on occasion, but it's welcome overreaching in a genre where posturing usually supplants progress. Danger Mouse's affected weirdness never clutters his strong hooks, and for someone whose rich, creamery tenor could make him a mint if he confined it to crooning about making sweet love, Cee-Lo's willingness to turn his voice to growls and grunts and tunes about necrophilia can only throw fuel onto DM's eccentricity. And oh yeah, there's a Violent Femmes cover.

If you want to hear a great Tom Waits record, quit drinking for a couple days and buy his new box set. Despite what critics and other fools claim, Man Man's second album is not a snickering, snarling mish-mash of Tommy boy, the Captain (Beefheart) and Frank Fucking Zappa. It is however a reason to believe in outsider rock again, to ban guitars and take up arms with rabid mini-orchestras and singers so strung out on pain and poetry that they sound downright scary. Sadly, all of the above has been lost on far too many bloggers, a fleet of blowhards too busy swaddling Beirut in spit to realize that Man Man is similar in spirit but much saucier — a bench-clearing brawl at the Ukrainian hall with brass balls and a freshly broken, still-beating heart.

The Decemberists — who conquered the CP Top 21 last year with Picaresque — set their sights on America at large with their challenging, mysterious major label debut. And — guitarist Chris Funk's recent Countdown to Guitarmageddon loss to Stephen Colbert notwithstanding — they've made some inroads. Colin Meloy, the commander in grief, demands your attention with tragic wisdom on The Crane Wife and, yes, we still love his skill for syntax. Though he was meant for the stage, Meloy doesn't go for Kelly Clarkson high notes. These are concept songs. He is the anti-pop star hell-bent on writing the book on geek-folk rock. Staggering and frail, haunting and manic, The Crane Wife is all death, sorrow and crooked rain, as if to say: Bombs drop. Hearts break. Figure it out.

For those who prefer their regret rock dappled with sunlight and hope (think Nick Drake or Hope Sandoval), local hero Arcuragi and his Philly-rock all-star supporting cast manage a neat trick: a bittersweet, lyrical debut album that's intimate without feeling autobiographical; you're never quite sure whose shoes he's gazing at. The songs are introspective by proxy, as if 11 folks with slight serotonin imbalances each consigned Arcuragi and his burnt-honey baritone to express their elliptical inner narratives. The standout in an album full of gospel-tinged, literate vignettes is "1981," which just may be the catchiest, most repeat-playable track of the year, and is almost certainly the best song ever written about the special theory of relativity. City Paper has now hyped this song at least six different times this year. Why don't you own it yet?

Listen to Adam Arcuragi NOW!

Tunde Adebimpe starts off Return to Cookie Mountain with the sweet, sweet falsetto of "I was a lover/ before this war." So what is he now? Trying to figure out this band is like sinking down through "I Was A Lover"'s layers of woozy rhythms to the chilly techno beat below. So where are we now? In love during wartime, I think. It's an eerie, unsettling place to be, but the harmonies are sublime.

Maybe you just had to be there. Five years ago, another opening gig for another band at the Troc, hyper and tanked, Beth Ditto knocks shit around and falls offstage. Later, The Gossip is slumped over at the merch booth, hawking CDs that are so confrontationally K-Records-lo-fi that the production aesthetic all but obscures the raw talent, the blues chops, the fucking pipes. Then there were those growth years in between: the formidable shape-up with Movement offset by the tiresome comparisons drawn to Yeah Yeah Yeahs, even though The Gossip did the blues-punk diva thing sooner and better ... Karen O, really, was little more than a skinnier, skankier version of Ditto. This spring's Standing in the Way of Control saw the best elements of The Gossip — a fierce dance sensibility, those groovy dirty basslines, the trembling alto wails and a strong personality that's unapologetically leftist, feminist, queer, punk and pissed off — coalesce into a perfect whole, with none of the snags that held the band back in the past. Was there a better single this year than the fiery disco jam "Listen Up!"? Now then, back to the stage, this time the Starlight Ballroom in March. The band is cooking, Ditto is strutting back and forth, wagging her finger, inciting, instigating, provoking, preaching. Despite the title, control is unimpeded. The Gossip has control. It is control.

The Life Pursuit contains classic Belle and Sebastian elements (lush compositions, wry lyrics) yet continues the pop turn the band took with 2003's Dear Catastrophe Waitress. Stuart Murdoch has grown into the frontman role, and The Life Pursuit feels like a bridge over the Fold Your Hands Child chasm that nearly destroyed the band. Playful vignettes of cheeky lasses ("Sukie in the Graveyard") and lovestruck boys (just about every other song) brush up against ambient pieces ("Mornington Crescent") reminiscent of the band's early albums, and the resulting mix is outstanding.

It's a whole lot easier, four months after its release, to list all the things that Game Theory is not — it's not the commercial or chart success that the long-suffering Roots Crew might have hoped; it's not the magic pill that revives the post-Things Fall Apart boom; it's not part of any current hip-hop movement anymore either — there's no Kanye-style big production or Neptunes-fueled crack rhyming, and it's reasonably safe to assume that The Roots will continue as hip-hop's only live band for a while longer. What Game Theory delivers is a consistent vision and a coherent body of work. This might not be the record we wanted from the group responsible for young-and-hungry Illadelph Halflife and the sweet high-point single "You Got Me," but, aged and bitter and jaded, it's the one they've given us: a thundercloud masterpiece of regrets and recriminations and doubts, set forth with more focus and assurance than any hip-hop act has mustered in a dog's age.

Was the world ready for a skateboarding Muslim MC from Chicago with four black belts? Regardless, Fiasco proved worthy of the attention, capable of vivid storytelling ("Kick, Push," "The Cool") and righteous protests ("Daydreamin'," "American Terrorist"). And with production help from the likes of Kanye West, The Neptunes and Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda (really!), Food & Liquor possesses dazzling sonics, filled with rubbery samples and beats that go from cinematic to funky to trippy, sometimes within a single song.

It's not so easy to find a spiritually ambivalent country-soul record these days, much less one that's as liable to be liked by hipsters as by suckers for a pretty voice. (And yeah, you can say those demographics aren't mutually exclusive, but if you picked The Hold Steady's record above this one, pretty voices aren't your first priority.) Bolstered by Chandra and Leigh Watson's heavenly harmonies, Rabbit Fur Coat is smoother than Jenny Lewis' work with Rilo Kiley, but it's just as cynical and preoccupied with hypocrisy. Now that she's got top billing, Lewis calls on God more often than Kanye West does, only the Lord's less inclined to heed songs like "Born Secular" and "The Charging Sky." Elsewhere, Lewis calls out false prophets and social climbers, scared lovers and bitter enemies, her mom and herself. If she sounds a little self-righteous at times, well, someone's gotta judge.

Till now it had been all fun and mostly games for Portland's The Thermals. But fevered punk-pop birthed feverish agit-prop for the band's 2006 offering. Singer/guitarist Hutch Harris rains great vengeance and furious anger upon an administration hip-deep in hypocrisy and its manifest destiny playbook. The band strains at times under its weightier material, but on cuts like "Power Doesn't Run on Nothing," "Here's Your Future" and the giddily defiant "Pillar of Salt," Harris, bassist Kathy Foster and drummer Lorin Coleman prove deft, flying fists-first at a power structure that's tangled up church and state in a deadly blood knot.

The Pipettes — a trio of Brighton birds, and a septet if you count their instrumental lads — are cute and cheeky, and they don't play coy. The two-minute dance parties on We Are the Pipettes set the girl-group harmonies and retro arrangements at full blast, but the lyrics subtly replace the 20th-century's doormat dynamics with stronger stuff. No guy is safe from The Pipettes' withering glances — not the alpha male and certainly not the oversensitive lapdog. Songs like "Because It's Not Love (But It's Still a Feeling)" and "One Night Stand" celebrate the female libido, while "Your Kisses Are Wasted on Me" spins breaking up into sweet revenge. And "ABC" reveals the truth about nerdy boys: They're just as clueless and self-involved as the rest. Like The Pipettes' sound, it's a truth that bears repeating.