In a year when the playlist was king, the majority of the albums here were best admired from start to finish as coherent works of art or complete narratives. And there isn't a wasted note or a moment of filler on any of them.

Tindersticks The Hungry Saw
The focus of intense debate among fans due to Tindersticks' diminished (by half) lineup, The Hungry Saw is still a breathtaking record, and no disappointment after five years without the band's bespoke melancholy. Elegant, bleak, romantic, humane, and evocative enough to make you feel like you're sitting in a damp kitchen in Sheffield.

Black Mountain Into the Future
Seems like you couldn't go anywhere this year without hearing "Stormy High" throbbing out of restaurants, bars, cars, and earbuds. Or "Angels", for that matter. Or the spicy acid-kraut of "Wucan". Or the occult rock opera of "Queens Will Play". Or the insane drum fill that ends "Evil Ways". And so it goes. Black Mountain—making the world a way cooler place, track by unbelievable track.

Chad VanGaalen Soft Airplane
I couldn't even make it through Chad VanGaalen's Skelliconnection two years ago, but the prettily arcane death dirges of Soft Airplane were a constant companion in the cheery second half of 2008.

Portishead Third
From the queasy progressions and fake-out ending of "Silence" onward, Third keeps you amazed and enthralled, challenging all assumptions about your formerly MIA Bristolian heroes except one: that there's nobody else like them. Screw Axl—this was the over-incubated comeback of the year.

Fleet Foxes Fleet Foxes
Pitchfork's It Band of '08 surprisingly turned out to be wonderful. Five super-earnest hippie-babies who sing like birds, and who treat their work as if the very act of making music might somehow save us all. A sort of Crosby Stills Nash and Yahowa for the post-oil weirdness to come.

My Morning Jacket Evil Urges
Alt-country-synth-funk-glam-bang-soft-rock-disco as sequenced by a deaf maniac, ending with eight perverse minutes inside a Eumir ("Also Sprach Zarathustra") Deodato orgasmatron. In a nutshell.

Dengue Fever Venus on Earth
The year's perfect summer record grew out of an L.A. hipster's fascination for cheap-ass, 40-year-old Cambodian psychedelic pop. Surely that's enough of a recommendation already?

Mirror Mirror
Theatrical ambitions and gigantic guest stars like Dave Gahan aside, locals Thomas Anselmi and Laure-Elaine Cí´té invented the sound of Weimar Gastown with their elegantly dissipated, plush, and erotic synth-pop debut.

Dungen 4
Gustav Ejstes's time-and-space machine is set on glide for 4, like a cosmos-bound glass elevator with its own canned soundtrack of retro-future jazz-rock.

Sparks Exotic Creatures of the Deep
On that oh-so-tricky 21st album, Sparks once again nails its inspired marriage of intricate musical composition, lyrical comic genius, and Russell Mael's undiminished falsetto. Aside from the routine brilliance, Exotic Creatures also makes this year's list for the Dada duo's sheer persistence.