10: Wolf Parade
Apologies to the Queen Mary
[Sub Pop]

Wolf Parade might be 2005's most begrudged indie heroes: The Montreal group's debut was produced by Issac Brock, and a handful of loose associations with the Arcade Fire and Frog Eyes left the band buried in a pile of Modest Mouse comparisons and overblown Montreal-scene gab. Apologies to the Queen Mary is stranger and more complicated than its reputation admits, riddled with theremin and keyboards, and lyrically preoccupied with ghosts, machinery, and fuddled relationships, all powered by the mesmerizing tension between dueling songwriters Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner. The fist-pumping "Shine a Light" is apt fodder for house parties and road trips, but "I'll Believe in Anything" is the record's shining center, a gut-punchingly perfect portrait of shit gone awry. --Amanda Petrusich

09: Cam'ron
Purple Haze
[Roc-A-Fella]

Oh, Pitchfork, you're so December 2004! It's called deadlines, rabble-rousers, breathe out. Purple Haze, right now, remains as important and combustible a rap album as has been made this century. So much blood and ink has been spilt (though it has sold less than 700,000 copies to date) that it's easy to forget the virtuosity contained therein. Killa Cam posits himself a token, if flashy, street hustler, but his verbals say something else entirely. He's renaissance writer, global traveler, and comic genius. Hell, even the skits are still funny. Musically, a mostly undistinguished group of beatsmiths make outstanding use of their time and Cam obliges with stratospheric verses. On "Down and Out" he says, "Play razor tag, slice ya face, you're it." Thing is, no one's responded in kind yet. --Sean Fennessey

08: LCD Soundsystem
LCD Soundsystem
[DFA]

We may have heard many of these tracks more than a year before this LP's release, but there was something edifying about cramming the James Murphy catalog into one double-disc album. Retro/new wave/post-punk revivalists saw their significance evaporate when Murphy exposed indie kids to dance-rock without excessive hi-hats or leather jackets. From blatant Daft Punk name-droppage to affected disco-infiltrating meta commentary, Murphy's proactive style benefited most from its galvanizing impressionism; pleasure sensors go apeshit long before neurons notice there's no guitar part, and we're all the better for it. Really need no-strings-attached rock? Fine, "Never as Tired as When I'm Waking Up" is a suaver "Ten Years Gone", and "Great Release" pays its respects as a great fake-Eno track. Of course, by then you probably haven't even realized your Led Zep t-shirt's been replaced with a silk button-down. --Adam Moerder

07: Animal Collective
Feels
[Fat Cat]

It's a familiar indie template: the band that begins difficult and gradually takes on songwriting as they become more accomplished. Every kid loves the sound of his own noise but it takes something more to write a great tune, and some wait to try until they know what they're doing. You knew the first time you heard Feels that the band's audience would grow; fortunately, Animal Collective's more explosive and chaotic ideas can easily be grafted onto poppier flesh. They chant where others would croon, vomit childish screams where rock'n'roll tradition calls for an "Oh yeah!", and they're not afraid to write one long bridge leading nowhere. As they keep sounding like no other band around we'll allow them another rock record, especially if they continue to traffic in this degree of empathy. Even with its darker shadings Feels is at its most basic a pure expression of positivity from four guys trying their hardest to bring something beautiful into the world. --Mark Richardson

06: Deerhoof
The Runners Four
[Kill Rock Stars]

It's not in Deerhoof's DNA to be a pop band; their strange amalgam of octopus drumming, lyrical manga, and Siamese-twin acrobat guitars is far too unwieldy to be conveniently packed into mass-digestible form. Luckily, nobody bothered to tell them about this limitation, and as a result The Runners Four gives us 20 different misses at conventional songwriting, silly attempts at traditionalism that go fascinatingly awry in every way possible. All the noisy interludes and muso noodling of Deerhoof's previous work weren't so much discarded as assimilated, creating songs that give fleeting impressions of normalcy before shooting off down unpredictable alleyways, bursts of noise that give way to eerie, beautiful calms or absurdly tight rhythm-holding-the-band-hostage moments. Even in that alternate dimension critics love to cite, The Runners Four would be too weird for radio; on Earth-1, it's one of the year's most playfully dense, eminently relistenable calamities. --Rob Mitchum

05: Antony & the Johnsons
I Am a Bird Now
[Secretly Canadian]

In an eclectic musical era buzzing with grime, reggaeton, dancepunk, crunk, freak-folk, and Architecture in Helsinki, I am a Bird Now was the cool, palette-cleansing drink that washed away all traces of spicier curries. Quite simply, there was nothing else like it in 2005, and while I relished analyzing a smorgasbord of intricately plotted musical graphs this year, this album seemed to penetrate their spikes and shudders like a baseline. This is extraterrestrial, atmosphere-charging, just-realized-I'm-holding-my-breath music, and while purity is a sketchy value, it's physiologically difficult to perceive Antony's beautiful gender mutations, consecrated vibrato, and efflorescing cabaret pianos as anything but. Chrysalises birthed themselves like Russian dolls; bright winged things fluttered into dark rafters; and the greatest shock of all, it turned out that the second coming of Boy George is something we should've been hoping for all along. I Am a Bird Now played like raw sound achieving its Platonic ideal, making everything else seem like an interesting deviation. --Brian Howe

04: M.I.A.
Arular
[XL]

Arular arrives after a long year of critical storm and stress. Dissenters painted Maya as a living, breathing Che t-shirt, a distressing signifier of the insidious commodification of Third World culture and rebellion. Had she hollered vague revolutionary sentiments over indigenous Sri Lankan folk, the pros/cons may well have flipped, but such a move wouldn't have made her any more or less authentic.

But M.I.A. is from the melting pot council estates of London, not a shanty in Sri Lanka, and Arular was her coming to terms with the contradiction of being a tagged terrorist's child living amongst those who'd done the tagging. If her politics are not necessarily poignant, it's because they are personal. While her inner clash spoke universally, the underlying music appealed to the universal ass. With hints both obvious (dancehall) and neglible (grime), her producers-- including Richard X, Diplo, and Steve Mackey-- merged the global urban beats that mingle in every major metropolis, group-thinking an album that expressed the diversity available to anyone with a modem. In both form and content, Arular exemplified the community that no longer has a base in any city or country but every city and country. --Peter Macia

03: Art Brut
Bang Bang Rock & Roll
[Fierce Panda]

When Art Brut issued their first single "Formed a Band", you'd have put good odds on these upstarts being merely a brilliant one-off and nothing more. A pinprick in the sides of their more overcooked colleagues, the track came with a wink and a sneer but felt like a complete manifesto rather than mere prologue. Yet on their debut full-length, the band nods to the earliest recordings from the Fall or Television Personalities, bucking the frankly odd notion that smart yet cynical meta-pop is inherently ephemeral.

Coming across like a triangulation of Jarvis Cocker, Jonathan Richman, and Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge (were he in on the joke), singer Eddie Argos wields charisma and one-liners in equal measure, disguising pointed pop-cult criticism as humor and vice versa. In the process, he's grabbed UK indie by the lapels and implored it to wake. the. fuck. up. and stop accepting post-punk hand-me-downs and tabloid fuck-ups as its heroes. With a punk-era clarion call-- go and form a band, do it yourself-- Art Brut scowled at (and even picked fights with) stuffed-shirt revivalists, wrote about sex as something other than groupie-baiting myth-making, and punctured the lie that avant-posturing is an appropriate substitute for just putting your head down and rocking out, and they (and we) had a hell of a good time in the process. --Scott Plagenhoef

02: Kanye West
Late Registration
[Roc-A-Fella]

Let's not get it twisted: Kanye West wasn't one of Barbara Walters' Ten Most Fascinating People of 2005 because he made a dazzlingly complex, precedent-smashing impressionist opus of a rap album; he's there because of seven words he said on a live telethon. That was a brave move, but it wasn't Kanye's first. Before he called out the president, he remade rap into what he always wanted it to be: a sunkissed sonic cathedral with room for conflicted political rants and coke-slanging memories and please-don't-die-grandma songs and chest-puffed bravado and Common and Paul Wall and swelling strings and cascading harps and burbling synths.

Co-producer Jon Brion lent West an expansively ecstatic lift that West had never had before, and West lent Brion a genially self-important strut that Brion had never had. Together, they crafted a cathedral of sonic details-- a gorgeous, tangled, heartfelt strings-and-samples masterpiece. --Tom Breihan

01: Sufjan Stevens
Illinois
[Asthmatic Kitty]

Stories always feel more important when you tack them onto a map. Real places, people, and myths give us a way into a private story-- or cast the story in doubt. And while for years, the singer/songwriter tradition has assigned the mopiest songs to the lone acoustic guitar, a ballad can sound even sadder if you bring in a banjo and a choir. Sufjan Stevens' gift for crossing the grand with the intimate partly explains how Illinois landed at the top of this list: He wraps his stories in landmarks and footnotes, ornaments them with glorious countermelodies, and celebrates them like a Fourth of July parade.

We thought Stevens' breakthrough came two years ago on Michigan, but Illinois improves on it in every way: He takes more chances with humor and myth, the palette's richer, and the new drummer puts oomph behind Stevens' falsetto. It's still tempting to look for messages and slogans in his view of America, and to ask whether his gift for seeing us as we are comes with an urge to tell us how we should be. But Stevens insists that he's interested more than anything in singing about people, from beside a death bed, to inside the head of a serial killer, to someone tearing away his past in a van heading out of town. And he made a classic by empathizing with the loves and needs of those people, and watching them seek and wander while the landmarks on his map of Illinois stay fixed. --Chris Dahlen