Part two of our five-day feature broadens the coverage of this year's finest albums.

And so it begins. The top albums of 2009 are hand-picked and collected for your listening pleasure. Part one of a five-day feature.

As Brian Lightbody and Tom Asselin could tell you, the differences between rural and urban America are plentiful. Lightbody lives in media-centric Brooklyn and works as a creative director, while Asselin resides in northeastern Pennsylvania working as...

Repetition and pretentiousness are sometimes aligned in music, especially when something not even worth hearing once is repeated continuously. Listeners do not want artists forcing anything on them, especially when it is a frustratingly linear loop....

Merely a few months after I started this site, I deemed an album by Beach House to be “the most atmospherically beautiful debut of the year.” Although slightly rough around the edges, their debut showed a band on the brink of something special....