Every year, there's at least one, if not several, albums that if I'd only heard/fully absorbed them a scant few weeks earlier, they would be proudly displayed in my top 15 of the year. In 2006, it was Converge's No Heroes and Grizzly Bear's Yellow House. This year, it's Baroness' exceptional Red Album. A potent mixture of metal, Southern rock, ambient interludes, and prog dalliance, this record is as invigorating and consistently surprising a metal album as you'll hear. Their willingness to inject their music with moments of disarming calm and beauty pay huge dividends. Cannot stop listening to this.

While their ex-bandmate Matt Pike chose a road toward destruction and mayhem, the rhythm section of stoner rock trio Sleep--bassist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Haikus--sought a path of enlightenment. Or least a place to smoke more dope in peace. Whatever the case, their duo Om has taken a concept that felt a little thin on paper--the bass-and-drum duo--and actually found ways to grow within its limited palette. Pilgrimage finds the band playing with more comfort and fluidity than ever. A 'metal' band that gets 'heavy' by forsaking volume for presence and patience is a beautiful thing indeed.

Matt Pike is pretty much a latter-day stoner rock legend; his seminal band Sleep's Jerusalem is a hallowed, single 52-minute monolith of sludgy riffage. But his work in High On Fire has consistently been more and more aggressive with each new release, trading the molasses haze of dope for an athletic adrenaline. Death Is This Communion is yet another example of his exceptional skill at wrenching primal ferocity from the guitar, and his vicious bandmates never miss a chance to help him pummel a point home. Er, and by that I mean, it tears the flesh clean off your bones. You dig Mastodon? You'll love this.

The thing that I love about PJ Harvey is the specificity with which she makes records. With every new album, she challenges herself, and her audience, to abandon familiar comforts and adapt to new approaches. The piano-driven White Chalk is possibly the most challenging record she has presented since Is This Desire? or even her sophomore milestone Rid Of Me. To interpret it as a callous and self indulgent attempt to alienate listeners is to have never known what made Harvey tick in the first place. Austere and distant on first meeting, it quivers with new feelings upon every listen.

I could go on and on about the vitality, peerlessness and plain beauty of the music of The Dirty Three, but above all else, their greatest contribution to music is their inversion of the traditional roles of their instruments. In particular, Mick Turner's ability to take the most obnoxious and familiar instrument in modern music (the electric guitar) and turn it into something so amorphous and secretive is nothing short of brilliant. This collection of rare solo material (along with duo collaborations with D3's drummer Jim White) is instrumental daydreaming of the highest order.

I saw Daniel Hope perform Beethoven's Violin Concerto with the Koln Symphony about a year and a half ago and it was an event. I had not seen a classical violinist play with such precise recklessness in a long time. I bought this album at the concert and it remains a favourite of mine. The mixture of Indian ragas, Romanian folk dances, and Ravel rhapsodies could have proven an awkward stab at cross-genre appeal, but Hope and his accompanists make it work through sheer will and talent. An eclectic listen that retains a strong unity of themes despite its diverse repetoire.

As the Slint reunion continues to roll on, it's appropriate that singer Brian McMahan's other project, The For Carnation, gets a much needed reissue. Promised Works collects Fight Songs and Marshmallows, the two EPs which introduced the group to the world. TFC removed Slint's indie-rock edge to distill a pure ether of unsettled calm. Spoken rather than sung, implied rather than played, these songs float, drift and possess with such amorphous grace that they take time to reveal themselves. The end product is a body of work that, while short-lived, is lasting and singular.

One of my faves from 2001. A 14-track double album, this was the seventh album by Olympia Wash. art-punk trio Unwound and it represented a dramatic shift away from start-stop, screaming aggression toward an ever-evolving patchwork of many styles. While all of the songs fit loosely under a melancholic umbrella, the songs vary from single-note drones, post-rock crescendos, pounding rockers, and psychedelic pop explorations. Sadly, Leaves also proved to be the group's swansong, but like Refused's The Shape Of Punk To Come, it's kinda difficult to dispute going out on such a high.

An often overlooked Coltrane album from his Atlantic years and released while he was on Impulse. This is most notable for an exceptional ballad "Central Park West," which shows Coltrane at his most lovely and lyrical. A varied record that any fans of his Giant Steps era will appreciate.

Rufus taps into my hidden desires of my ideal music. He knows things that I want to hear that even I didn't know I wanted to hear. Operatic, daring, funny, poignant... Release the Stars is yet another example of this man's ability to make a modern hybrid of explosive Wagnerian fireballs and porcelain pop caresses. My jaw is slack.