Jim: Music News Editor

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  The Good, the Bad, the Queen

  Supergroups largely fail for the same reason that colossal rock bands inevitably implode: inflated ego. Blur frontman and Gorillaz mastermind Damon Albarn surely has one, but he's also shown a knack over throughout the years for conducting wildly diverse creative forces into a cohesive sound.

  This album, from an unnamed supergroup that includes Albarn, former Clash bassist Paul Simonon, legendary Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, and Verve guitarist Simon Tong, avoids such a fate. It's chock full of lush, moody soundscapes and tales of modern West London. Albarn is a master at writing melodies that are both familiar and novel. String sections and a melodica are scattered here within Allen's subtle percussion and Simonon's haunting dub bass lines. This is the sound of four skilled craftsmen reining themselves in to fit in, and the result is dub rock bliss.

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  Amy Winehouse — Back to Black

  By most accounts, the wheels have completely come off for the bee-hived songstress who made the best album of 2007. Who knows whether Back to Black will mark the peak of a "Whatever happened to..." career or better/worse for Amy Winehouse, but it's safe to say that the demons evident in these songs are no marketing gimmick. Mark Ronson 's production gives the Dap-Kings ' backing sound extra grit, and the Brooklyn funk ensemble in turn adds a thick layer of soul on Winehouse's half-slurred, '60s girl-group voice. But while the beefed-up retro sound is superb, the real strength of Back to Black lies in the songwriting. There is depth, despair, melancholy, and the feeling that these songs served as a catharsis for a woman who truly needed it--a fact that places her well outside of the company of her tabloid fodder sorority. Now, if she could only get back to songwriting again.

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  Yeasayer — All Hour Cymbals

  Oh what David Byrne and Brian Eno hath wrought. With any number of bands having drawn on the dynamic duo's catalog, from Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah to TV on the Radio and Grizzly Bear, rock has been given a booster shot of late by bands that take nondenominational spiritualism, fuse it with Pan-ethnic rhythms, and ground it in impassioned rawk. Brooklyn-based Yeasayer is next on deck, but All Hour Cymbals doesn't sound like anything you've heard before. The first single "2080" is a mindbender, stacking multipart harmonies and chanting on an insistent, dubbed-out rhythm propelled by West African high-life guitar. You can dig into the lyrics, as when frontman Chris Keating sings, "I can't sleep when I think about the times we're living in/I can't sleep when I think about the future I was born into." But more than anything, you can press play, throw some headphones on, and go to church.

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  Ticklah — Ticklah vs. Axelrod

  Victor Axelrod aka Ticklah done did it with this one. The producer took dub on a world tour in 2007, mixing in Latin rhythms, Ethiopian sounds, and even a bit of Mother Nature herself. The two standout tracks are "Si Hecho Palante" and "Mi Sonsito," both of which rework classic Eddie Palmieri tracks into Caribbean burners. Both dancefloor fillers feature songstress Mayra Vega, who turned Antibalas' 2003 cover of the Puerto Rican anthem "Che Che Cole" into a sonic bomb. This might not be the first time a producer has mixed salsa and reggae, but it's unquestionably the best. Axelrod proves himself capable of infusing vintage dub sounds with the rhythms and melodies of his other work as keyboardist for Antibalas and the Dap-Kings, as well as on albums by the likes of Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen. In doing so, he has taken dub and reggae to new heights.

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  Band of Bees — Octopus

  Although the Wu-Tang Clan mailed in a fairly abominable record amidst a swirl of mutiny this year, another set of killa bees came correct. This Band of Bees hails from the Isle of Wight, the island off the southern coast of Britain that is best known for its iconic rock festival that lasted from 1968 to 1970 and was revived in 2002. These Bees are too young to have taken it all in the first time around, but they are clearly throwbacks to that era. Octopus is the Bees' third album, and it finds them continuing to expand their psychedelic pop sound into a retro realm at the nexus of Sgt. Pepper's and the palm-wine sound of Nigeria. It's truly fantastic stuff, littered with tracks that mix classic pop melodies with polyrhythms and horn stabs that fit like a glove. From the CSN-esque "Who Cares What the Question Is" to the Hammond-laced mariachi mambo of "Left Foot Stepdown, Octopus is that record with something for everyone with ears.