The best music of 2008: The Ballots

M83's earlier albums brimmed with promise, but their comely electronic textures sounded lifeless in the end—like dramatic gestures that aspired toward grandeur but got hung up where bombast goes to live and die. Saturdays=Youth corrected for that by cleaning up the edges and leaning hard against melody. The result is an album that traffics in songs rather than atmospheres, and even if the songs sound wedded to a sort of Breakfast Club memory of the 1980s, they play as distinctly modern for the space they luxuriate in.

Erykah Badu came back after a few years away with the calmest kind of vengeance, with an evocative series of R&B; sketches sung by a star so starry that she sounds most powerful when barely there.

A worldly DJ/producer (grown from a mix of Swiss and Chilean roots), Luciano reconciled dance music's appetite for ecstatic thrills and austere minimalism on a DJ mix that plays just as well on any scale—big vs. small, palpable vs. obscure, hands in the air vs. hands drawing diagrams of beats that build and recede when the mood calls for it.

Indie-rock done totally right—with more passion than poise, and absolutely no anxiety-of-influence to fight against.

More than any other album I loved this year, First If You Please came out as a viable candidate for what pop might sound like in 20 or 30 years. It was made in a minimal-techno mold—as fashioned by the likes of Ricardo Villalobos and Luciano, among many rustling others. But Los Updates mastermind Jorge Gonzalez upends the album's propulsive purpose with songs about sex that writhe, churn, and moan—sometimes awkwardly but also automatically, like songs about sex should.

It's hard to place what exactly about Blitzen Trapper can make a listener flash so hard on The Band. But it's hard to place Blitzen Trapper in almost every way—save for somewhere near the sweet spot where rootsy rock retains its formative swagger and faith in chance.

Maker of a magically patient kind of dance music, Theo Parrish wrings more out of the ephemeral aspects of rhythm and swing than most producers can hope to swallow in a lifetime. His slow, sensuous (and let's just say it: stoner) style of house-music is big in his native Detroit, but Parrish sounds like he'd be at home wherever a few beats can be given time to glisten.

Jim Noir's 2006 debut Tower Of Love was one of the best collections of songs this decade, but that's also what it felt like: a weird, wonderful mix-tape of sorts. On his follow-up, the bowler-hatted one has turned his spaced-out aesthetic into an actual album, and the result is a delightful one-two punch of songwriting and artistic cohesion. There's a surging immediacy to this set, exploding on the opening "Welcome Commander Jameson" and soaring into the stratosphere with the bouncing electronic-pop gem "All Right." By its end, Noir's sophomore effort is the embodiment of perfect pop music as opposed to pop songs.

Jesse Elliott has found a good way to ensure his music never gets pigeonholed: Release two albums in seven months, each eclectic in its own right and yet starkly different. On These United States' March debut A Picture Of The Three Of Us At The Gate To The Garden Of Eden, Elliott found an unusually seamless mix of Postal Service-esque indie electronica ("First Sight") and coolly compelling psych-folk ("Burn This Bridge" and "Slow Crows Over"). Then, in September, he rounded up a full band and released Crimes, a rousing, stylistic romp through roots music and rockabilly. Recorded in Kentucky, Crimes is an ambitious throwdown at a crowded, bourbon-drinking roadhouse, a type of blues-rock not made whatsoever for fans of blues rock.

Who knows what "rock 'n 'roll" even means anymore? You can take almost any word in the dictionary, add a hyphen and stick "rock" on the end of it, and it's a genre someone's tried to create. "Rock" may now be too ubiquitous for simple characterization, but, if there's any value left in the term's original definition, Alejandro Escovedo's Real Animal is rich indeed. On his ninth studio album, decades into his musical career, Escovedo has an astounding level of passion for the kind of rough, unapologetic rock that finds strength in focus and power in simplicity. Escovedo is not dabbling in artfulness here; Real Animal brings together the swagger of his punk roots and the emotion of his bluesier days.

Those looking for an obvious crack on, say, Lindsay Lohan can trust Perez Hilton to supply that to them. Serious music fans would not put much stock in his personal playlist—but after gushing about Hutchinson's Sounds Like This, it appears he at least got one right. Not that it's too hard to find merit in Hutchinson's sophomore studio effort; front to back, Sounds Like This is a playful, piano-powered pop album that brings to mind Stevie Wonder's most freewheelin' days. Sure, on first impression, Hutchinson looks like one of those dime-a-dozen sensitive pretty-boy songwriters who dominate the adult-alternative-driven soundtracks of certain TV network drama series, and, yes, the album is sure to get play in all the mainstream places that will make music snobs gag. But one can't knock the guy for putting out such an energetic, supremely catchy collection of sharply penned songs that people outside of the local independent CD shop will appreciate it.

Beginning as a sort of reggae-ska-jam-band, then turning into a sort of generic funk-rock group, Zox never merited much attention, only hinting at any break with conventional "alternative" crapola best kept at community festivals and college bars. Which makes Line In The Sand, the group's third effort, a wonderful reminder that the most unlikely bands can create something worthwhile when they earnestly push themselves to. And Zox certainly have pushed themselves here, with a show of musicianship that lasts long after the CD has stopped spinning. On Line In The Sand, reggae and ska are just diverse elements in a larger musical formula that's open and without limits—whether it's substituting lead guitar with electric violin (it works), or borrowing qualities of The Police and their '80s brethren, or grounding songs in a weepy synth hook (as on "Goodnight"), everything fits and nothing feels forced.