Tracks - The Golden Age; Paper Tiger; Guess I'm Doin' Fine; Lonesome Tears; Lost Cause; Nothing I Haven't Seen; All in Your Mind; Round the Bend; Already Dead; Sunday Sun; Little One; Side of the Road

Tracks - Fiction; Freak; Dialogue: Conan, Early Letterman; Fuck This Shit; Night Walk; Dialogue: Jersey's Where It's At; Black and White Unite; Consuelo; Dialogue: Toby; Storytelling; Dialogue: Class Rank; I Don't Want to Play Football; Consuelo Leaving; Wandering Alone; Dialogue: Mandingo Cliche; Scooby Driver; Fiction Reprise; Big John Shaft

Tracks - Tiny Spark; Metarie; Folk Singer; Life in the D; Good to Me; You're Quiet; What; Eventually; I'm Easy; Pleasure Seeker; Just Like Me; Jet Lag

Tracks - Whiskey and Rye; How Long?; On North Wood Ground; Untitled; Beside the Windowsill; Untitled; Poor Audrey James; Hard Times; Emily, O, Emily; A Picnic Lunch Packed for Two; Untitled; The Airborne Station; We Shall Meet Again; Untitled; Over the Way; Untitled; A Direction Taken; Plant Me a Rose; Brighter Days

Tracks - The Big Picture; Method Acting; False Advertising; You Will You? Will You? Will You? Will; Lover I Don't Have to Love; Bowl of Oranges; Don't Know When But a Day is Gonna Come; Nothing Gets Crossed Out; Make War; Waste of Paint; From a Balance Beam; Laura Laurent; Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and to Be Loved)

22-year-old Nebraskan singer-songwriter Conor Oberst has unquestionably delivered his finest record to date. Building on the promise of 1998's "Letting Off the Happiness" and 2000's "Fevers & Mirrors", Oberst has here spat out 13 tunes of happy-sad brilliance that lyrically match anything I've heard since Destroyer's "Streethawk: A Seduction" and Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea". Even the initially-grating, lo-fi ramblings of the opening track ("Big Picture") begin to crawl under your skin and thus trigger an emotional 73-minute roller-coaster that lodges in your head for days on end. Oberst has been dubbed the indie Bob Dylan. His vocal style is intense, bitter, tender and ultimately captivating. Think Robert Smith meets Lou Barlow with a dose of Sir Bob and you have a fair idea what to expect. However, it's lyrically that Oberst shines and lyrically where the comparisons to Dylan are most warranted. His words are pretentious, maybe. Interesting, always. Heartwarming, often. Trite, never. The Song highlights are many, perhaps only the over-polished "Lover I Don't Have to Love" slightly disappoints. Stand-outs include "False Advertising", "Bowl of Oranges", "Nothing Gets Crossed Out", the self-mocking "Waste of Paint" and the rollicking 10-minute closer - and my personal favourite - "Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and to Be Loved)". Not for all tastes, but compulsory listening.

Tracks - Too Late for Tonight; All the Same to You; Early Years; Don't Break the Heart; Wait; Mountain Fern; Vaguest Idea; Yonder Comes a Freight Train; Broken Again; When the Roses Bloom Again; Conqueror's Song; Oh So Many Years

Tracks - The Kids at the Club; Why I Try to Look So Bad; I Close My Eyes to Think of God; My Defiance; Carry on Living; Moments in the Snow; Ripped-Up Suit!; She Never Understood; Movies; Labour; Don't Fall in Love if You Want to Die in Peace; Realistes

Tracks - Heavy Soup; Staging the Plaguing of the Raised Platform; Music Plus 1; Lessons Learned from Rocky I to Rocky III; Wogs Will Walk; Motion the 11; People Power; Sounds Super Recordings; The London Radar; Spectral Mornings; Slip the Drummer One; Heavy Soup (Outro) + Bonus Track

Tracks - This Night; Holly Going Lightly; Here Comes the Night; The Chosen Few; Makin' Angels; Hey, Snow White; Modern Painters; Crystal Country; Trembling Peacock; I Have Seen a Light; Students Carve Hearts Out of Coal; Goddess of Drought; Self Portrait with Thing (Tonight is Not Your Night); The Relevant Ballads; The Night Moves

Tracks - Fight Test; One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21; Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1; Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 2; In the Morning of the Magicians; Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell; Are You a Hypnotist?; It's Summertime; Do You Realize?; All We Have is Now; Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon...

Tracks - Apples, I'm Home; My Shadow Tags on Behind; Bartholomew; Mozzarella Swastikas; Dance with Me; Computer Show; Her Father and Her; Baby's Gonna Die Tonight; Times Are Bad; Can You See Me; Untitled; Dance with Me (EP Version); Bleeding Heart; Computer Show (EP Version)

Tracks - Terrible Things; Lay it All Out; Ballad of Buck Steel; Missing Hatt; We Know What We're Doing; Leave Me in Montgomery; We're on Our Way; Careful Love; The Melodies You Bring; Willing and Able; Pistol Whipped; Lost You in the Fog; I Will Forget; Tied

Tracks - Seasons; Two Stones in My Pocket; Driving with Bert; Hi-Lo and Inbetween; See You on Rooftops; Martha's Mantra (For the Pain); Sleeping on Roads; Dreamed I Saw Soldiers; High Hopes

Tracks - Amelia Earhart vs. The Dancing Bear; The Good Toothpicks; So Much Wine; The Czar Bar; Tin Foil; A Beautiful Thing; Vienna Sausage Hotline; The Giant of Illinois; My Sister's Tiny Hands; Names for All His Shirts; Cathedrals; Weightless Again; Bony Bread; Winnebago Skeletons; Drunk by Noon; Magic Balls (Introduction); The Sad Milkman; Magic Balls (Conclusion); I Know You Are There; Down in the Ground; Arlene; Moving Furniture Around; Freebird; My Ghost; The Woman Downstairs

Tracks - Lion's Mane; Bird Stealing Bread; Faded from the Winter; Promising Light; The Rooster Moans; Upward Over the Mountain; Southern Anthem; An Angry Blade; Weary Memory; Promise What You Will; Muddy Hymnal

Tracks - Vertigo; Death on the Stairs; Horrorshow; Time for Heroes; Boys in the Band; Radio America; Up the Bracket; Tell the King; The Boy Looked at Johnny; Begging; The Good Old Days; I Get Along

Tracks - Lovedust; Weird and Woozy; Black Postcards; Black Champagne; Swedish Fish; Renee is Crying; Mermaid Eyes; 1995; Rememories; Dizzy; Orange Peel; Romantica

Tracks - Walking in a Straight Line; The Greatest Thing; Can't Stop Watching; Malaysia; So Young; The Good Girls Goodbye; Ready to Go; I Won't Forget; You Won't Find Me; 123; Written on Every Hour; Sweet 16

Tracks - Before Sauchiehall & Hope; Fallin' in Luv; Let's Radiate Love; Get That Girl; Watching the Band; Your Hand in Mine; She's a Monkey; Girl, I'm in Love with You; Everything's Alright; Mine All Mine; Daydream Girls; Life Ain't Long; Bad Mood; Back in Your Heart; Loser; Heart to Break; Grey Hair; After Sauchiehall & Hope; Fallin' in Luv (Reprise)

Tracks - How Can I Send Tonight (There to Tell You); Still We Have a Friend in You; Alta's Song; Back to the Old Homeplace; December's Child; Nerstrand Woods; Cactus Wren; Climb These Steps (We Will); How Can This Be; Say You'll Be Mine; One Eyed Black Dog Moses

Tracks - Grand Parade; Budapest; Strike Me Down; Your Sweet Voice; I'll Be Here When You Wake; Where I Fall; Cartwheels; Last Song on Blue Tape; Cold Water; You Are My Joy; Who Told You; Whodunnit?

Tracks - Honky Tonk Maniac from Mars; I Dreamed My Baby Came Home; Bible and a Gun; Too High to See; James Dean's Car; Camille; One Less Heartache; Mother of Earth; Don't Come Home a Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind); Sun Don't Shine; Erin's Seed; Last Train to Memphis

Tracks - The Cool Song; Take a Dance with Me; Goodbye Emily Lang; Oh, I Have Left the Ground; Strangers Out of Blue; A Nice Bottle of Wine; Cornerman; She Married a Cowboy; Failure #1; Bookstore; Into the Forest; I'm Coming Home #2

Tracks - Age of the Sun; Ultraviolet Orchestra; That Ole Sun; Everything is Waking; Digging to China; A Better Way to Be; An Illuminated Array; See Yourself; Inside the Nebula; Hide in the Light; Sail Beyond the Sunset; A 93 Million Mile Moment; Mr. Summer Day; 72 Years; Cycles of Time; Le-Roi Soleil

Not to be completely outdone by former bandmate Will Cullen Hart's solo release from 2001 (The Circulatory System), ex-Olivia Tremor Controller Bill Doss leaves most of OTC's experimentation behind and spews forth his obvious pop-prowess on this, his first full-length release since tranforming into The Sunshine Fix. Led-off by the extraordinarily trippy - and eerily timeless - title track, Age of the Sun is a solar-obsessed, pure psychedelic-pop delight. Doss (backed by the usual Elephant 6 alumni) has assembled an album of crystal-clear, beautifully produced pop that will - within the psych-pop genre - be hard to top this year and shouldn't disappoint fans of OTC and the Elephant 6 Recording Company either. Don't get me wrong, Age of the Sun is not a masterpiece (the production and playing is admittedly more impressive than the tunes themselves) and it probably won't convert the non-converted, but it is for the most part a fine sonic achievement and a strong debut long-player. Highlights include: the title-track, "Digging to China", the 'funky' "See Yourself" and the lovely "Cycles of Time". Warning: the album closes on a bizarre 20-minute note that defies description!

Tracks - Behold the Miracle; I Feel Fine; Near to You; Smile; Crush on You; Cupid; The Power of Your Tenderness; Vampire's Claw; Secret Heart; You Rock; Love's Taken Over; The Good Thing

Tracks - I Am Trying to Break Your Heart; Kamera; Radio Cure; War on War; Jesus, Etc.; Ashes of American Flags; Heavy Metal Drummer; I'm the Man Who Loves You; Pot Kettle Black; Poor Places; Reservations

Tracks - 7 Months, 39 Days; Broke, Lovesick and Driftin'; Cecil Brown; Lovin' and Huggin'; One Horse Town; Mississippi Mud; Whiskey, Weed and Women; Trashville; Walkin' with Sorrow; 5 Shots of Whiskey; Nighttime Ramblin' Man; Callin' Your Name; Atlantic City