“City is my church!” sings Anthony Gonzalez, flustered and passionate, engulfed by the head-rush synths and galactic beats of his instant-classic “Midnight City.” An ironic lyric, since the Frenchman’s tunes, more than just about anyone else’s, seem blueprinted to reverberate off the boundless walls of a distant Heaven. No city (or stadium) is huge enough to contain this guy’s epic art-pop A-bombs — only the afterlife will do.

Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is pure brilliance. So much atmosphere, so much ambition, so much euphoria. All 22 glorious tracks over two discs in spaced-out slumber-party succession is an

Wilco’s evolution from Uncle Tupelo detritus to post-Americana thinking-man’s jam band goes two steps back on their eighth studio album, and that’s a good thing.

Unlike recent comfort-zone efforts Wilco (The Album) and Sky Blue Sky, The Whole Love — the band’s first album on its own label, dBpm — feels like a truly audacious studio record, jam-packed with instruments, ideas, and the sort of restless creativity that marked 2002′s game-changer, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Historically, Ryan Adams has released, via labels or for download, every idea he’s put down on tape. The dude barely has a filter. Some consider him prolifically gifted, others annoyingly egotistical, but then when he waits a couple of years to drop something new, the anticipation is that much greater.

Ashes & Fire is as close as it gets to the brilliance of his first post-Whiskeytown offering, Heartbreaker. It’s a subdued affair, rarely breaking much more than an acoustic guitar– and light-piano sweat, except on the honky-tonk jangle of the title track.

Bias alert: 1996′s Endtroducing … DJ Shadow is one of the most firmly enduring perpetual motion machines in all of musical history, defying genre (“What was trip-hop, dad?”) and all preconceived notions regarding an hour filled with turntablism, spoken word, and Metallica samples. The beautiful and deeply-textured “world’s first entirely sampled album” (we won’t tell Guinness about Lyrics Born’s “It’s the money” cameo) was instantly both dated and timeless.

Six years later, The Private Press was as excellent as an arena-rock version could be, but four years wasn’t a long-enough incubation for The Outsider, which made hyphy unfun.

Feist should be making perfect albums every time. The occasional Broken Social Scene vocalist/multi-instrumentalist has one of the loveliest voices in all of pop, and when she bothers to marry those transcendent pipes to colorful backdrops, she’s in a league of her own.

But Metals, just like her sophomore release, The Reminder, falls short of that promise. Metals packs more sonic punch than its 2007 predecessor, but the problem here is not with recording quality — it’s libido.