In 2005, the Toronto-based, Halifax-bred pop band Sloan released their first singles retrospective. The compilation, "A-Sides Win," presented the highlights of a decade in which the band churned out well over a dozen major Canadian hits in spite of remaining consistently obscure in the United States.

This year, with the confidence of a band secure in its legacy in their home country and seemingly indifferent to their commercial prospects abroad, the quartet released their most ambitious to work to date: "Never Hear The End Of It." "Never Hear The End Of It" is a sprawling 30 song epic that comes across like a dense thesis on the art of power pop songwriting. The funny thing is, if you were going to imagine a greatest hits album by a pop band that you'd never heard before, chances are that your imagination would come closer to the work on "Never Hear The End Of It" than the music on "A-Sides Win." Whereas the latter is an enjoyable, serviceable set of modern rock tunes, the former is like a perpetual stream of instantly memorable and vaguely familiar songs that mostly sound like classic rock radio smashes from a parallel universe.

Though the band is not particularly long on musical originality, all four of Sloan's songwriters are masters of their craft, and the album finds each of them peaking simultaneously. In order to keep the record at manageable length and preserve its unity, the group wisely allows the songs to flow into one another as a series of suites not unlike the second side of the Beatles' "Abbey Road" or Guided By Voices' lo-fi classic "Alien Lanes." None of the songs overstay their welcome, and some of the most brilliant moments on the record come from the lyrical context suggested by the transition of one song to the next. In particular, the highly ambivalent tone of "Right Or Wrong" suggests the melancholy center of a trilogy that kicks off with the giddy rush of a new romance in the preceding "Someone I Can Be True With" and concludes with the gnawing angst of the subsequent "Something's Wrong."

Set to a dreamy tangle of arpeggiated guitar chords and a gentle yet firm rhythm, this gorgeous duet from New York City's +/-'s latest album laments the passing of a relationship documented by the trading of artfully sequenced mixed tapes. As the lyrics mourn the loss of memories attached to "the transitions between the songs, the pacing and the side breaks," it's hard not to notice that the singers actually seem relieved by the destruction of their sentimental artifacts, as though they are trading nostalgia and the past for freedom and the future.

On the sequel to the German electronic label Monika Enterprise's "4 Women No Cry" compilation, a new quartet of unconnected female artists from London, New York, Berlin and Barcelona present a set of compositions that compliment each other's work while maintaining their distinct voices. Mico, aka Mieko Shimizu, is a Japanese artist working in London, and her quarter of the collection reflects both her background in scoring film soundtracks and her penchant for mutating hip-hop beats into meditative trances. "Signal Found" transforms the rhythm of fellow Londoner M.I.A.'s hit single "Galang" into stoned daze with a beat that moves at a pace that seems glacial in comparison to the aggressive thrust of the original.