Annually, The Village Voice polls music critics for the year's best albums and calls it Pazz & Jop. Beyond list frenzy, Pazz & Jop allows all of us to go back to the record stores to sample our peers' choices. Below, I begin to report my findings.

The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow (Sub Pop)
Bored with aloofness, they now mumble with meaning, even enunciate a little. This commitment to specifics lifts everything. The throwaway rockers jump and play and make you want to dance. The ballads hurt and mourn and sound desperately lonely. Plus, James Mercer starts to write lyrics of elliptical preciseness, whatever the hell I mean by that. Best of the bunch: "Gone for Good," where Mercer finds unique, imaginary, precise ways to tell his lover goodbye in each and every verse.

Junior Senior, D-D-Don't Stop the Beat (Atlantic)
If you can, cast your mind back to 1999 and Beck's Midnite Vultures. Remember all his talk about intelligently dumb dance music? Didn't work, did it? Why? Because Beck wasn't clever enough to get freaky. He over-thought his approach, and it only sounded antiseptic. So much for intelligence. Now comes this album, a perfectly dumb dance record the way it should be done. Go Junior, go Senior, there's a fire on the dance floor, do you think I'm dynamite, et cetera, et cetera. The point is mindless hooks that enchant each time they come around again. One guy's gay, one's straight, which means this band loves everybody equally. Between them and the Michael Jackson sound-alike on "Move Your Feet," they do more for civil unions than any San Francisco mayor could imagine.

The Sleepy Jackson, Lovers (Astralwerks)
He can do everything once — George Harrison hippie tune, psychedelic rock, piano ballad. His mixtape of an album will catch you at your every mood: reflective, wistful, anxious, agitated, silly. As with so many chameleons before him, he could use a back story, a point of view. But for right now, his only point is pleasure, and you will enjoy these songs' deft construction. His synthesis of real feelings is so convincing he makes you hope he grows some organic ones of his own soon.

The Darkness, Permission to Land (Atlantic)
Leave this on in the other room, and it's like '80s hard rock never went away. (Or maybe it's just Andrew W.K.'s idea of '80s hard rock.) Up close, the songs are dumb dumb dumb. Smart dumb, sometimes. Just plain dumb, other times. But the 21st century has done a good job of thrusting acts upon us who merely wish to entertain by conjuring the past expertly and without context. I get the joke, and I enjoy it. But, honestly, "love is only a feeling"? Well, yeah, duh. Is that Spinal Tap knowledge? They don't really mean it, do they? People who ask nothing of their music will love this balls-to-the-walls feast. Just don't think.

Steely Dan, Everything Must Go (Reprise)
For everybody other than me, this is a worthless record — even some of Steely Dan's biggest supporters were down on it. But I forgive Donald Fagen and Walter Becker a lot, and here I go again. Tastefulness is the fine line they dance upon each time out, and, yes, the boys pile on so many sax solos that you may swear off jazz forever. But Becker's appearance as one cool cat behind the mic almost makes me want to get his solo album from a dozen years back. I can't do that, of course: Don't want to be that much of an obsessive completist. Meanwhile, Fagen's worldview of endless lounge, endless wit, endless despair raises mediocre material to a slightly higher level. His persona trumps the album so easily that I did break down and buy his first solo record from more than 20 years ago. I won't buy his second one, though. Wouldn't want people to think I'm just pathetic, now do I?

Scrubs, Tuesdays on NBC
John C. McGinley has worked like a dog for years, popping up in Oliver Stone movies and Office Space. One of a billion anonymous, recognizable bit actors, he's been spoiling for the right role, and he's currently making the most of it. As Dr. Perry Cox, McGinley enhances and grounds Bill Lawrence's too-quirky great sitcom, playing a cranky guy who would very much like to lose all outward signs of emotional connection so as to move easier through life. As a mixture of comedy and sentiment, the show sometimes chickens out, going for the zany laugh as if to assure us that we are, in fact, just watching one more stupid sitcom. But as with a recent episode when McGinley's arrogant, defensive Dr. Cox finally realizes the best friend he's been talking to has been dead for two days, Scrubs understands that humor is a weak shield we lift to battle everything else that just isn't funny: jobs, death, relationships, family. And unlike M*A*S*H, Lawrence and McGinley doesn't hide behind a laugh track to prove it.

The Return (Kino International)
Be lazy and say that Andrei Zvyagintsev is a master of mood, tone, all the rest. To be more accurate, though, he evokes basic emotions from our most elemental surroundings: high dives, childhood, brothers, pouring rain, freezing lakes, the forest, fathers. In good Russian storytelling tradition, his movie plays like a fable, whose moral is most definitely "nobody knows anybody." Zvyagintsev skimps on narrative follow-through — two boys on a trip with their long-gone dad, that's it. And yet the ending's twists and shocks force you to realize how much this slim tale has sucked you in when you weren't noticing anything happening.

My Architect (New Yorker Films)
Over two cringe-heavy hours, we learn the following: Artists don't always make good dads; artists don't always make the best husbands; artists don't always make great human beings; artists are complex, difficult, unknowable people. Most of you probably don't need a movie to tell you these things, so why didn't anyone explain this to Nathaniel Kahn, son of the late, famed architect Louis Kahn? Nathaniel's determination to make a "personal" documentary of his journey to find clues about the father he barely knew will be of mild interest to architecture students. But even the curious may lose patience with a narrator so boring, so insignificant, so shamelessly trying to tie his name to a great man's legacy. Louis Kahn risked, suffered, made some questionable personal choices — and look what he accomplished. His abandoned son opens a lot of doors on the cache of blood relation, but he'll never possess an artist's soul or guts. Watching his wimpy musings, you're tempted to decide Nathaniel doesn't deserve his lineage or the right to understand his dad.

Down and Dirty Pictures (Simon & Schuster)
After slogging through the most boring, unsurprising Oscar ceremony in memory, it's hard to hate the showbiz theatrics of one Harvey Weinstein, the man who made the ceremony interesting over the last 10 years. Granted, Peter Biskind's book reveals all the evils Weinstein brought to the Academy Awards: ruthless campaigning, dirty politics, awards as the end-all-be-all. But Biskind's tsk-tsk style of juicy gossip and bitchy reporting would be nothing without a Miramax, just as Easy Riders, Raging Bulls couldn't have existed without '70s directors willing to take risks. Biskind loves the dirt, but he doesn't seen enamored of the work that goes into movies. On occasion, he has perceptive comments about a filmmaker's work — would that someone during Tarantino's reign could have been so clear-eyed in their commentary. But mostly, he drains the fun out of creativity. Sure, Hollywood is full of evil bastards. But even the biggest jackasses strike gold every once in a while. That's what makes filmgoing fun, Peter.

Consumables is a biweekly overview of popular culture.