First, the bad news.

Conventional compact-disc sales were down more than 10 percent from last year, as music consumers increasingly warmed to downloading music legally in 2005. (Digital album sales were up 214 percent, and digital song sales were up 154 percent.) Sony-BMG enraged millions of consumers paying full price for its CDs by encoding copy-protection software into its discs that left computers playing them vulnerable to Web-based viruses. (The pummeled company eventually recalled every disc.) And the Recording Industry Association of America continued filing lawsuits against thousands of peer-to-peer file sharers worldwide for trading music. (The good things in life are rarely free.)

The good news?

Recording artists still managed to turn out great music in spite of all the industry drama.

Here are the CDs that warmed this music writer's cynical heart most in 2005:

1. "EXTRAORDINARY MACHINE" BY FIONA APPLE (EPIC/CLEAN SLATE)

Things would really suck if Fiona Apple got happy. And three albums into her decade-long music career, the fiercely intelligent, wicked clever 28-year-old singer/songwriter and her seemingly endless well of misery — with life, the wrong-doin' menfolk drifting in and out of it, etc. — still makes surprisingly joyous stereophonic company. On "Machine," Apple's usual mushroom-cloud-layin' bile toward the opposite sex remains in all its rage-filled kiss-off glory. But there's something new at work in her lyrics, perhaps from some hard-won maturity since her last album in 1999: The ability to lay some of that ample breakup blame on herself. It doesn't hurt that Apple gets to wrap her expansive voice around her strongest batch of songs ever. Working with Eminem producer Mike Elizondo, who reworked original, Jon Brion-produced tracks (released illegally over the Internet last year), Apple also surrounds herself with brilliantly eclectic, yet accessible soundscapes. Her trademark percussive piano still holds much of the work together. But it's matched with lush orchestration, looped quasi-hip-hop beats, jazz and blues-reminiscent tempo shifts, and, on a couple of songs, tasty leftover remnants of Brion's baroque artiness. More sagely revelatory about relationship dust-ups than any jagged little pill, brimming with attitude and comfortable in its oddball uniqueness, "Extraordinary Machine" lives up to its name and then some.

2. "LCD SOUNDSYSTEM" BY LCD SOUNDSYSTEM (DFA/EMI)

With "LCD Soundsystem," Brooklyn club kid James Murphy has either crafted a debut work of classic dance floor genius or the best album of the year by a music nerd with too much vinyl in his closet. Murphy collects all of the requisite disparate hipster music genres for his sonic collages: alien disco, garage rock, acid house, post-punk, hip-hop, '80s skinny tie synths, etc. But rather than getting all mushy and melancholy about how good the good 'ol days of music were, Murphy — using the alias LCD Soundsystem — rips everything up over 16 wildly inventive tracks to create music wholly new and uniquely his own. He also kicks in witty, self-effacing lyricism throughout in the nerved electro-voice of a jaded, still-trying-to-be-cool-though-he-kind-of-hates-himself-for-it scenester. "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House" is the year's best radio-ready single you never actually heard on radio.

3. "Z" BY MY MORNING JACKET (ATO/RCA)

If Radiohead hailed from Louisville, Ky., and still deigned to include a whole lot of pre-"OK Computer" cosmos-traveling electric guitar in their songs, they might be mistaken for My Morning Jacket. That is, except for Jacket's occasional subtle sonic bow to folk and country roots rock, mild hip-hop and (yes, you really were feeling some) dub reggae. Guitarist/songwriter Jim James' dreamy tenor soars over and just above every impeccably crafted pop song on the band's fourth album. In a more perfect world, the infectiously jangly electrified, tinkling-piano sketched "What A Wonderful Man" would be all over rock radio and inspire the love of millions. Warm, strange, original and near flawless, "Z" is the work of a long-promising band finally achieving greatness.

4. "ARULAR" BY M.I.A. (XL/INTERSCOPE)

In-your-face physical and crazy brilliant, the debut album by London-raised Sri Lankan musician Maya Arulpragasam is — sorry Kanye — the real genre-defying rap album of the year. A childhood refugee of the Sri Lanka civil war, M.I.A. raps about the violence and marginalization endured by her people in barely comprehensible slang-rich lyrics, at once grenade-launching serious and clubland carefree. Exploding in and around it all: dancehall, bhangra beats, Miami bass, U.K. garage, crunk, old school electro and hip-hop, Brazilian funk and much more. "Arular" is as addictive as it is wildly revolutionary.

5. "FRANCES THE MUTE" BY THE MARS VOLTA (UNIVERSAL)

The Mars Volta don't want to be post-millennial rock show-offs. They just want rock music in the '00s to be a lot less boring. So matched up with a nonlinear lyrical suite about an orphan looking for his biological parents are visceral guitars, quiet acoustics, mind-warping time changes, salsa piano, Spanish folk, horns, strings, vocalist Cedric Bixler Zavala's glass-shattering tenor and, coqui frogs. Bonus: Lyrics are in English and Spanish. A tad self-indulgent and prog-rock concept album reminiscent? Maybe. But oh, the places you'll go.

6. "DEMON DAYS" BY GORILLAZ (VIRGIN/EMI)

Asking remix rebel Danger Mouse (late of the illegal-but-so-good-for-you Jay-Z/Beatles mash-up "The Grey Album") to replace departing producer Dan "The Automator" Nakamura was fearless leader Damon Albarn's first smart move on this sophomore Gorillaz disc. The second was getting the Pharcyde's Bootie Brown, Happy Mondays' Shaun Ryder, De La Soul, and even go-to nutjob Dennis Hopper to somehow taste great together.

7. "GET BEHIND ME SATAN" BY THE WHITE STRIPES (V2)

Any White Stripes fan worth his or her white blood cell count knows by now that the joy of each new release by the Detroit duo is finding out what Jack White has learned since the last White Stripes CD. This time out, fresh from producing Loretta Lynn's blooming "Van Lear Rose" and the folk-twisting soundtrack for "Cold Mountain," White grabs Americana by the throat and twists hard. Who's left with me for the next Stripes CD?

8. "YOU COULD HAVE IT SO MUCH BETTER" BY FRANZ FERDINAND (DOMINO/SONY)

We did, actually, on Franz Ferdinand's debut album, which — sorry again, Kanye — was the best CD of last year. But sticking to a formula they all but patented doesn't dampen the hooky, arty, energetic swagger of these great Scots any more than enjoying a second helping of a particularly tasty pot of haggis. The cheeky hipster anthem "Do You Want To" is essentially "Take Me Out, Part 2." Still, if you're gonna steal, home is an ideal place to start.

9. "IN BETWEEN DREAMS" BY JACK JOHNSON (BRUSHFIRE)

It's one thing to laud Jack Johnson's growing assuredness as a songwriter and admirably defiant intent to keep his music true to his own warm, acoustic muse. But what's truly cool about "In Between Dreams" is watching millions of music lovers fall head over heels for honest, personal songs that exist simply to make one feel good, and maybe, just maybe think a bit. May Jack never lose his dreamer's wanderlust.

10."THUNDER, LIGHTNING, STRIKE" BY THE GO! TEAM (COLUMBIA)

Oh Mickey, what a pity you don't understand: how an album punctuated by cheerleader chants, '70s-era cop-show theme and soul samples and double-dutch raps, layered with electronica, drum beats and soaring electric guitar could be one of the best of the year. The U.K. sextet's debut is a pastiche of refreshing inventiveness that tastes wholly new despite using a refrigerator's worth of leftovers.

Reach Derek Paiva at dpaiva@honoluluadvertiser.com.