Two Thousand is nothing if not well crafted; that it doesn't have more memorable moments is as frustrating as it is mystifying.

The record is very reminiscent of the Sounds' 2006 release Dying to Say This to You, because of the sassy, provocative vocals as well as the overall mood.

Necessary if you like that wikki-wikki-scratch; recommended if you enjoy impossible pop and hip-hop from the fringe.

Muse have really done it this time.

It's a poetic work of circling guitars and melodic phrases and vocal lines repeating and layered like monastic chants.

Even if it's not as traffic-stopping as her debut, this album suggests that she can keep her music interesting for the long haul.

Stevens constructed an alternate version of Illinois that is almost as good as the original.

Intensely focused and steady.

It's not quite focused enough to place among the best of his other work.

The Silver Lining suggests that Soul Asylum might still have another great album in them (especially if Murphy does more of the songwriting), but this one certainly isn't it.

Most of the musical content is diaphanous and fleeting.

There's still a kind of inconsistency in the development of Through the Windowpane, an inconsistency that can't quite work itself out in sweeping strings and vaguely dissonant chords, and unfortunately, this diminishes the power of what the album really could be.

Listening to this album, one can't get around the knowledge that it is a posthumous collection made in Cash's last days, but even without that context, it would have much the same impact.

As the album carries on, it becomes more and more evident that this albums is less about sex than a statement about the overblown pretentiousness and drama surrounding many of the bands with artistic merit that are popular, circa 2006.

The album is a major production.

The album is gentler and falls much closer to the feeling of The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most.

The majority of Fundamental is like the majority of their great album Behavior in that repeat listens are required to do these rich songs justice.

The Return of Dr. Octagon doesn't always make a lot of sense, but that's the beauty of it.

While it's hard not to be overtaken with a sense of nostalgia while listening to this album if you knew these songs from back in the day, Phillips pulls them out of their original context and in the process reveals their strength is more timeless than one might have imagined.

If it weren't for the album's studio polish, it'd feel like an extremely well-recorded concert -- it has the ebb and flow of a good live set, and its expansive warmth ends up making its length work in its favor.

Timbaland has revitalized Nelly Furtado both creatively and commercially.

Die-hard fans might rush to judge Under the Iron Sea as sounding a bit too much like U2.

Her self-titled debut sounds a wee rushed and sometimes meanders its way into background music territory, but this comfortable effort is pleasingly homegrown, warm, and poignant in parts.

He emerges here as a more "traditional" kind of songwriter; the tunes are more conventional in structure, but like his spiritual mentor Leonard Cohen, Staples' lyrics are rooted firmly in the terrain of love, loss, regret, passage, dissolution, and absence.

Ganging Up on the Sun is the work of a band who matters.

It's not bad, it's just not as profound as Shineywater and Hughes would like everyone to believe it is.

Yes, Victory for the Comic Muse has its funny moments, its sad asides, and some of the now standard Nyman minimalist moments, but in the Divine Comedy's overall discography it's a rather slight and often flat affair with unfortunate suggestions that Hannon might have milked the comic cow dry.

News and Tributes is a far cry from the all-out rush of fun of their debut. Ultimately, though, it's a stronger set of songs.

One can't help but think that just a little bit more spice might have elevated all of these beautiful ideas out of the trappings of their now painfully insular song structures.

It's like listening to early New Order records for the first time, waiting for the next one with a little bit of excited anticipation to see what's going to happen next with every new song.

In an era of bloated and overproduced albums, Moorer has delivered a small wonder with Getting Somewhere, and it ranks with her best music to date.

He makes his tracks entertaining, but he occasionally falls prey to a common trap -- educating the listeners but not enlightening them.

Though he's as loud as ever, he has never sounded more tired.

The Sun Awakens is the record he's been promising. Where School of the Flower was a leap, placing his singing and guitar playing in equal measure -- though there were numerous instrumental pieces -- The Sun Awakens is the place they burst forth, fully entwined, completely formed.

It's a solidly good album, and if taken as part of a trio of albums with Sonic Nurse and Murray Street, it shows that Sonic Youth is still in a comfortable yet creative groove, not a rut.

The album feels like getting to really know someone: at first, it's polite and a little restrained, but then its real personality, with all of its charming idiosyncrasies, finally reveals itself.

After decades of giving us good and even fine work, he's finally treated the faithful to a masterpiece.

Even as the guys stretch and flex their songwriting muscles, they never fail to remember where they came from, instead using their past work as the foundation to their essential growth.

Even though Be Your Own Pet were more consistent, or maybe just easier to keep up with, on their EPs, there's still plenty of hyperactive fun (or rather, fuuuuuun) to be found here.

You might not find heartache as enchanting as this anywhere else.

What makes the album rather extraordinary is that it's as much celebration as it is protest.

The work would not have been out of place on a more skeletal version of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

Unlike his early classics, Laugh Now stumbles occasionally and fails to keep the momentum going through the whole fourth quarter.

Regardless of tempo, these are some of the strongest, most involving songs the band has ever recorded.

Some serene, wide-angle numbers toward the end help a lot, making this safe album easier to recommend to the longtime trance addict.

This combination of quirky sounds and suave production lands the disc in musical territory that feels at once both innovative and familiar; something like Beck, Björk, and Velvet Underground meeting in a lazy Rio cantina only to discover they've all been listening to Stereolab and Nouvelle Vague.

With Garden, Zero 7 have created what could be the ultimate summer evening record: warm pop hooks, lush instrumentation, unobtrusive electronica elements, and '60s-style harmonies that all come together into superb, wonderfully descriptive songs.

It's their simplicity and lack of pretense that's so refreshing to hear and what makes Free to Stay so listenable.

It's the sound of the band maturing, and while it's certainly more laid-back than any of Live's previous records, that low-key approach feels right for the music on Songs from Black Mountain and helps make it one of their most consistent and successful records.

It's not earth-shaking, but it's far better than nearly any other reunion of this kind.

You don't have to like, or even see, Who Loves the Sun to be moved by McCaughan's work here.

Presents more of the same disconcerting, cacophonous, yet strangely melodic and catchy music that always seems to find frontman John Congleton on the verge of going absolutely insane.

Citrus is as good a shoegaze record you will ever hear, regardless of release date.

Vintage Burden is among the most beautiful, subtle, and moving records this band has ever made.

Though Herbert has outdone himself and matches his ambitions with his achievements, the songs are unmistakably his and Siciliano's, sounding like no one else, twisting and swinging and drifting with optimum vibrancy.

It's quite possibly Patton's most accessible album since his Faith No More days.

The Drift isn't an equally severe leap from Tilt [as Tilt was from Climate of Hunter], but it is darker, less arranged, alternately more and less dense, and ultimately more frightening.

We Don't Have to Whisper is too doggedly dour and amorphous to be more than a curiosity.

[The] lack of zest in the production is forgivable because Taking the Long Way is otherwise a strong, confident affair.

Sonic rabble-rousing doesn't get much better than this.

Their performances sound more confident than ever.

An album that's more like the Walkmen's concerts than the meticulously crafted sound of their other albums.

The great majority of Stand Still, Look Pretty is tuneful, tastefully rootsy, and quite engaging country-pop.

Pleasant if undemanding listening.

Milian's weakness remains ballads; the few that are here are more like placeholders that merely apply some forced variety to the album.

It's brief and even a little slight, but it's almost as much fun to listen to as it must have been to make.

Nearly every single thing about this album is a shout-out to the Clash or Gang of Four, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but why not just listen to the originals instead?

Musically, the album is as hard as the group has ever gotten.

Espers II is both wondrous and troubling.

But even if Every Man for Himself was constructed with the mainstream in mind, it likely won't win any new converts, since at their core Hoobastank remains unchanged: their songs aren't particularly dynamic or catchy, the band doggedly follows alt-rock conventions as if adherence to clichés gives the group legitimacy, and Robb's pedestrian voice alternately disappears into the mix or veers flat when he holds a note.

From nearly anyone else, The True False Identity would be a striking and adventurous work, but given Burnett's body of work, there's no arguing he can do better.

Depending on how much Robin Guthrie you want in your life, Continental is either redundant or another reason to love him.

Pink is easily the most cohesive, adventurous, and straight-ahead rocking recording of their 12-year career.

Like all Ron Sexsmith albums, Time Being is reliable and expertly crafted, and contains a handful of cuts that will kick around in your head until the next one swoops in to replace them.

Though it runs out of steam slightly (at least in comparison to the pop art brilliance of the band's best songs) on its second half, Bang Bang Rock & Roll is a terrific debut, and Art Brut is smart, catchy, and fun.

With the help of Danger Mouse's platinum ear and intricate vocal productions, Green is revealed as a top-notch post-millennial soul singer.

[The songs] manage to be unified in a way that Young wanted Greendale to be but didn't quite pull off, yet they also stand on their own and are, overall, more memorable than those on Prairie Wind.

A pitch-perfect blend of Black Heart past and present, and a recording as accomplished as any that navigates similarly dark seas.

The resulting eleven tracks do not disappoint, striking the perfect balance between dissonance and melody with a backbeat that shakes the foundations of everything he's tried before.

There is a depth of emotion and seriousness here that had been missing on Sumday, Lytle's vocals have a gravity they lacked before, and the bandmembers seem to mean every note they play this time.

Whether she's writing original material or covering traditional tunes... the effect is the same. It's intimate, like a secret told readily.

The only complaint with the album is that all the angst and gloom can get pretty heavy at times, but if you are in the right mood, Last Secrets can play like the soundtrack to a broken dream.

Even if it's not as cohesive as their two previous albums, it's some of their best (and certainly most ambitious) work.

The bare-bone production combined with the relentless march of songs gives Stadium Arcadium the undeniable feel of wading through the demos for a promising project instead of a sprawling statement of purpose; there's not enough purpose here for it to be a statement.

Unlike such deservedly praised comeback albums from some of his peers -- such as Dylan's Love and Theft, the Rolling Stones' A Bigger Bang, Paul McCartney's Chaos and Creation in the Backyard -- Simon doesn't achieve his comeback by reconnecting with the sound and spirit of his classic work; he has achieved it by being as restless and ambitious as he was at his popular and creative peak, which makes Surprise all the more remarkable.

Snow Patrol's hungry rock sound only gets bigger and better this time around.

Without Feathers may lack its predecessor's apocalyptic vision, but it's a new direction for a group that was heading down an awfully familiar -- and extremely congested -- road.

The musical portion of her songs... takes a distant second place to her lyrics. Which is fine, because her words are so engaging, but it wouldn't hurt her to experiment a little more with chord progressions or keys.

Ignore the clunky lyrics... and Gulag Orkestar is an infinitely more appealing album.

It should not take the seasoned listener too long to grasp that Serena Maneesh transcend the narrow boundaries of shoegaze.

His previous album's excellence made it seem like Daedelus was working at his peak but amazingly he not only equals that album but surpasses it, creating his most satisfying album since his debut.

Simpatico... is the Charlatans' version of the Stones' Emotional Rescue: it's a groove-centric rock album, heavy on disco and reggae rhythms, where the overall vibe is more important than the individual songs.

In the 21st century, this is what singer/songwriter albums are supposed to sound like. The Boxing Mirror is brilliant, and it is his masterpiece.

How We Operate is strong, focused, and a complete pleasure to engage; its maturity and confidence is beyond anything they've released thus far, and the experimentalism brought into play on their other albums is here.

As a writer she's never been stronger.

The flashes of brilliance that were once routinely delivered by Havoc and Prodigy are few and fleeting here.

Pearl Jam hasn't sounded as alive or engaging as they do here since at least Vitalogy, if not longer.

It's not only a step forward for the band, but a re-embracing of the epic-length rock songs found at the roots of early heavy metal.