The album lacks the visceral, immediate impact of the best beat poetry and frequently seems fueled by self-consciousness instead of stream-of-consciousness.

Melodic, wistful, whimsical, reflective, yet clever, the album showcases Hatfield at her peak, crafting fragile, endearing post-jangle pop songs that reveal themselves shyly and sweetly.

Messy, noisy, directionless, and painfully shy on both tunes and purpose... and winds up sounding a bit like a parody.

It has the same combination of sweetly sentimental ballads and endearingly gaudy dance-pop that made One More Time.

A dense, plunderphonic kaleidoscope of an album with giant, noisy jazz breaks and groovy electronic synthwork.

Constantly yields new musical surprises.

Much of This Time Around feels like a conscious attempt at furthering their craft, defining their sound, and honing their songwriting skills. In other words, it's a stab at maturity.

You can't tell if Wishville is the sound of a band losing steam or just being too self-conscious.

Although it is never overpowering, Dusty Trails is too well crafted to be reduced to mere background music.

The album has a more polished feel than its predecessor Up a Tree, as well as more of an electronica vibe...

Their brightest, most accessible album to date... the band is absolutely brimming with confidence and vitality.

To call Bachelor No. 2 a masterpiece may be overstating the matter somewhat, since an album this intimate and unassuming (but not unconfident) doesn't call attention to itself the way self-styled masterpieces do. However, it isn't hyperbole to call it the finest record Mann has made to date.

Their most accessible album to date, lacking the flights of fancy and exuberant bizarreness that have marked each of their albums.

The album is not the flawless statement against complacency the band seemed to strive for, but it succeeds at tearing heads off, shooting fascists, and quickly asking questions later with unbelievable fury. For these reasons alone, it easily serves as one of the band's highest marks.

A pleasant sound, to be sure, but not exactly what Young followers were expecting.

A return to their early-'60s Beatlesque sound...

A collection of more shimmering, weightless pop that is nostalgic for yesterday's visions of the future but remains on the cutting edge of contemporary music.

Even though you wouldn't call the sound upbeat, it is indeed mesmerizing, tranquil, and head-bobbing.

Even if it is a very impressive statement overall, Figure 8 isn't quite the masterpiece it wants to be -- there's something about the pacing that just makes the record feel long...

With Return of Saturn, No Doubt have made a terrific, layered record that exceeds any expectations set by Tragic Kingdom.

With Come to Where I'm From, Joseph Arthur shows a willingness to ease up on the stifling angst that dominated his previous efforts. To be sure, the album still has more than its share of gut-wrenching misery -- there's no shortage of lines like "I feel like taking a razor blade and on my wrist write an invitation" -- but this time out, the anguish is balanced by healthy doses of self-awareness and a winking sense of humor.

A remarkably spare and focused collection?

Reed genuinely seems to be stretching towards new lyrical and musical ground here, but while some of his experiments work, several pointedly do not?

MDFMK charts the same breakbeat industrial-thrash that has long been a staple of any KMFDM album, complete with ranting vocals, aggressive songwriting, heavy-metal chords that sound vaguely familiar, and solid programming that reveals a surprising pop sense.

Another handsome, shaded, and satisfying work from an artist that has reconnected with her muse.

Marshall?s sparest album yet, The Covers Album uses guitar and piano as the only foils for her malleable, emotional voice.

An interesting album, spooky in spots, but other than the terrific "Slow and Steady," this one's a curiosity.

This is music to listen to when you're either very depressed, in order to feel the camraderie, or when you're very happy, in order to mellow out.

A hit-and-miss affair.

Contemplative electronic mood-music in a minor key-

Overall, MACHINA meanders due to a combination of amorphous songs and precisely detailed production.

The most surprising thing about the album is that it sounds exactly like classic Steely Dan, but without feeling dated.

No matter whose music he was reformulating, however, Orbit worked gently, creating an album that, if it technically belonged beside Wendy Carlos' Switched-On Bach, actually was more reminiscent of Brian Eno's Discreet Music.

Easily one of 2000's most accomplished albums, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out may not be as immediately appealing as some of the group's more upbeat albums, but it's just as enduring, proving that Yo La Tengo is the perfect band to grow old with.

Bloodflowers boasts all of the Cure's signatures: stately tempos, languid melodies, spacious arrangements, cavernous echoes, morose lyrics, keening vocals, long running times. If you want something transcendent, you're out of luck, since the album falls short of the mark, largely because it sounds too self-conscious.

This will still strike most as a mighty odd record, though. Ostensibly much of this record was inspired by former president Richard Nixon (there is even a suggested reading list of Nixon-related books on the sleeve). But there are no direct references to him, and even any indirect ones are so oblique that you'd never make the connection if the record had a different title...

Whereas many of the songs on their previous album sounded unfinished and rushed, The Night sounds like a fully realized work.

Though it's starkly rhythmic where Cornershop songs like "Brimful of Asha" are lush and trippy, Singh's appealing vocals and the duo's accessible songwriting provide the link between their two projects.... however, too many of these good ideas drag on for too long without progressing.

Luckily her sixth full release has some true charm, with some fine blue-eyed soul and slickly produced rock. But the production tries too hard to align her with Sheryl Crow's growling sound.

It comes off a little too sweet, much like running through an ice cream shop and sampling all the flavors rather than eating a proper dinner.

Musically, Midnite Vultures is filled with wonderful little quirks, but these are undercut by the sneaking suspicion that for all the ingenuity, it's just a hipster joke.

Pawn is immediately grabbing, and instead of fading upon further plays, it reveals more with each listen, whether it's a lyrical turn of phrase or an unexpected twist in the arrangement.

Handsome Boy Modeling School succeeds where so many compilations fail. It's a great album from start to finish.

At base, Contino is a reasonably entertaining and sometimes quite compelling combination of slower dance aesthetics translated into rock & roll terms and sounds. It just isn't the end of the world, that's all.

Parts of One Part Lullaby work very well, but it's also curiously flat. The modern rock production feels two years out of date -- shiny and commercial for 1996-1997, but an anomaly in 1999. ... That's not to say One Part Lullaby is a failure -- when Barlow and Davis pull it all together, the results are as strong as anything else the duo has recorded. As a whole, however, it winds up being strangely unengaging.

Stephin Merritt's most ambitious as well as fully realized work to date, a three-disc epic of classically chiseled pop songs that explore both the promise and pitfalls of modern romance through the jaundiced eye of an irredeemable misanthrope.

One of the most assured, propulsive full-lengths the dance world had seen since Daft Punk's Homework.

Not just the best album of 1999, The Soft Bulletin might be the best record of the entire decade.

Though it's hard not to miss the gloriously messy sprawl of Pavement at their peak, this carefully crafted, languid recasting of their signature sound is effective and winds up as a fitting, bittersweet farewell for the best band of the '90s.

Moby shows himself back in the groove after a long hiatus, balancing his sublime early sound with the breakbeat techno evolution of the '90s.

If the preceding Dusk at Cubist Castle was the Olivia Tremor Control's very own White Album, then the labyrinthine Black Foliage is their Smile -- it's an imploding masterpiece, a work teetering on the cliff's edge between genius and madness.

13's strange, frustrating combination of expert musicianship and self-indulgence reveals the sound of a band trying to find itself.

Central Reservation is first and foremost a record about hope and survival ... but its underlying message of healing and perseverance is powerfully life-affirming -- her music hasn't merely discovered the light at the end of the tunnel, it's now bathing in it.

And though it is a disappointing record compared to the group's high-flying previous albums, it displays Underworld's talents well.