This trip is an easy, late-summer cruise. [Oct 2006, p.142]

Here, they combine hardcore punk’s combat-boot side with its tortured-noise side, layering what sounds like scores of tsunami-distortion guitars over an atomic-speed drum blitz to attain rarely witnessed levels of obliteration (think Black Flag reincarnated as psychotic yetis).

Strangely compelling. [Nov 2004, p.129]

Feuled by a ninth-grader's nausea they refuse to grow out of, they take their skateboards and chase down the horizon. [Mar 2009, p.64]

[Finn] tells better stories than anyone else in music these days. [Oct 2006, p.131]

The emotional peaks are so sharp, the wordplay so juicy, that all excesses are redeemed.

Their most violently inventive album yet. [Nov 2003, p.109]

Lambert has a strong voice, if not an exceptionally pretty one, and it suits her badass hell-raising much better than it does quiet laments like "Desperation." [May 2007, p.107]

S-K swagger like they never have before, eschewing the filler that made their last few records drag. [#9, p.157]

Buck ingeniously borrows from dub, metal and country to capture his characters' woozy worlds. [Mar 2005, p.137]

A gentle, reflective and often gorgeous album. [Nov 2005, p.132]

Their most sure-footedly solemn performances to date. [Nov 2003, p.114]

Utterly entrancing. [Jun/Jul 2002, p.104]

The songs on Fever to Tell swerve like they're being followed by the police, constantly changing and transforming. [May 2003, p.124]

With the groundbreaking stab at emo self-analysis, Cursive deserve at least a boost out of the emo ghetto. [Apr 2003, p.122]

It's conceptually daring, but beyond a few ecstatic moments... the sound is familiarly Bjorkish. [Oct 2004, p.113]

It may not hold the attention of anyone who's been out of diapers more than five years. [#8, p.124]

The result approaches sublimity, but remains geared toward dance floors. [#13, p.96]

Rancid find plenty of ways to bend punk's rules. [Sep 2003, p.127]

Pay too much attention to these songs, and they dissolve into sweetly harmonized meaninglessness. [Apr 2004, p.130]

Their propulsive intensity busts down garage doors, stumbling only with the wrongheaded ersatz cocktail ballad. [#8, p.117]

Feverish and bruised, dense as chowder, the songs describe danger and alienation in distressed voices. [May 2004, p.128]

This return to murky obscurantism, thankfully, comes with a return to guitar noise. [Jun 2005, p.115]

What's most frustrating about them is precisely what's most appealing: Their refusal to write traditional songs, coupled with their giggling nature-child personas, adds an air of mystery and makes for some beautifully offbeat melodies. [Nov 2005, p.131]

His new take scythes through the original, revealing growls and guitars long obscured—sometimes it’s distracting, but often it lends the songs a newfound jolt.

Despite Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga's adventurousness, it's highest points end up being the most conventional. [August 2007, p.112]

On [Takk...], the band opens up emotionally, warming up their lengthy jams to a slow burn to create intoxicating, meditative rock. [Oct 2005, p.143]

After decades, Waits's theater of musical cruelty is familiar stuff. But the old dog's tricks still have bite. [Applies to both Alice and Blood Money, Jun/Jul 2002, p.111]

This is Jay-Z's suicide note and his glowing eulogy rolled into one. [Jan 2004, p.106]

It's an "important" record... But, more crucially, it's an enduringly entrancing listen. [Apr 2006, p.123]

The most tightly hook-larded, colorfully produced, listenable Decemberists record to date. [Nov 2006, p.138]

This is one helluva piece of singer-songwriter art. [Nov 2005, p.129]

A gently involving and moving album, Yoshimi could be the negative image of Radiohead's Kid A: the sound of a rock band using electronica to make music that's inclusive and warm instead of icy and aloof. [#8, p.114]

The whiff of apocalypse is unmistakable. Yet the scent of wildflowers and lovers’ musk wins out.

Consistently compelling. [Oct 2003, p.116]

The idea is to build a monorail between Aphex Twin and Stax Records; the songwriting eventually slacks off, but Lidell's performances don't. [Aug 2005, p.111]

A giddy funhouse of a record. [Oct 2005, p.136]

Its surging orchestrations and and acoustic subtelties seem willfully out of step with current trends, taking time to reveal their unique, and very British, charms.

The Cameras mix sex and spirituality over a gorgeous bed of organs, harps and 12-part harmonies. [May 2003, p.120]

There's an exhilarating, disorienting sense of freedom tot he album, the ruse of rules being ignored. [Aug 2008, p.79]

Sensitivity in excess. [#11, p.142]

Malin convincingly wraps his tortured warble around the dust-caked tunes. [#14, p.139]

Their final album is no solemn headstone. The languid beats are hazy with heat-distortion organs and porny electric guitars; the spirit is carefree.

Staggers under the unbearable preciousness of donkey-voiced singer Colin Meloy. [Sep 2003, p.122]

In a style gentler and more richly textured than the crudely amplified minimalism of the series’ debut by Konono N°1, the songs swell in and out of expansive and hypnotic patterns, forming clouds of interwoven rhythms.

Out Of Season's usefulness as ambience almost trumps its self-importance and paucity of standout material. [Dec 2003, p.136]

Whatever style the Roots take on their eighth album, whether it’s 21st century Sly Stone ("Baby"), flute-inflected freak-folk ("Living in a New World") or epic black rock ("Game Theory"), they do better than anyone else in pop.

His Who-tastic riffs remain belligerent and plentiful, but Pollard sounds grimmer, as if the former grade-school teacher suddenly realizes that touring in a van past age 40 isn't as much fun as he expected. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.111]

This is Love’s ultimate achievement. A band long broken up, and so majestic they’ve been relegated to history books, has been refashioned in a way that makes a fresh and startling presentation of songs as familiar as the Ten Commandments.

THe result is like a cross between R.E.M. and Coldplay, but Idlewild show their true smarts by continuing to attack every track with youthful energy and passion. [Apr 2003, p.124]

There are solid songs here... but the spliced-on attempts at gritty authenticity make every note on this record sound test-marketed. [#18, p.121]

[Holland] has been rather mistakenly compared to Billie Holiday; she’s more like Jeff Buckley covering Nina Simone, turning a very modern ear toward yesterday.

Marred only by incredibly pompous liner notes and a lack of worthy rarities. [#23, p.122]

[Brock is] adept at wringing out emotion while straddling sentimentality, but too often here, gauche studio affectations make his sap sound plain cheap. [Apr 2004, p.134]

Be picks up where West's The College Dropout left off. [Jun 2005, p.113]

Though less dynamic, the weary mid-tempo arrangements embody the album’s crushing hopelessness, tempered only by John Neff’s elegant pedal steel.

Her understated grooves... ooze natural-woman sex appeal. [Oct 2003, p.122]

The Coxon-less Blur seem half a band, adrift in a loopy, moody head cold. [May 2003, p.115]

At their most thrilling, they fuse the spiky cool of Elastica with the witty self-consciousness of LCD Soundsystem. [Sep 2005, p.131]

A riot of black humor, sex mania and mean-eyed, chaotic rock.

It'll do just fine for now. But here's hoping for a torturously difficult third album. [Oct 2005, p.140]

At 72 minutes, the gorgeous gloom of It Still Moves lasts a bit longer than it has to--but it offers a host of tarnished gems along the way. [Sep 2003, p.126]

Now and then, the energy lags. But mostly, Sugarland’s shameless mining of VH1 Classic hooks keeps their more tepid tendencies in check.

These surging, wordy confessionals are sometimes redemptive but never maudlin. [May 2005, p.121]

The stiff, weirdly disengaged, single-note guitar solos and Kidman’s monochromatic death screams don’t make you want to keep dragging yourself through the record.

The unhurried, full-retail rock arrangements are splashed with lite-R&B syncopations and snazzy-jazz harmonies. [Apr 2006, p.111]

They go for punk rock at the most physical level, until their rhythms feel almost like a rave, as in the seven-minute 'Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came From an Angel).'

Problem is, Blood Mountain's hail of convoluted riffs and abrupt time-signature changes never settles into one of Leviathan's mammoth grooves. [Oct 2006, p.137]

Charming and enrapturing, adrift in its own unique, invented world. [#11, p.142]

What elevates the Monkeys into a class of their own is Turner. [Apr 2006, p.113]

And if he occasionally errs on the side of self-indulgence... so be it; for every moment of youthful overreach, there's another that shows a promising new talent in first bloom. [Aug/Sep 2001, p.121]

His ornate, piano-driven arrangements cite a wide variety of musical sources, from indie pop to Gershwin to trip-hop and back again. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.116]

Sparxxx is no producer's creation. His lexicon is deep, his diction clear and his words resolute. [Sep 2003, p.130]

Some selections are heartwrenching... But others bear the stain of sentimentality, denial, even exploitation. [Jul 2006, p.98]

Prog was rarely as songful as the brutal beauty here.

Mastodon present a prog-metal concept that would make Stephen Hawking bang his head.

Her lustrous music can err on the side of sleepy, because she prefers atmospherics and tricky harmonies to blaring hooks. [Apr/May 2002, p.116]

So diffuse and mechanical, it sounds as if it were recorded by rebellious microchips in a German laboratory. [#13, p.103]

Case's own melodies aren't nearly as indelible as the country classics she's emulating. [#10, p.115]

A beautifully contained album, short in length and miniaturist in vision. [#14, p.135]

The best of Shadows lives in murky half-light where texture matters as much as melody. [Oct 2004, p.112]

The album's plush and detailed enough to invite extensive exploration, and varied enough to not get exhausting. [Oct 2005, p.135]

It's Banhart's gift for melody that ultimately carries the day. [Nov 2004, p.128]

Darker and colder than its predecessor but, surprisingly, more fun. [Jun 2005, p.109]

They’ve upped the sonic oomph a notch, leaning on the piano, violin, xylophones and perfectly mangled Pavement-style guitar mess.

In the tradition of thorny newbie bands that get scarily too big (Nirvana, Radiohead, Weezer), they’ve followed their funny, catchy debut with a less funny, less catchy second record to prove how little they trust the good times their music obviously inspires.

The results range from stupid to sexy to irresistably stupid. [Jan/Feb 2005, p.103]

Sadly, distracting overembellishments dog her sixth album. [#14, p.133]

Beginning with "Further On (Up The Road)," Springsteen finds his footing and rides out the album on a stirring high note. [#9, p.140]

The Renaissance hints at newness, but its cushy boom-bap grooves, airy soulfulness and rhymes about struggle and redemption recall rap’s Edenic “golden age.”

Things get almost crushingly heavy, but he fights through his nightmares like he's one spastic stab in the dark from flicking on a night light. [Apr 2008, p.77]

Her music is exhilarating, enigma-packed and, despite the unceasing noise barrage, winningly sweet.

The boldest album of their career. [Mar 2005, p.141]

Muscularly arranged with bongolated beats, psychedelic swamp guitars, boogie-woogie pine top and snowballing chorus hooks, Just Us Kids approximates a certain literate strain of early-'80s album rock.

Rooty boasts a raw, bustling edge and compulsive experimentalism closer in spirit to the hypersyncopated, R&B-flavored two-step garage currently ruling London clubland. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.104]

The Mekons can do anything, because no one told them they couldn't, and they do it better than almost anyone else. [#9, p.152]

They've all but abandoned 4/4 grooves, discarded bass as an inefficient distraction and fractured their beats into splintery beatlets that detonate in flurries. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.105]

Subduing the bright tinge of her country-flavored roots rock, Essence's acoustic musings mix Delta blues with Nick Drake-style nocturnal intimacy, while Williams's voice limits itself to a hushed drawl. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.102]