Every track is stellar. [Aug 2004, p.133]

Handled with less love, this could feel like a smug wander through an ironic record collection. Here, it becomes sexy, life-affirming pop. [Aug 2004, p.141]

The doggedly retro approach ultimately muzzles the Noise COnspiracy's radical bite. [Nov 2005, p.136]

It flows like a scrapbook rather than a novel, but it portrays them as diligent experimenters and meticulous melodists who have been liberated by embracing restrictions. [Sep 2004, p.155]

The Hives aren't mere jokers, because they mix their novelty-band brio with the genuine anger and disgust of punk rock. [Aug 2004, p.126]

There isn't a song on her debut that doesn't paint in huge strokes. [Sep 2004, p.143]

Save all this stuff for when you're in front of the mirror, kids. [Aug 2004, p.131]

Benefits from a fatter recording budget, with swooping symphonic arrangements and dazzling melodies. [Aug 2004, p.138]

Even the most hardcore riddims here percolate with moments of silky soul, pop and gospel. [Aug 2004, p.128]

Too often... their ideas are dead ends. [Aug 2004, p.140]

It's hard to shake the feeling that this is a collection of dope beats in search of some rhymes. [Aug 2004, p.134]

A couple of great amped-up stormers... and a lot of nearly identical songs. [Jun/Jul 2004, p.145]

Classicism yields all the right stuff: alert sound with a lived-in feel, finely detailed tunes that shoot straight. [Aug 2004, p.140]

They come off more than ever like a caricature. [Aug 2004, p.130]

Kracker's Southernisms feel a little rote and undigested. [Aug 2004, p.142]

Organ-laced acoustic ballads like "Block Island" are a tad too drowsy for the disc's tough topics. [Aug 2004, p.134]

The bulk of One Monkey finds the boys trying too hard to distance themselves from their former weirdness. [Aug 2004, p.132]

A nicely loose-limbed collection. [Jun/Jul 2004, p.143]

While Banks's wicked wordplay is impressive, his one-liners get him only so far. [Jun/Jul 2004, p.134]

Feels like an episode of her growing-pains TV show Moesha. [Aug 2004, p.130]

On initial listen, the album is rather monotonous, a bunch of moderately singable tunes with some noise piled up around the edges.... After the fifth or twentieth listen, however, A Ghost Is Born starts to insinuate meaning. [#27, p.132]

While none of these spare summer jams of knotty beats match his Marvin Gaye-sampling 2001 hit "Music," almost any would freshen radio. [Aug 2004, p.139]

Jadakiss' flow is impeccable throughout. [Sep 2004, p.137]

He's labored, bombastic and pitch-challenged.... The lyrics are embarrassing. [Aug 2004, p.143]

The songs themselves don't amount to much... but they're basically an excuse for Ejstes's gloriously lysergic arrangements anyway. [Sep 2005, p.133]

This formula wears thin over the 15 cuts here. [#27, p.137]

The ballads are clunky and ponderous. The groove stuff, though... exists in that blissy stratosphere the Dead visited so often. [Aug 2004, p.138]

The mood is unsettling, exhausted and energetic at the same time. [Oct 2004, p.120]

They're not the first--or even the fifteenth--recent band to draw on that era [of the 1980s], but they're among the most assured. [#27, p.138]

Their most songful release since the major-label hellos Goo and Dirty, and by most standards their best since 1988's pivotal Daydream Nation. [#27, p.144]

This album stands on its own, with... an emphasis on beats rather than technical tricks. [#27, p.149]

If she lacks [Fiona] Apple's emotional complexity, her lovely and original debut finds the romance in despair. [Jun/Jul 2004, p.149]

Overly somber. [Aug 2004, p.131]

Angrier than ever, Bad Religion aim punk's adolescent fury at grownup targets. [Jun/Jul 2004, p.134]

A terrific joy bomb of power chords and power-pop keyboard riffs. [#27, p.142]

For an album almost four years in the making, it's frustratingly half-finished, like a series of preliminary sketches. [#27, p.142]

A showcase for Weiland's vocals. [#27, p.148]

Eighties punk-funk meets '60s idealism and reefer-toking? Make way for the hipster hippies. [#27, p.134]

Full of the sort of twitchy New Wave pop that really gets the hipsters' hips a-shaking. [Jun/Jul 2004, p.148]

The music tends to drift along unobtrusively.

Buffeted by big guitars, her thin, untrained voice occasionally sounds listless. [May 2004, p.118]

A set of abrasively melodic pop songs. [May 2004, p.124]

The group aims for a mix of artistry and cred, a la N.E.R.D. or the Beastie Boys, but their music is rarely as catchy. [Aug 2004, p.130]

She has deepened and darkened her sound without sacrificing her platinum-plated melodies. [#27, p.141]

The basic Slipknot sound has improved. [#27, p.147]

A rather polite album... but it's also comprehensively gorgeous. [#27, p.138]

Persson does sadness the way Eminem does anger: with a conviction that takes the breath away.

Kravitz has evolved merely from one set of retro-’70s surfaces to another, with uncharacteristically uninspired hooks.

Her signature sound -- voice snarling through a tangle of massed guitars -- is here, but so is a softer, more vulnerable tone. The melodies, while radio-ready, have a stomping insistence.

This set bogs down when the band flaunts its slow-chug technique at the expense of hooks and jokes. [#27, p.139]

A hedonistic debut that's thick with the stench of leatherette and fake fur. [Aug 2004, p.131]

Delays have found a way to combine the sparkling harmonies of the Byrds with the glorious noise of My Bloody Valentine, and still sound as fresh and surprising as a London heat wave. [#27, p.134]

A hip-hop Blood On The Tracks. [#27, p.143]

Feels like surprisingly generic party rap. [May 2004, p.126]

A prince's share of his royal talent survives. [Aug 2004, p.136]

Grand in scope, majestic in sweep and only 57 percent pretentious. [#27, p.143]

The Thermals are the rarest of punk bands: a three-chord, three-member outfit whose clamorous drive actually resolves into a riveting, accessible worldview. [#27, p.146]

The exact opposite of background music, A Grand Don’t Come for Free demands the same attention as a movie, and that’s why some people will hate it while others will find it uniquely riveting.

His best album since Vauxhall & I. [#27, p.140]

At times, i turns dangerously slow and arty.... But for the first time, [Merritt's] lethargic croak also emits a few degrees of human warmth. [May 2004, p.124]

Sometimes the tone is self-congratulatory, but a house band this glorious deserves some kind of standing ovation. [May 2004, p.127]

It's an attractive kind of stoner-folk, whose dimensions she controls on a minute level, with enough gradually shifting detail to get lost in. [#27, p.139]

Lost in an eerie, graceful torpor, he opens his mouth and lets words seep out and linger, like so much intoxicating smoke.

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

His wisest and warmest record yet. [#27, p.136]

For years, Smith has excelled in her profession as rock's great heroine; at its best, Trampin' sounds more like leisure time, but it still pays off. [May 2004, p.132]

[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.

If the comfy, mostly acoustic, fiddle-inflected tunes are pure Nashville craft, the lyrics speak bluntly about personal dislocation and loneliness. [May 2004, p.119]

The male affinity is so intense, it approaches homoeroticism. [#27, p.138]

For all their craft, the songs are bland and vague. [May 2004, p.126]

Some of the most gripping singing you're going to hear all year.... A brave, unrepeatable record that speaks to her whole life. [May 2004, p.123]

Less of the recent Jesus-jazz, more funk minimalism--so far so good.... But the once-and-future Prince doesn't seem to be rooting around in the rich melodies of "Raspberry Beret" or the frenetic nu-wave soul of "Uptown." [#27, p.144]

There are no future standards, but no sugary returns to childhood, either. [May 2004, p.124]

They’re crotch-pumping arena pimps and introverted minimalists.

Unlke many underground MCs, [Levine] doesn't use a $10 word if it'll compromise the beat. [May 2004, p.118]

There's a fine line between sounding passionate and overwrought, but [The Veils] find themselves on the proper side of that smudgy barrier--just. [Aug 2004, p.142]

Her voice--half dark, lazy molasses, half bourbon with a silky finish--rings with equal parts defiance and vulnerability. [May 2004, p.128]

Seachange wrap their songs in the glorious dissonance of Sonic Youth and the mighty alt-rock-meets-R&B rhythms of the Afghan Wigs, but underneath it all, they just want to creep you out. [May 2004, p.131]

The formula gets a bit stale. [May 2004, p.133]

Dub, metal, Okinawan folk, hip-hop and various strains of out jazz all inflect Blondie’s hooky popcraft, and they never pretend they’re something they’re not, such as young.

A debut on par with the music of Massive Attack, Underworld or Kruder & Dorfmeister.

The promising threesome spend most of their time in a creative rut, largely because of an unrelenting adherence to a diet of chunky beats and straightforward battle rhymes -- neither of which is particularly easy to digest.

Kweller's skeletal songs rely mostly on his acoustic guitar, garage-y riffs and swinging, Beatlesque piano. [Apr 2004, p.130]

[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]

The genius of Sexsmith’s seventh and best work is the way he surrounds (or, depending on your perspective, atones for) the empathy overload with deftly assimilated, gloriously ascendant pop hookcraft.

Shimmers with a newfound sophistication. [Apr 2004, p.136]

There's no unnecessary reverence, so the roots move that could have tagged Aerosmith as geezers proves instead that they're still wild boys. [May 2004, p.118]

His guitar reinvigorates age-old lines on neat and tidy arrangements, but he's even busier exploring the limited expressive range of his singing voice. [May 2004, p.119]

What's titillating about Damita Jo isn't some easy flash of sexuality, but the varied soundbeds that Jackson and her producers create to house her love games, and the confidence with which she plays. [May 2004, p.116]

A daring and triumphant concoction. [#27, p.140]

His songwriting isn't a strength, and his ballads often drown in their own inanity. [Apr 2004, p.132]

He has a dusky, intimate voice and a weakness for overwrought lyrics. [May 2004, p.126]

Proves that [You Forgot It In People] wasn’t a fluke.

The best songs here brace his vulnerability with expansive flourishes. [Apr 2004, p.134]

Striding purposefully forward on vaguely cinematic fanfares and catchy soul-queen loops, Murs reveals more than you want to know about his sex life. [May 2004, p.130]

At 62, Reed apparently has indulged in the drug that rejuvenated Bob Dylan's career: enjoying himself. [Apr 2004, p.135]

A strange brew. [May 2004, p.128]

[Some] attempts at genre-mashing suffer from some uncharacteristically sluggish Muggs production. [May 2004, p.120]