At worst, the wordy Travistan borders on hectoring... At his danceable best, Morrison ingeniously manifests his big concepts and even bigger heart. [Nov 2004, p.138]

Kweli expends most of his considerable lyrical talent touting his considerable lyrical talent. [Jan/Feb 2006, p.94]

It’s easy to see why these songs didn’t fit on their record but, while a full listen turns unrelentingly dour, they’re better than discards have any right to be.

The melodic shortcomings of M!ssundaztood show that those eye-popping videos aside, she's no Madonna. [#4, p.122]

The album's final third is useless... Fortunately, the rest is bracing permutations of the lopsided, much-sampled post-disco rhythms that helped define NYC art-funk 25 years ago. [Oct 2006, p.135]

For Beep Beep, New Wave means not zippy synth-pop but the brute force of '70s punk turned into screwed-up yet finely calibrated outbursts. [Sep 2004, p.134]

The Prodigy’s renewed commitment to first principles portends a future as the techno Ramones. There are worse things to be.

Since 1995, Jenkinson's been treating his laptop the way death-metal bands treat their guitars, and it's no longer radical, just annoying. [Apr 2004, p.136]

This is Fountains of Wayne or the Church with real power in their power pop. [Apr/May 2002, p.116]

Laces the Unit's thugs-to-riches formula with chunks of the Dirty South. [Aug 2004, p.143]

Cocky and nicotine-stained, the Kills revive the cheap art of sinister underground rock and puzzling, mysterious pseudonyms. [May 2003, p.121]

Unless you've just fallen off a bong, the endless whimsy lacks meat. [Apr/May 2002, p.118]

Zigzags between immensely beautiful and crushingly ordinary with disorienting regularity. [May 2005, p.122]

Every song has hooks so polished you can see your reflection in them. [Dec 2004, p.142]

After 25 minutes, they close with five worthy remixes instead of the typical filler—a startup rarity, knowing how to quit while you’re ahead.

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

Concept or not, American Idiot is still decent fodder for a mosh pit, a luagh and a sob session. [Nov 2004, p.136]

Parish is at his best on songs that, for all their avant-garde trappings, are eloquent enough not to need lyrics. [#10, p.125]

Its densest aural jungle so far. [#17, p.136]

This time, he's playing with a minimalist, barely electric trio that wouldn't dare overshadow his sleepy-voiced utterances, painstakingly plucking one note at a time, and writing songs mostly about horses or mortality or both. [Jun 2005, p.115]

There's no jam-band noodling, and Anastasio's indelible head-bobbing cheer is now attached to the kidn of straightforward hooks Phish preferred to twist. [Dec 2005, p.144]

On the whole, it's an inventively played, not-quite-straight bluegrass album... [Aug/Sep 2001, p.124]

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

Get past the sometimes cloying pastoral arrangements and the often cornball sentiments and there are moments of ragged glory. [Sep 2004, p.132]

A vehement kiss-off to California's Central Valley. [Nov 2005, p.136]

Strange stuff, but oddly appealing. [Feb/Mar 2002, p.111]

These songs don't rock; they squirm, shuffle and skulk. [#23, p.111]

These amply melodic songs offer a style manual of orchestral pop and twinkly genre touches. [Mar 2006, p.112]

Instead of the rumbling epics of their later records... we get patient but ultraconcise miniatures. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.113]

Lush and idyllic. [Nov 2004, p.142]

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

Nas can still dazzle on the mic. [Jan/Feb 2007, p.87]

Keep It Hid is guitarist and singer Dan Auerbach’s affirmation of ragged principles, self-recorded with blunt, squawky ax-picking and loving lo-fi grit. The sentiments can be snoozily familiar.

The Secret Migration comes dangerously close to being just another Mercury Rev album, and they're too inspired for such a mundane fate. [Jun 2005, p.112]

You can find kids playing harder and faster in the cut-out bins at Hot Topic, but if you're lookin' for trouble, you came to the right place. [Apr 2005, p.119]

The more her follow-up slugs [Lucinda] Williams' bourbon'n'romance on the rocks, the drier it gets.... When she shakes it up just right on the sinister libido-rocker "Back To Me," she sounds familiar and like no one else. [Apr 2005, p.116]

The Texas combo strings together images that never add up to cohesive narratives. [Aug 2004, p.137]

The album is livelier for its contradictions. [Oct 2004, p.124]

Less lugubrious and more melodic than [Bright Lights], but the improvement is marginal. [Oct 2004, p.119]

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

Her voice was made to rip, and when she lets go just a little, the coyness turns sultry--proof that she might just have a life after high school.

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

Witness the birth of a new dance genre: fantasy-core!

Perspiration trumps inspiration, as madly sawing strings and short-circuiting robot bleeps compensate for the lack of hooks. [Oct 2004, p.120]

Lurches from dewy-eyed sentimentality to vicious funk. [Oct/Nov 2001, p.105]

Picture a protest of the World Trade Organization led by Bananarama. [Nov 2004, p.131]

So low-key that even the amplified instruments sound semi-acoustic. [#10, p.116]

The offhand charm isn't enough. [Sep 2003, p.123]

Lateralus sounds like Black Sabbath jamming with Genesis at the bottom of a coal shaft. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.115]

The album merely washes pleasantly past, tickling the ear and delivering a few hummable refrains. There's nothing here to lift listeners the way White Ladder did. [#12, p.143]

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

Offers something for everyone -- and ends up an intermittently engaging but overall shapeless collection. [#4, p.112]

It's the musical equivalent of George Lucas's tinkering with the Star Wars DVDs--some flaws are best left uncorrected. [Nov 2005, p.135]

The first and less snarky half of Tanglewood Numbers... is some of the liveliest music Berman has recorded. [Nov 2005, p.140]

Coherence dissolves over the album's spawl of 72 minutes and 16 songs. Barnhart can still be quietly metaphysical now and then, yet too often he settles for a less lovable tie-dyed legacy: cutsiness. [Oct 2007, p.106]

The melodies are well-shaped and the lyrics twist their knives elegantly. [Dec 2006, p.174]

Punch line for punch line, Luda is still the best in the business (e.g., promising to get ladies “wetter than Michael Phelps”), but these sex jams and hater disses feel too flat and perfunctory for his thousand-watt personality.

Tones down the spazziness and turns up the googly-eyed lyrics about marital bliss. [Jun 2006, p.141]

The end of the working day, the mark of Cain, to win, darling, we must pay--these phrases, variations on ones he's used previously, arise on his fifth studio album in seven years, until it seems his uncharacteristic prolific streak comes partly from lazy songwriting, maybe done with a set of Bruce Springsteen Lyric Magnets.

It's not always successful. But the sheer audacity of taking computers to Camelot works splendidly in the pastoral beauty of "Y.T.T.E." [Oct 2003, p.124]

Freak[s] out thoughtfully. [Oct 2004, p.129]

[It] sounds as if she's happy to give the people what they want: escapism and nostalgia. [Dec 2005, p.152]

Half of their new truckload feels typically phoned-in. But sometimes they surprise you, nailing the signature sounds of their '70s boogie-metal brethren. [Nov 2008, p.72]

Rich, smooth, and speedily forgettable. [Mar 2004, p.128]

A party band to the core, the Ting Tings can't leave the dance floor without stumbling. [July 2008, p.76]

It's refreshing to hear a band approach the form's familiar imagery from a place of romance, not cynicism. [Oct 2005, p.138]

The ballads, which are copious, are dull. [Mar 2006, p.115]

Pretty, weird and tricky to get a handle on. [Mar 2007, p.136]

All very beguilling as long as you really, really like the sound of a melodica. [Sep 2004, p.134]

A&E is generally more subdued, but, like Pierce’s earlier work, it’s best at its most theatrical.

By turns sensual and despondent. [Oct 2004, p.126]

What's keeping the band from achieving a unique identity are Havok's generic whine and medoicre lyrics. [#15, p.120]

It's not until the seventh song that voice and material converge satisfyingly. [Jul 2005, p.115]

Wailing, distorted guitars and jumpy backbeats deliver messages of escape, refuge and, ultimately, sweet hope. [May 2003, p.124]

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]

Noel Gallagher has even less to say than he used to. [Jun 2005, p.112]

He specializes in layered harmonies, not deep lyrics. [Aug 2006, p.117]

In the quest to make overly bronzed twentysomethings sweat, this endearing pseudo–rebel loses much of the little–sister angst that made her so appealing in the first place.

Stefani gets her groove back when she sticks to two essentials: sex and the Neptunes. [Jan/Feb 2007, p.88]

It's delightfully wacky and right in character. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.80]

There are moments when this third album is blissfully gorgeous--just not enough of them to make his song of himself interesting to others. [#11, p.125]

Loudboxer stands apart from other utilitarian dance music in its hypnotic sense of space. [#8, p.124]

When it works, his songs are intoxicating pop nuggets... But meandering instrumental interludes and clunky song titles are low on wink, high on wank. [May 2005, p.122]

Sonically, it's a tour de force.... But the success of this record depends on Johansson and she's not up yo the task. [June 2008, p.73]

The first third of 0304 tries too hard to impress.... But soon she calms down and knocks out undeniable hooks. [#17, p.142]

Too often, songs drift off into a fog of vague guitar atmospherics. [Aug/Sep 2001, p.130]

Nellyville will be the year's only record with a bigger-than-life number with Justin Timberlake, a capable ballad with Destiny's Child's Kelly Rowland, an acute dis of preachy rap veteran KRS-One, and an ode to the hip-hop footwear of choice. [#8, p.120]

On this clamorous, relentless album, a violent death lurks in every bar (“Rider Pt. 2”), licentious catcalls have replaced slinky come-ons (“I Like the Way She Do It”) and guns seem to fire of their own accord (every other song here). In doses, it’s rousing. Over the course of a whole album, it’s exhausting.

Sometimes the music can feel as cold and clinical as Kraftwerk, but even then, the lyrics emote wildly. [Jun/Jul 2002, p.106]

If the vocal tracks sound irredeemably icky... the instrumentals are as dreamily engaging as ever. [#23, p.100]

Aside from their outsider appeal, Join the Dots proves that the Cure's other trump card was Smith's misery-drenched knack for gleaming pop melodies. [Mar 2004, p.138]

Mostly, these electro trances... sound like an ill-advised quest to make a Williamsburg version of Dark Side Of The Moon. [Mar 2005, p.132]

Even the fiercest moments never fully detonate. [Jul 2005, p.114]

A much more conventional Busta. [Aug 2006, p.111]

blink-182 without the humor.

Always dark, sometimes lovely. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.105]

MMW start with some dirty grooves, then add DJs, horn sections and singers for dissonance and disruptions. [Apr/May 2002, p.115]

Only a few of Barzelay's tunes... are the equal of their sonic textures. [Aug 2003, p.121]