The most original spin on indie-pop in years. [Dec 2003, p.140]

Oye's single-minded thematic focus and velveteen baritone hold everything together. [#14, p.142]

Tapes 'n Tapes take not just their frazzled vocals but also their low-fi mixes, fuzzed-out guitars, semi-sequitur lyrics, falsetto refrains and general air of nearly falling apart from campus kings Pavement. [Aug 2006, p.114]

The riffs blast as if it's 1971 all over again. [Jun 2006, p.148]

Out Hud don't write songs, they whip up grooves: streamlined throbs and pulses, transmitted live from Saturday night at the coolest club in town. [May 2005, p.123]

Most of their songs gallop by in a minute or two, erupting with new beats the moment they start to itch. [Apr 2008, p.83]

A 38-minute meditation on how not to build on a hook. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.114]

There's a lot of passion and red corpuscles surging just outside the music's clean, primary-colored lines. [Apr 2006, p.112]

The loudest record [Hersh] has ever made, and even if few individual compositions leap out of the general roar, it sounds fantastic. [Apr 2005, p.116]

WFTD occasionally give in to the urge to crank up the fuzz and play straight-up indie rock, but the narrower each song's scope is, the more it feels like it should go on forever. [Oct 2004, p.131]

Westerberg delivers a hook, an idea and a subtle emotion on nearly every track. [Jun/Jul 2002, p.116]

With so many hip people in the studio, it's no wonder Echoes sounds like such a party. [Nov 2003, p.119]

An inevitable return to their punk-meets-dance-rock basics, featuring their sexy, trademark battery of geometric riffs, careening bass and shrapnel noise. [Jun/Jul 2002, p.108]

The quartet throws itself into these vintage gestures with so much verve and dumb-fun exuberance that the songs, even with their simplistic, catchphrase lyrics, are hard to resist.

Sometimes they're tossing salad, with predictably sappy songs about sainted all-stars Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson, yet theyre funny throwing chin music at cult figures Fernando Valenzuela and Harvey Haddix. [Sep 2008, p.76]

If this is soul, it's soul for 21st-century sociopaths. [Apr 2008, p.77]

Swells with grace and intrigue. [May 2005, p.116]

[Hammond's] "Crown Vic"... fits snugly among these relaxed, happily run-down blues. [#14, p.136]

While Costa is almost too glamorous for her own good, she flaunts that old-school splendor that generates apt comparisons to early Lenny Kravitz. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.107]

The best songs have concise melodies and a likeable punch. The worst just sound like sketches, riffs a more traditionally ambitious group would have discarded. [#8, p.116]

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

OH (Ohio) ends with a straight-faced rendition of the hokey country standard 'I Believe in You,' with lyrical mush about dogs and babies, but Wagner sings it like he wants to believe every word.

While their protest cries tilt feebly into goofball psychedelic funk, a lush poignancy bubbles up on the more ruminative tracks. [May 2006, p.110]

Scabrous, overdriven spallter-punk. [Nov 2006, p.136]

While Ten New Songs is not an attempt to break new ground, its sophistication and unassuming depth are almost worth the decade-long wait. [Oct/Nov 2001, p.103]

Dry and straightforward disco-soul. [Jul 2005, p.116]

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

The 2005 AIDS-related death of Extra Golden cofounder Otieno Jagwasi shades the follow-up to last year’s rough yet lovable "Ok-Oyot System."

[A] ceaselessly grim set. [Apr 2007, p.118]

Glasvegas are often compared to the Jesus and Mary Chain, another great Scottish band that worshiped Phil Spector and the whammy pedal, but Mary Chain’s appeal was a chilly remoteness. Glasvegas make it cool to care.

He balances skill, style and comedy. [Dec 2003, p.142]

Live In New York City may be the first example of Springsteen allowing himself to be reduced to what he has carefully avoided becoming up to now: pure product. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.112]

Veteran producer Phil Ramone helps Lynne emphasize the loneliness of 'You Don't Have To Say You Love Me' and linger in the sensual transgressions of 'Breakfast In Bed' until this drastically rearranged but delicately rendered tribute feels like a candid self-portrait painted in watercolors and tears. [Apr 2008, p.81]

Black Lips make the same album over and over. If that album sucked, this might be a problem. But it doesn’t.

Parish brings out Harvey’s crazy, arty side, pushing to extremes as she works her long-established territory of sex and death.

The world's second-best co-ed lo-fi blues-rock duo are as sunny and merry as they've ever going to be, and that's not very sunny or merry. [Apr 2008, p.79]

Sweaty, sloppy and desperately quick. [Jul 2006, p.102]

It's like a game of Name That Tune at a barreling 200 bpm. [Oct 2005, p.138]

The band’s fourth album turns down the roiling boil of 2004’s What Is This America? to a seductive simmer.

It's Li's confidence to stray that gives this album its depth. [Sep 2008, p.82]

Stupid-brilliant punk rock. [Dec 2005, p.147]

Tempering his usually piqued voice and strumming with uncharacteristic restraint, Darnielle marinates in shadowy aloneness.

Amnesiac isn't a difficult album -- or, rather, it's not a mere experiment but a successful one... Nobody has ever made a record that sounds like this before. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.109]

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

The results can sometimes get bland; unlike its predecessor, which was moody and aimless, Drops is so polished that there are no ragged edges left to hang on to. [May 2006, p.109]

The introductory kiddie voice and opening guitar scrape establish this second album as White's show; mariachi-style brass fanfare, Appalachian-hoedown fiddling and plenty of Roman-candle solos soon follow. [June 2008, p.76]

This album about the seamy, scary side of Bushland, conceived after Davies was shot in New Orleans in 2004, is a mixed bag of pointed personal reflection (Good Ray) and facile social critique (Bad Ray).

This is a visceral, powerful muso's record, a nerve-jangling explosion in a drum clinic. [Apr 2005, p.111]

Lively and loose, cut with collaborators including her talented Scottish boyfriend Johnathan Rice, spooky folkie M. Ward and actress-singer Zooey Deschanel, the 11 songs (many of which she has performed live for years) encompass Southern-gothic folk, Appalachian blues stomps and 'The Next Messiah,' an eight-minute, Who-style rock mini-opera.

Micachu has made one of the strongest debuts of the year.

Fundamental ingeniously explores political chicanery through imaginative set pieces about private relationships. [Aug 2006, p.113]

An album that continues their mission of yanking bluegrass into the modern era. [#9, p.149]

If this collection has a coherent theme, it's the cautious joy of a man making his emotional recovery. [#4, p.119]

A weak echo of those gloriously clean and spacious LPs [of the 70s]. [Dec 2003, p.136]

Transcends their last album with lean hooks that trade urban melancholy for a surprisingly pastoral warmth. [#11, p.136]

It’s a modest record, but also the first Byrne album in decades to feel sprung from outside the ex-Head’s head space.

While none of the new album’s hooks match the taurine-mainlining rush of “Sugar, We’re Goin Down,” there’s still lots to love.

Even the otherworld instrumental 'Oceans of Venus' can’t counterbalance Venus’s ballad-heavy bottom half.

By now he's decided he'd rather be Bob Dylan--recent Dylan, that is, devoted to phlegm-clogged blues-codger grumbles about how he's ready for his pine box. Producer T Bone Burnett proves a willing accomplice. [Aug 2008, p.88]

Ambitiously wide-ranging. [Aug 2004, p.133]

The 808 features just 16 sounds, but Kanye works wonders with this limited palette, turning lo-fi kick drums into an austere artistic statement.

Most of the time he makes the profound sadness seem like the best party in either Nashville or Dublin. [Apr 2006, p.116]

Joyous and limber. [Mar 2007, p.136]

Vapor Trails combines the cartoonish familiarity of Geddy Lee's helium-tinged vocals and [Neil] Peart's hyperkinetic drumming with the tuneful, concise writing they've favored since 1989's Presto. [Jun/Jul 2002, p.113]

Tuneful, kinky and deeply rooted in groove--a combination that evokes the best of both Prince and Macy Gray. [Feb/Mar 2002, p.112]

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

Too much of Strays settles for the pedestrian. [Aug 2003, p.126]

Ego War doesn't disappoint, offering an instant hit of raucous energy via choppy rave-house dynamics, high-density Daft Punk-style production and a refreshingly anti-epic approach to songwriting. [#16, p.114]

Youngblood's tunes are so clever it's easy to overlook the commitment to new wave it took for him to avoid wasting his love of wordplay on folk music. [Aug 2008, p.84]

The results are either stiffly egalitarian... or stripped of personality altogether. [Jun 2006, p.143]

Treading his father’s path, he’s never sounded so comfortably himself.

For all its ambitions, Detours aims too low.

Longtime devotees may miss Morrissey's Smiths-era vocal histrionics, but his supple croon has matured into a thing of beauty. [May 2006, p.103]

Torrini captures a few joyful infatuations followed by a lot of lingering wounds; she’s vulnerable but never conquered.

Taking sound collage to seamless, organic perfection, Tobin arranges his samples like he's conducting a living orchestra. [#11, p.144]

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

Diamonds is pointed, pulled-back and juicily considered instead of massively jammed-out. [#15, p.120]

McNew adds his own hybrid theory, wittily merging classic and iconoclastic by exploring his influences. [May 2003, p.116]

Grohl's every intense metal rave-up quickly passes into a sweet, breezy melody that makes it hard to take most of the songs all that seriously. [#11, p.137]

So Sum 41 have grown up... a little.... It's all relative, and, crucially, it still rocks. [#12, p.153]

The album's fine pedigree might have worked in a more conservative era. [#9, p.144]

What makes this more than just efficient dance-floor fodder are the guest vocalists. [#9, p.158]

When Cave is bad he's unbeatable, but when he's good he's darn near awful. [Apr 2005, p.133]

With steel guitars, fiddles, banjos and newspaper-scrap reports of floods and desolation, The Mountain is as fierce as any past Bastards recording, just more honed and hellbound.

Deconstructed sonics phase between absent-minded professor and glitch-craft. [#23, p.101]

[A] snarly caffeine jolt of a debut. [May 2006, p.109]

All the surfaces are exquisitely tasteful, all the string arrangements achingly melancholic. But there are no tunes. [#14, p.138]

It's music that's all cleverness and fury from a distance, but when studied up close, it turns out to be pretty hollow. [Apr 2004, p.126]

A more crunchingly bare-bones record all around. [#8, p.123]

Nowadays, his voice has mellowed into a fearless croon that seems to suggest a down-home Boy George. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.108]

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

Like a question 1970s double disc compacted into 45 brutally efficient minutes, it has the momentum of a meteor. [Aug 2006, p.108]

The quartet has the virtues of youth... and some of the drawbacks. [May 2007, p.106]

From the orgiastic "We're All In Love" to the painfully mortal "Take a Good Look at My Good Looks," they're all clearly Dolls for life. [Aug 2006, p.113]

A widescreen goth-punk stunner. [Jun 2006, p.144]

The result is slight but often gorgeous. [Apr 2008, p.77]

A downer. [Jul 2007, p.116]

A dazzlingly rhythmic junkyard. [Jun 2006, p.142]