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.