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]