Isbell’s recitation--defiantly unexciting in its averageness--doesn’t help. But the thing is, the guy can really write.

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

The songs change, but the sensibility remains the same, more or less: plaintive to mopey, clever to smartass, and back again. [Jul 2005, p.118]

Sound[s] like bad Southern swamp songs covered by the world's most miserable bar band. [Sep 2005, p.131]

McCabe is bearable, even fun. But he oversings like a guy who's mistaken a North Dakota rock club for Madison Square Garden. [Oct 2006, p.142]

Filled with ambitious production and winsome nostalgia, Saturdays is an otherworldly chronicle of adolescence only a starry-eyed 20-something could make.

It’s a fantastically difficult record, but almost every passage of knotty head-game weirdness quickly dovetails into something dramatic and physical, and it all sparkles with crushed particles of the blues.

The music is dramatic with a glammy Britpop insouciance, and Garcia is a refreshingly earnest romantic. [#16, p.117]

The band sometimes flails ineffectually, but more often it stays streamlined and urgent. [Jun 2005, p.109]

Two things save Electric Six from becoming the alt-rock Weird Al: Their jokes hit home and their music is convincingly ferocious. [#17, p.134]

It's all clever and overstuffed with ideas, guaranteed to bug dance-music purists just as much as it annoys their parents. [Aug/Sep 2001, p.130]

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 jam-band influence that now pervades the group's sound is as pernicious an additive as that strychnine somebody slipped into Robert Johnson's whiskey. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.110]

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

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

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

Honors shifts in style over substance. [#11, p.124]

The vibe is all infectious, feverish build-up. [Nov 2006, p.155]

The lighthearted genre-hopping suggests nothing so much as a Broadway smash about a restless country star, borrowing from many styles, beholden to none.

Sultry suits her fine, but when she reaches for the sadness in these self-written songs, she can’t summon the sense of conflict that was embedded in ’50s pop.

B'Day never cools down, and swaety up-tempo numbers prove the best platform for Beyonce's rapperly phrasing and pipe-flaunting fireballs. [Sep 2006, p.138]

The music, coproduced by M.I.A. confederate Switch, warps and wanders too, from rock-rap to dancehall to new wave to folk.

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

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

Amerie's heat is irresistible, in large part because it's subtle. [Jun 2005, p.108]

It's fed-up and proud at the same time, a kind of Desperate Housewives meets Trailer Fabulous. [Oct 2005, p.144]

A throwback to his trunk-rattling G-funk heyday.

Sadly it's undercut by music that tirns Brian Wilson into merely another Brian Wilson imitator. [Sep 2008, p.85]