There are solid songs here... but the spliced-on attempts at gritty authenticity make every note on this record sound test-marketed. [#18, p.121]

[Holland] has been rather mistakenly compared to Billie Holiday; she’s more like Jeff Buckley covering Nina Simone, turning a very modern ear toward yesterday.

Marred only by incredibly pompous liner notes and a lack of worthy rarities. [#23, p.122]

[Brock is] adept at wringing out emotion while straddling sentimentality, but too often here, gauche studio affectations make his sap sound plain cheap. [Apr 2004, p.134]

Be picks up where West's The College Dropout left off. [Jun 2005, p.113]

Though less dynamic, the weary mid-tempo arrangements embody the album’s crushing hopelessness, tempered only by John Neff’s elegant pedal steel.

Her understated grooves... ooze natural-woman sex appeal. [Oct 2003, p.122]

The Coxon-less Blur seem half a band, adrift in a loopy, moody head cold. [May 2003, p.115]

At their most thrilling, they fuse the spiky cool of Elastica with the witty self-consciousness of LCD Soundsystem. [Sep 2005, p.131]

A riot of black humor, sex mania and mean-eyed, chaotic rock.

It'll do just fine for now. But here's hoping for a torturously difficult third album. [Oct 2005, p.140]

At 72 minutes, the gorgeous gloom of It Still Moves lasts a bit longer than it has to--but it offers a host of tarnished gems along the way. [Sep 2003, p.126]

Now and then, the energy lags. But mostly, Sugarland’s shameless mining of VH1 Classic hooks keeps their more tepid tendencies in check.

These surging, wordy confessionals are sometimes redemptive but never maudlin. [May 2005, p.121]

The stiff, weirdly disengaged, single-note guitar solos and Kidman’s monochromatic death screams don’t make you want to keep dragging yourself through the record.

The unhurried, full-retail rock arrangements are splashed with lite-R&B syncopations and snazzy-jazz harmonies. [Apr 2006, p.111]

They go for punk rock at the most physical level, until their rhythms feel almost like a rave, as in the seven-minute 'Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came From an Angel).'

Problem is, Blood Mountain's hail of convoluted riffs and abrupt time-signature changes never settles into one of Leviathan's mammoth grooves. [Oct 2006, p.137]

Charming and enrapturing, adrift in its own unique, invented world. [#11, p.142]

What elevates the Monkeys into a class of their own is Turner. [Apr 2006, p.113]

And if he occasionally errs on the side of self-indulgence... so be it; for every moment of youthful overreach, there's another that shows a promising new talent in first bloom. [Aug/Sep 2001, p.121]

His ornate, piano-driven arrangements cite a wide variety of musical sources, from indie pop to Gershwin to trip-hop and back again. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.116]

Sparxxx is no producer's creation. His lexicon is deep, his diction clear and his words resolute. [Sep 2003, p.130]

Some selections are heartwrenching... But others bear the stain of sentimentality, denial, even exploitation. [Jul 2006, p.98]

Prog was rarely as songful as the brutal beauty here.

Mastodon present a prog-metal concept that would make Stephen Hawking bang his head.

Her lustrous music can err on the side of sleepy, because she prefers atmospherics and tricky harmonies to blaring hooks. [Apr/May 2002, p.116]

So diffuse and mechanical, it sounds as if it were recorded by rebellious microchips in a German laboratory. [#13, p.103]