This is really a missing Greatest Hits in disguise. [Jul 2005, p.118]

It's fun to hear here negotiate the contours of Top 40 pop for the first time since "Like A Prayer," without any European house music hose-head gumming up the pleasure and catharsis with mediative schmaltz. [May 2008, p.73]

Pacific Ocean Blue [is] a moody, groovy and deeply congenial solo album. The earthier Banbu. regularly rises to the Malibu heights of the first album. [July 2008, p.79]

Even at their most nihilistic, these 16 songs resonate melodically, like Eminem's most haunting material. [#15, p.118]

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

Beneath their steel-wool guitar tone, the songs swing like a slammed door. [Nov 2005, p.137]

As usual, Franz Ferdinand pack a greatest-hits album’s worth of melodic tricks into each tune, while Kapranos purrs the sort of pick-up lines that would earn a lesser man a gimlet in the face.

[The] sense of playful adventure ensures that smooth needn't mean snoozy. [Jun 2007, p.108]

Two long, draggy pieces near the end of The Private Press are its only intimations of mortality. [Jun/Jul 2002, p.102]

[Slug is] suddenly one of the best alt-rappers around. [#9, p.143]

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

He represents gangsta rap's evolution into pure entertainment. [May 2005, p.116]

This is Newman’s most unwound album.

A giddy funhouse of a record. [Oct 2005, p.136]

Her second album is rowdier and less well-behaved, and thus better, although the template is the same: breathy coos and lush strings intermittently blown apart by distorted guitar blasts.

The arrangements are so flush with guitar hooks and buoyant harmonies that these tunes are entertaining even when they're not catchy. [Oct/Nov 2001, p.108]

What's titillating about Damita Jo isn't some easy flash of sexuality, but the varied soundbeds that Jackson and her producers create to house her love games, and the confidence with which she plays. [May 2004, p.116]

Here, they combine hardcore punk’s combat-boot side with its tortured-noise side, layering what sounds like scores of tsunami-distortion guitars over an atomic-speed drum blitz to attain rarely witnessed levels of obliteration (think Black Flag reincarnated as psychotic yetis).

The songs are richly and surprisingly textured, having more in common with experimental jazz than folk. [#15, p.122]

Sometimes the tone is self-congratulatory, but a house band this glorious deserves some kind of standing ovation. [May 2004, p.127]

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

Disparate dance genres mesh with impressive (and infectious) ease. [Oct 2004, p.113]

The Hives aren't mere jokers, because they mix their novelty-band brio with the genuine anger and disgust of punk rock. [Aug 2004, p.126]

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

This odd cast creates strangely beautiful moods. [May 2007, p.104]

Unlike similar records... this has a unity of aesthetic purpose, a competitive wallop, even (kind of) a seriousness. [Mar 2004, p.127]

This is Jay-Z's suicide note and his glowing eulogy rolled into one. [Jan 2004, p.106]

Guitarist Kerry King physicalizes Araya’s emotional investment; his mad, crunched-up playing is anxiety rendered in sound.