While Love's voice is as scratchy and corrosive as ever, unfaraid to veer off-pitch for a good sneer, the album is big-time Hollywood rock. [Mar 2004, p.112]

He has his own personality: not a gangsta or a player but a diligent pragmatist. [Apr 2004, p.124]

His bandmates... elevate Boyd's self-indulgent nonsense with rich noodling and searing flashes of metal. [Mar 2004, p.120]

A heartfelt batch of art-pop that never sounds snobby. [Mar 2004, p.117]

They've adopted a crisp, unfussy style that assures the audibility of Darnielle's artful words. [Mar 2004, p.124]

Unrushed, spacious, and duller than a four-hour hayride. [Mar 2004, p.130]

A casual, mostly charming sketchbook of diffident alt-country laments. [Mar 2004, p.116]

So easygoing they're like going nowhere, his voyages to the beaches, beers and frathouse memories are easier journeys than the saccharine mountaineering that occupies the rest of the disc. [May 2004, p.119]

The Five... go for the high-flown pap of '70s singer-songwriters Dan Fogelberg and Dan Hill, playing off Ondrasik's fey falsetto and fondness for lush, string-sweetened arrangements. [Mar 2004, p.117]

As self-indulgent side projects go, this could be a whole lot worse. [Apr 2004, p.139]

If the vocal tracks sound irredeemably icky... the instrumentals are as dreamily engaging as ever. [#23, p.100]

Aside from their outsider appeal, Join the Dots proves that the Cure's other trump card was Smith's misery-drenched knack for gleaming pop melodies. [Mar 2004, p.138]

Over the course of an entire album Twista's gift proves his curse: Uniterrupted, it can get taxing. [Mar 2004, p.129]

Problem is, 23-year-old frontman James Walsh remains the same sap. [Jan 2004, p.109]

Rich, smooth, and speedily forgettable. [Mar 2004, p.128]

The surprise is that the realist rage of material they had barely thought about in years feels so right in the age of Dubya. [#23, p.106]

For all their wriggly noise details and fragmented language, their center of gravity is in their hips. [#23, p.101]

These songs don't rock; they squirm, shuffle and skulk. [#23, p.111]

These are among the most rivetingly unconventional vocal performances she's ever offered. [Mar 2004, p.116]

His hard-edged, dance-inflected debut makes East London sound like the new Dirty South. [Jan 2004, p.108]

The problem is not the lumbering, mid-tempo beats or the terrible lyrics (“Synthesizer, crystallizer, realizer”), although neither help. It’s the sense that you’ve heard every synthesized squelch and ambient breakdown before.

[Several songs] sound way too much like Strokes castoffs, a situation little helped by... Fridmann's unusually heavy-handed production. [Mar 2004, p.125]

The soundtrack is faultlessly authentic, though you might wish it weren't so damned reverent. [Mar 2004, p.130]

It's a declaration of independence, and she pulls it off stunningly. [Jan 2004, p.105]

Only on "Prison Song," a jokey fake-oldie, does the Offspring's weakness for novelty tunes lead them astray. [Dec 2003, p.145]

The most original spin on indie-pop in years. [Dec 2003, p.140]

An enthusiastic album full of masterful strokes and electrifying intensity. [#23, p.98]

This Is Not A Test lacks feeling--besides beats, what else what does she care about? [Jan 2004, p.102]