Lost and Safe removes much of the chaotic elements of its predecessors, substituting a more focused, and therefore cohesive approach to their cut-and-paste style.

Despite the fact that it’s an obvious misstep from a band that seemed bulletproof... it's still a strong album with a lot more charm than, say, the Bravery or the Killers.

There was just so much I loved about Damien in Absence and so much that disappointed me.

This is easily the most stripped-down album of their catalogue since their first one, and, not coincidentally, the best.

Whether it marks the beginning of a significant shift for the group or not, Molina's growing confidence as a vocalist and songwriter remains levels above his peers -- and, like Songs: Ohia's final days, proves more than capable of forgiving its own shortcomings.

With Black Sheep Boy, Okkervil River have made the kind of minor classic that will inspire obsessive-compulsive love affairs with the lucky people who stumble upon it.

It’s smart, depressing, inoffensive pop perfect for a rainy day.

If this record had come out in ’94 it would have been groundbreaking. ’98 and it would have been good. But it’s ’05 now, and there aren’t many reasons to be impressed.

It’s music so frothy and unsubstantial that you could practically meditate to it: listen to it often enough, and it just kind of floats away, even if you’re blasting it at full volume.

His rhymes are intelligent and image-packed, his drums are classic, and his inspired sample choices come together to make a striking aesthetic statement.

This album is the hot shit.

These songs are enjoyable and beautiful and pure hip-hop --- glittering, hard diamonds that hopefully won’t get buried in the underground scene’s mounds of coal.

Arular beats out most everything I’ve heard this year in terms of creativity, energy, dance-ability and fun.

Removing the formulae and sensual stimuli from the Party leaves little that’s substantive or innovative. Even the most cursory of examinations would show the group to be an “it” band and not much else. However, Bloc Party’s absurdly good at being an “it” on Silent Alarm.

While Picaresque is a significant step forward, it’s also a logical one. The band’s sonic palette has expanded gradually from album to album, and appears to have come full circle here.

Of all the glaring sonic crimes, it’s Moby’s nonexistent voice that most solidifies Hotel’s future infamy.

Let Us Never Speak of it Again is bor-ing.

Lullabies to Paralyze loses points for a handful of uninspired tracks and questionable production values, but I can’t imagine anybody who’s enjoyed the Queens in the past not taking to at least half of the songs on this album.

Tasteless Rolling Stones apers rip off an entire decade of rock music.

Freakout is a struggle between balance and shambles; the compositions constantly wobble beneath a gravity that threatens to bring them down for good and to render Broder’s brain inane for all time.

Another left-field triumph for Gira.

An occasionally pretty but merely competent lite-alt-country, the kind you’d hear ordering a soy latte with a shot of hazelnut.

Despite being monstrously homogenous and boring, The Fallen Leaf Pages is too much of a melodic accomplishment to dismiss.

The album’s hyper awareness of its own mortar disrupts a bouncy pace that would otherwise fit Rhys’s suntanned pop to a tee.

Whether or not Human After All - which of course, has not a single purely human voice in its midst - is supposed to be some great stroke of pop irony or self-reflexive wink is irrelevant. Boring, empty music that thinks it’s making a point is condescending and pedantic.

This is an not an album designed for navel gazing introspection, but rather one to be played at neighbor-annoying volumes before you hit the town on a Friday night.

I doubt that anybody who found enjoyment in Behind The Music will be able to outright hate Origin Volume 1 because it’s about as similar to its predecessor as a follow-up record can be.

The coherence of Wolf’s ethic assures the consistency and believability of his cryptic, erotic, and eerie world.

Pros: Farina is an excellent drummer and singer, and MacKaye hasn’t lost any of his righteous anger. Cons: with only two people you just can’t be viciously loud.

Let it be said here first: Kasabian is indisputably one of the most important albums of 1997. Unfortunately, it’s 2005, and we’re left wondering just what the hell they're trying to pull.

While not any real cause for concern amongst Boom Bip fans, Blue Eyed in the Red Room is not the masterpiece that they might be hoping for.

While No Wow certainly has its missteps, they largely come as a result of the band’s most basic concept: simplicity and repetition.

It takes more getting used to than their previous work, but it rewards even more for it.

Sometimes this gets boring, when tracks lull and hunch into the next and Sam’s voice doesn’t do much to challenge the monotony. Sometimes it’s confusing to hear such graciously restrained music eventually show itself as meticulous, experimental, and deep, deep, deep. Well, not confusing. Refreshing.

[50's] rhymes are as stupid as ever.

Some Cities is easily their best since Lost Souls, and while repeated listens won't likely reveal it better than their debut, it's often equally as hypnotizing.

There are hardly any virtues to this record at all.

It’s conceivable that she can be marketed as a hipper Michelle Branch (the string arrangements get a little schmaltzy), but at her most accessible she’s still too resolutely quirky.

Where Live From Rome really falls off, though, is the production.

With shorter, tighter songs far more reminiscent of 80’s post-punk than Southern AOR, Aha Shake Heartbreak can only be considered a pleasant surprise.

Unfocused, haphazard, and a bit homogenous.

Lost Marbles is no more inconsistent than most respectable bands’ A-side albums, and attains greater brilliance on a number of occasions than they could ever hope for.

Woman King is the sound of Iron & Wine becoming a band; the sound of a singer-songwriter taking that all-important step forward; the sound of a group refusing to slip into the trap of staleness and homogeneity.

His delivery is exhilarating, but it made me nervous, jittery. It’s kind of like Miles Davis scatting, but instead of a trumpet he’s playing the entire writing staff of The Simpsons.

Let’s get two things about Government Commissions out of the way. The first is that the set is utterly inessential.... The second thing is that the first thing doesn’t matter.

It practically goes without saying that fans of guitar heavy psychedelia and mind-altering substances will find plenty to enjoy here.

Fluff-heavy, Fast Cars snitches on the upcoming full-length: Blockhead better be back on beats, because Bavitz is moving in a sparse, faux-spacey direction that sounds bored compared to his busy work on Bazooka Tooth, Labor Days, and Daylight. But since there’s always going to be two or three songs on any Aesop release that deserve your Jukie-Board sig file, and especially since the The Living Human Curiosity Sideshow finally allows the listener to figure out what the lyrics to those great songs are, this one is just barely worth your lunch money as well.

LCD Soundsystem is mostly too afraid to be balls-out fun, but too unambitious to make for a really rewarding artistic experience. Essentially, it sits awkwardly in a no-man’s land between artistry and actual dancing fun, like guess-what-demographic.

Outside Closer seems to have mined an infinitesimal point on the musical map, something near the intersection of RJD2, Sigur Rós and Iron & Wine. It’s the detail and obsession with which Hood has excavated this minute point that makes the album so warmly, hopelessly riveting.

On A Healthy Distrust his delivery has noticeably improved.

Although The Mysterious Production of Eggs lacks the gleeful variety of Swimming Hour, it is obvious that Bird has created his most cohesive statement to date.

Fulton’s beat-making is stellar, but devoting attention to it also necessitates suffering the consistently insufferable Kanamori, and stylistic schizophrenia that’s as jarring as it is unique.

For what it lacks in consistency, I Am A Bird Now gains in being, even at its most tedious of moments, an interesting and thematically compelling listen.

She etches out a style that is as feeble as it is vicious. And she owns it, her voice only an assurance of just how cool she really is.

One of the most cluttered, awkward, and unfocused albums in recent memory.

Urn is a chore.

Easily the most cohesive and consistent album of his career, and one of the first great albums of 2005.

The lion’s share of these tracks throb with a purpose that was mostly absent from their last effort.

The thing that lifts The Great Destroyer just above an album like Trust is that it is more spirited: there’s a hint of revival here.

M83’s latest, given careful attention, is a rather impressive and blissful experience.

Wilderness is nothing if not consistent, and even its dullest points are palatable given the right mood.

So it essentially comes down to the fact that “Come Down on Me” and “Go” are likely going to be two of the best tracks of the year, but that a great deal of ’64-’95 is less likely to stick to memory.

The new versions aren’t bad, but the Vertex-era fan might quickly become the unwitting recipient of a $20 coaster.

Superwolf is Bonnie-era Oldham trying to channel Palace-era Oldham.

Sweet Jesus, these guys sound like Syd Barrett.

While not a live album at all, PB & J does indeed live with its own throbbing, messy scariness that demands that the volume be turned all the way up to 11, threatening to eat your brain if you dare leave it lower.

If Stamey had chosen to go one way or the other — straight covers or an all-out album full of originals--- A Question of Temperature would be a much more interesting album. As is it stands, nothing here really captures the imagination.

A gorgeous little nightmare.

Black Mountain is as mundane, bleak, and hollow as the cover art would suggest.

So, Ludacris is still a distance from a definitive, unmatched hip hop statement, but I’m content with his glaciered pace and middling “a-a-a-a-b-b-b-b-etc” frame. It’s just too much damn fun to pass up.

There’s no getting around it: this sentimental, electronically-hackneyed glitch-pop shit can be remarkably effective.

If reduced to a single disc, Street's Disciple could well be one of the more exciting albums of the year. As is it's a solid, if not brilliant album from an artist we've come to not expect too much from.

Compared to All That You Can’t Leave Behind, it’s immensely sincere, well-thought out, and meaningful... [It] also happens to be loaded with hooks.

The three audio discs... are a mixed bag at best.

Half of the fun with Dumile has always been the unexpected, ridiculous sampling and the storyline he develops around it. MMâ?¦Food seems unable to capture this element. Doom manages to drop a few great songs, but as an album, MMâ?¦Food falls flat.

Want Two disposes of almost all of the commercial elements that had been blamed for One's downfall without revealing a satisfying work in the process.

While the best of it is good enough to promise a fruitful and substantive future, the worst of it suggests that in a few years time, Mr. Mathers may be little beyond a slightly intimidating class clown.

The schizophrenia on display here is not of the dramatic sort that intrigues or interests; it’s a very real disorder that befuddles and annoys the listener.

Tigers cannot compete with an actual Case show, of course, and after Blacklisted we don't really need to be reminded of her talent, but, hell, why not?

Traditional folk-rock outings that reek of Workingman’s Dead (1970) and the musk of Jerry Garcia’s beard.

Infinitely better than their last album, and proof that The Manics are now capable of writing pop music that’s neither dull nor pandering.

Pretty much nothing from Dear Heather is without some kind of significant flaw, and the only thing saving it from being below average---at least in a general sense, and not kept strictly to his own discography----are the few moments that Cohen is kept solitary with as little outside interference as possible.

A truly rocking dance punk album that fulfills on the promise of a dubious genre; other artists in this so-called movement have only hinted at something this fun and dance-able.

And with so much music, some cuts solidly fail, and some stand up to the best in the Bad Seeds canon.

It begins to sink in that this band has performed a theoretical feat of Hawking proportions: it has devised a fool-proof formula for the unformulaic.

Razorlight is nearly everything wrong with rock and roll today.

What it lacks is Agaetis’ singularity of purpose, as well as its understanding that atmosphere should be an aesthetic by-product of songcraft and not the other way around.

It's the first truly inessential album he's made.

The album fails mainly in its inability to set itself apart; for a Warp release it’s dull, Beans isn’t enough of a rapper to carry the show by himself, and the beats feel like they would have been interesting if they didn’t just remain stagnant through pretty much every track.

Would be much better if it came with an option to turn the vocals off.

The album is, in short, phenomenal. It certainly doesn’t match the beauty and heartbreak of Either/Or (1997), but it manages to recapture the spirit of that record while properly articulating the orchestration that Elliott had been working with for Figure 8 and XO (1998).

Inevitably, how they treat their dominant influences is what separates the Zutons from the Coral. While the Coral have yet to truly define their sound, The Zutons can bounce from funk, to zoot-suit swing (“Dirty Dancehall”) to alt-country (“Remember Me”) and yet have that tangible, original quality to their music that makes for an impressively cohesive debut album.

In terms of a go-to disc for a pissed off stomp around the bedroom, it’s the finest album I’ve heard this year.

To revise a debut with only a slightly more effective result is nevertheless disappointing for all of their fans awaiting an album as moving as their live show.

[Disc 1] is fantastic and worth the price of admission in and of itself.... Sadly, the results [on disc 2] sound more like the soundtrack to a bad '80s cop movie than appropriate or even interesting re-takes of some of the best pop songs ever penned.

Little of the album fails to impress in its striking melodic strength or its lyrical intelligence---which shouldn’t surprise Eitzel’s long-time fans. But the album does have one recurring flaw: overextension of its ideas.

It’s largely half-baked in its execution.

While Summer in Abaddon features Pinback’s by now trademarked sound and cryptic lyrics with a few nice developments, it falls victim to a sort of malaise of consistently indistinguishable mid-tempo rockers on the second half of an album that starts very strongly.