Summer Sun stretches Yo La Tengo's musical boundaries even further than before, as well as reaching back to tie-up loose ends from past master works.

The songs on Thickfreakness are all near masterpieces.

Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid has enough substantive quirks amongst the tiresome new-wave signposts to make this album a reasonable yet flawed artefact that is more than just the sum of its quaint parts.

A follow-up album that not only meets expectations, it blows them away.

In the end, this is better left to die-hard Yo La fans and jealous bassists everywhere.

There are a few moments of weakness on Keep on Your Mean Side - most notably where V.V. and Hotel get a little too repetitive or too simplistic for their own good – but it's easy to move past these minor instances without it detracting from the album too much.

Chesnutt has finally made an album that utilizes the full range offered by lush, fully adorned production to his advantage, accenting the strengths of his songwriting but never jockeying for position with his most distinctive traits.

While it doesn't have as many flat-out terrific songs as its predecessor, I'd venture to say that The Remote Part is the record that Idlewild has wanted to write all along.

Califone's most confident and realized album.

The focus may be tighter and the refinement may be a little more obvious, but such things don't hold the band back on Antenna; rather they further the progress that has been showing itself with every Cave In release.

Whether you end up liking this album or not, it is going to be one of the most intense things you've ever heard.

A strong early contender for Record of the Year.

Some of Log 22 feels like a step too far, with the band's ambitious arrangements falling foul to the limitations of their musical abilities.

Possibly the best Kristin Hersh solo album since 1994's classic Hips & Makers.

Magnolia Electric Company is a watershed album, an artistic breakthrough, and the first album to fully realize Molina's potential.

It's messy and it's fun. Sometimes pop music isn't meant to be cleaned up and polished to death, and here is proof of that.

This is an album that's tough to love but impossible to ignore.

This record is a composite of everything that is good about modern music.

It won't blow you away the first time, but it eventually will.

The most eclectic and endearing Dirty Three album in quite some time.

Give Up is an outstanding, creative effort from two of indie rock's most disparate voices.

This is one consistent record that will being a smile to your face; there is nothing breathtaking, but there doesn't have to be.

The best complete work the band has offered to date.

A brave, commanding, astonishing LP that shatters all notions of what modern rock music can, or for that matter, should be.

One of the best albums you'll hear in 2003.

Where the Aislers Set really create a distinction between themselves and their contemporaries is through the unpredictably imaginative arrangements, bolstered by Linton's truly enigmatic melodic sense.

The band merrily rips through song after song with skill and zeal, all the while cheekily brandishing a wit that's equal parts irony and earnestness.

Nocturama isn't the weakest album in Nick Cave's canon, but it's far from being a particularly good one either.