It is a challenging and humorous album that works like a society brave and wise enough to allow dissent.

I suppose that this isn’t the album a lot of people were probably hoping for. But it’s never the album people were hoping for.

Costello stays away from pop hooks here, concentrating instead on a tentative but engaging marriage of words and melody.

Everything here is marked with a hint of familiarity, but it's surprisingly hard to mind.

An album that blooms slowly over time and repeated listening.

When they're on, Mates of State recall the better moments of fellow smilers Quasi or The Anniversary, and the rest of the time their friendly pop buzz is more harmless than irritating.

5 is Town and Country's most beautiful, flawless actualization of the goals they’ve been working towards since 1998, and paradoxically, a near-complete rethinking of them, as well.

It’s an old trick: happy music, sad words. But Quasi has elevated the strategy to an art form, and it’s nearly impossible to resist the sugar rush of the band’s sound in collision with Coomes’ black musings.

Appealing and slyly catchy.

Beulah have somehow blended the sounds their last three albums, each a significant achievement on its own, into one career-spanning epic, completely worthy of their reputation; any small ways in which their past work has seemed lacking, superficial, or scatterbrained is gone, and only the best points remain.

The guitar throughout the album has an unusual approach which certainly helps PGMG stand out from the crowd.

To the extent that it falls prey to unnecessary pseudo-sophistication, Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers comes off weak; to the extent that it maintains its own musical niche within the shattered-lover trope, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers makes the shopworn surprisingly compelling.

Has all the hallmarks of classic Kraftwerk.

This is what makes Earthquake Glue such a startling arrival. You don’t simply listen to it out of obligation, but instead because you are compelled to return to it, again and again.

It seems that with HaHa Sound, Broadcast is subtly developing a personal aesthetic, assimilating all that comes across their path but rarely allowing the elements to overwhelm their on ideas.

A glorious and preposterous journey.

The whole of it seems passive and incomplete.

There probably won't be many albums in 2003 that will combine images, sounds and deepfelt emotions as well as The Violet Hour.

His melodies hang in the air, homespun like Saturday afternoon arts and crafts, creating a lush foreground that contrasts something lovely with his minimalist production. This latest holds to that formula, and improves upon it.

While it makes no effort to conceal its intellect, it solicits an under-the-table emotional connection the Seas and Cakes of the indiesphere simply will not allow.

Promise Of Love would be a good joint, by indie rock standards, if the passive-aggressive everyschmuck ex-girlfriend mixed-tape staples on the latter half didn’t suck so badly.

It sounds as if Atkins and Plummer had merely sucked down a few beers and bashed out some tunes in their garage over the weekend. This is not to undermine their talents, but rather to celebrate the basic energy of the record, which makes you want to suck down some beers yourself and have a go at the rock.

Moving well beyond the claustrophobic and listless tendencies of earlier releases and doing away with their predictably two-dimensional dynamics, this is Mogwai's strongest album to date.

Saloon might not attract the same short-term attention as some of their higher profile rock and pop peers in the UK, but this second album affirms that they have more to offer than many of their compatriots.

We're on familiarly bleak and gloomy (although not entirely unironic) Tindersticks ground here and, in the case of this band, familiarity certainly doesn't breed contempt.

This album's problem is a very, very shoddy sequence.

Wareham’s sideline fantasy life becomes the Luna fan’s candy-infested playground.

Simultaneously complex and unassuming, You Forgot It In People has punch that will stimulate even the cagiest listener, curious quirks and all.