Most of Skeleton is an endless rush, sounding like up-tempo versions of the Pixies' surf-rock choruses. [#71, p.93]

And Now That I'm In Your Shadow finds him at another peak. [#74, p.98]

As a whole, The Complete Recordings quiets the lingering misconception that after the Pixies, Black's best work was behind him. [No. 119, p.52]

The title track ... and the unstoppably melodic "Billy Wire" are two of the catchiest tunes Pollard has ever penned. [No.88 p.56]

For those [who have cottoned to Mascis' nasal falsetto and six-string wizardly], this is another lovely acoustic outing from a beloved artists. For the rest, move along, there's nothing to see here. [No. 112, p.59]

As subtle as, and harder than, a flying mallet. [#58, p.84]

Spoon and Rafter proves that sometimes refining your focus is just as enlivening as radical departure. [#60, p.108]

If you're sitting still through Myth Takes, you might be dead. [#75, p.90]

As epic and compelling as nearly anything in the Cult's '80's back catalog. [No.87, p.53]

Wye Oak just turned in one of the year's most satisfying and seductive records. [No. 109, p.51]

Quilt doesn’t merely revisit retro glories on Plaza; it infuses them with contemporary indie-rock energy and melodic dissonance to create an edgy and engaging hybrid. [No. 129, p.59]

Krug's non-stop croaking yells get old quickly, and the few highlights are hardly worth sitiing through an hour of Renaissance Faire-y meandering. [Fall 2007, p.108]

The fourth LP from this gritty Toronto five-piece offers a few genuine gems sprinkled among many more tracks borne out of blue-collar blood, sweat and tears.

Folly finds KOD darker and statelier than ever. [No. 104, p.57]

The band manages to harness the immediacy of being a three-piece without sacrificing sonic depth or complexity.

Chelsea Light Moving finds Moore in renaissance mode. And it's pretty goddamn great, even if one might occasionally yearn for a Lee Ranaldo squall or Gordon vocal coo-roar up around the next bend. [No. 97, p.54]

Spencer lays down as much hog-calling jive as can fir on the tape. [No. 119, p.59]

Cosmopolitan, but often dull, easy listening.... Basically, Thievery Corporation skims the surfaces of more substantial styles and reconfigures them to create pleasant dinner-and-drinks music. [#47, p.124]

Molina's delicate vocals glide and dip, leaving Bjork earthbound on the shore and pea-green with envy. [#64, p.102]

Below The Pink Pony is a fat-free delight, this season's surprise. [No. 114, p.55]

Should I Remain Here At Sea? and Taste stand as proof that "Mastermind, Islands" should be Thorburn's lead credit. [No. 131, p.57]

A record that still manages to seamlessly blend doom, ambient, noise and post-rock. [No. 135, p.61]

It's not until the third or fourth [listen] that you hear how smart it is. How organic. How rich in nutrients. How thoroughly these conservatory grads are digesting their jazz/pop/soul influences and squeezing them into something unforgettable. [No. 128, p.58]

Wolfroy goes to Town is a meditative and sparse collection, and much of it continues the same train thought at work in the "There is no God" b/w "God is Love" single. [#82, p. 52]

Jackson sounds as vital as ever in front of her live band, and has crafted a definitive album in a storied career. [#92, p.54]

Depression Chery has four masterful set pieces, staggered to hit as odd-numbered tracks, each deepening the pervasive sense of rediscovered romance. [No. 124, p.51]

The Sadies can still sound like the best rock 'n' roll band in the world, but here. for all their brilliance, they miss that steadying hand. [No. 103, p.60]

An enticing record emerges, boasting intricate instrumental latticework with the smoldering focus of slow jams. [No. 108, p.57]

What's interesting to note is, with instrumentation technology improvement, Evelyn appears content to capture analogue warmth. [No. 111, p.57]

A thrumming, tribal first half gives way to a haunting, ethereal second. [No. 113, p.59]

Any absence of qualitative gain is overcome by quantity: 19 tracks, 10 tracks, 10 players, three LPs and nearly two hours with one of the best start-to-back country/rock records of recent years. [No. 117, p.59]

Wennerstom's voice marvelously leapfrogs between piercing highs and baritone lows, and bassist Jesse Ebaugh carries "Late in the Night" like a subdued, sober and shirted Mel Schacher, though Arrow's languid pace may turn off those who like their rock a bit more rocking. [No. 85, p.55]

Elements of krautrock and psychedelia add color, buoyancy and narrative detail to the rippling dub-pop streams Dunis' disembodied voice drifts over like smoke. [No.89, p.58]

Debbie Downer, perhaps, but Austra sure knows how to make misery sound like a good time. [No.99, p.52]

A series of genre-bending compositions written with New York chamber-music ensemble yMusic that puts [Worden's] full vocal range of on display... a really powerful synergy. [#82, p.59]

Marissa Nadler’s sixth studio record finds the Boston-based singer creating beautiful, sweeping songs that feel as ethereal as the last dream before dawn. [No. 131, p.59]

Rest easy, the group that makes you wish you’d gone to film school so you could’ve built a movie around its expansive instrumentals--works that seem to come rumbling from the molten core of the earth itself--hasn’t changed much from the glory days of early albums such as 1997’s "Young Team."

It finds Wareham in rare form. [#54, p.95]

After the actors have their poignantly emotional say, it's Bowie's own tremolo-rich, baritone voice and the noir-art-industrial-jazz band he employed on Blackstar that top off Lazarus stage-songs. [No. 137, p.53]

There's something comforting about hearing this stripped-down version of Iron & Wine again. [No. 118, p.54]

Blind Spot sounds like the band hasn't missed a step since 1998. [No. 131, p.59]

Further proof that Fidlar's headliner-destroying stint as the Pixies' opening act was no fluke. [No. 124, p.55]

Considering the improvisational skill, malleability and performing traditions of the sprawling group, this is just another solid recording on a long, strange evolutionary trip. [No. 101, p.60]

They take genre conventions and flip them inside out. [No. 96, p.57]

Too much of A River, though, doesn't give you enough music to love it. [#68, p.110]

New Seasons is a reverb-drenched, genre-hopping gem, the culmination of a 10-year, eight-album journey that promises to bear even more riches farther down the road.

There's precious little invention at work on Attack And Release, and the stench of authenticity hangs heavy. [Summer 2008, p.98]

Sounds far richer than the one-off project that it is. [#74, p.97]

What stands out most on the Americana-saturated Miracle Temple is the way the band shuffles and tweaks country music and gospel/folk elements, yet still sounds very traditional, for better or worse. [No. 96, p.53]

While the urgency of You're Nothing is missed, this more distraught-sounding version of the band is plenty captivating. [No. 115, p.57]

Luciferian Towers is a muddled mess of underworked ideas strung together. [No. 148, p.57]

Magik Markers' simulations are dutiful, but they lack even a hint of the revolutionary spirit, menacing explosiveness, creativity, musicianship, savvy, wit, humor, heart or charm oif their heroes [Sonic Youth]. [Fall 2007, p.101]

Songs Cycled completes Parks' transformation from oddball torchbearer to full-on musical time capsule. [No. 101, p.59]

Essentially, this is one for obsessive completists only. [No. 116, p.55]

The opposition between sonic abstraction and more familiar pop elements like beats, riffs and grooves creates a welcome tension. [#58, p.83]

It's positively full of life. [No. 118, p.56]

Superheroes, Ghostvillains & Stuff also shows how the Notwist masterfully blends organic and inorganic textures outside the studio, but it's also a reminder of how adventurous this band can be. [No. 138, p.59]

The uniformly dark, driving song cycle has no real high or low points--just 11 consistently thrilling guitar and drum loops led around in circular crescendos by Windett's wire-taut tenor. [#73, p.84]

Without seeming pretentious or curated, Out Hud is making dance music that feels "important." [#67, p.110]

This shimmery psych-rock collective is back with more wah-wah Woodstock jammolas filtered through cathartic chanting, African rhythms and jittery percussion. [No. 114, p.57]

Every song on debut Alight Of Night seems to be falling apart, mostly because vocalist Brad Hargett’s melodies are off the map.

Sure, it's a mess. But it's a brilliant, manically theatrical mess, true to Welles' self-destructive spirit. [No. 95, p.57]

Hypnotic and punchy by turns, it's a riveting album that finds Bell X1 pushing its established aesthetics in admirably new directions. [No. 100, p.52]

Howl works best when Feck and Co. marry their frustrated empathy with hopeful jubilation, letting the kids know that although they're lonely, they're certainly not alone. [#82, p. 53]

Sugaring Season isn't a breakthrough, but it's a consolidation of Orton's strengths. [#92, p.58]

The selection here covers a comprehensive gamut of hymns, carols and miscellaneous Christmas songs from all the usual suspects to a few curveballs. [No. 116, p.59]

Gensho makes obvious how much each act enhances the other. [No. 130, p.53]

Four becomes truly trying during its tangent-prone second half. [#70, p.93]

Occasionally cliched and often anthemic, this is an old-fashioned populist rock record that grows steadily with repeated listening. [No.89 p.53]

A massively significant step forward.... Rock Action is so monumentally magisterial, it approaches near heretical status: the post-post-rock era's Sgt. Pet Sounds' Lonely Hearts Club Band.

A batch of 10 songs you really need to spend some time with to appreciate. [#59, p.97]

Somewhere beautiful documents a fantastic 20-song set by this long-adored, seminal New Zealand band that makes you wish you'd been invited to the bash. [No. 104, p.53]

The songs all deal with weighty subjects, but the music, a s pleasing hybrid of blues, rock, classical and gospel impulses shines the comforting light of faith onto every time. [No. 120, p.54]

Fear not, this is a kick-ass rock'n'roll record all the way around. [No. 146, p.61]

Violent, seething and uncompromising. [#67, p.96]

It's a transformative, fluidly orchestrated moodscape of dappled piano figures, synthesizer washes and swelling strings, horn and bell tones. [No. 106, p.54]

Double Exposure is exceedingly well-crafted. [No. 104, p.60]

They whip out churning rock tunes with burning guitars and solid hooks, switch things up with softer, melodic ballads, and evoke the glory days of Southern rock with impressive ease. [No. 136, p.53]

Essentially, it's the super-cool but super-classy Christmas record all hipsters hope they'll find under their tree this year. [No. 94, p.61]

This wet blanket is a sheer bore. [No.89, p.57]

This is Wareham doing what he does best: making music he loves with people he holds dear. [No. 107, p.60]

They turn out to be pretty good influences on one another. Jay sounds generally reinvigorated: good-humored, full of nimble, intricate wit and atypically emotionally revealing, and if Kanye's rhymes occasionally remain as clumsy and crass as his personal life choices, he drops far fewer boners than usual. [#81, p. 56]

To Survive is both sparser and more polished than last year's "Real Life." [Summer 2008, p.107]

The band clicks perfectly, as if it had been playing these songs forever, and the album brings out another side of Auerbach, with different guitar textures and a different falsetto channeling his blues-rock instincts in a different direction. [No. 124, p.53]

Song after song hurts in that oh-so-right way. [#54, p.89]

The unintentionally hilarious Mount Eerie misfires so dramatically, it makes you want to reconsider not the Second Amendment but the First. [#57, p.98]

Instrumentally, Torino strays little from previous Cinerama releases.... But lyrically, Gedge... [has] developed a gritter, nastier edge. [#55, p.72]

His songwriting keeps growing hookier and more ingratiating. [#81, p. 59]

It's hard to recall an album so invitingly unfamiliar, so beguilingly hard to parse, so full of "wait, what was that?" moments... since the first Books album. [No.86, p.61]

Untethered Moon is almost undeniably a classic slice of BTS. [No. 119, p.51]

Their combined voices are just so unfathomably, incorrigibly all-devouring. [No. 120, p.61]

The obtuse nature of the song structures, content and riffing are exactly what one expects ... just dressed up as a "surprise." [No. 145, p.55]

The Moon And The Village is another subtle charmer. [No. 149, p.57]

[The album is] really fun. You don't have to know about 12-tone serialism to appreciate the wonderfully goody innards of this appropriately titled compilation. [No.90, p.59]

Vol. 2's Springsteen-tinged "Don't Hurt," Tom Petty-flavored "Look How Clean I Am" and punk-soaked "It's A Whale" stomp and romp with unrepentant rage and joy. [No. 146, p.51]

Ruminations doesn't set out to be a grand statement, but it's all the more rewarding for keeping the focus on Oberst's word-rich language and emotionally direct observations. [No. 136, p.59]

While there's no lack of drama on Locket, it's a missing the bombast of yore--which is to say that if you hated Frog Eyes before, you might dig this one. [No. 124, p.57]

The band seems aware that it's on well-trod ground throughout Honky Tonk, though that doesn't seem to affect Son Volt one bit. [No. 97, p.59]