A note-cramming session heavy on the Little Feat and light on the Sea And Cake. [#55, p.70]

There's a strange, practiced quality to the pop numbers that robs them of their buoyancy. [#71, p.87]

It sounds like a fun, energetic performance but it downplays his sophisticated charms. [#91, p.56]

About 45 seconds into song after song, the chorus punches in loudly--predictably and, ultimately, annoyingly. [No. 135, p.57]

As a group, they're missing the sheer fuck-it-all unpredictability of the original band.... For the first half of Golden Lies, everything clicks with long-remembered power; but after half an hour, Curt and Co. start groping for new ideas and wind up repeating themselves, falling into formula instead of rewriting it. [#47, p.106]

The most psychedelic moments on the album come during the long instrumental fades on tunes like "Silence Can Say So Much," "Cast The First Stone" and "Love Is Like A Spinning Wheel," but the middy instrumentals mix often mashes the sounds together into an indistinguishable pulsation of spacey sci-fi noise. [No. 137, p.55]

Loads of echo and reverb rescue the album from this potentially fatal flaw, but overall, You & Me is a mixed bag.

Turn Blue is a soft pack of post-coital smokes, and Marlboro Lights 100's at that. [No. 110, p.51]

On first listen, For The Season is pleasantly trippy. Listen closely, however, and it seems rather patchy. [#70, p.100]

At its best, Bewilderbeast promises pastoral beauty.... At its worst, the album's faux-jazz workouts, painful disco homage, sappy ballads and pointless instrumentals stretch a decent EP into a bloated, hour-plus opus. [#47, p.84]

It helps that the androgynous vocals carry a hook here and there.... Otherwise, it's hard to pull any other redeeming qualities out of Galore. [No. 106, p.59]

A half-hearted attempt to outshine 2001's A Better Version Of Me, but lacks all the "Spit And Fire" that made that album so human. [#58, p.105]

Fantasy would be far more appetizing as a photo-negative of itself, with a dearth of feedback and studio obfuscation and Ambrogio's poetry as front-and-center spoken word. [No. 105, p.57]

His [James Alex's] lyrics aren't particularly strong. [No. 126, p.53]

Flesh is musical, but also minimal, a soothing pink noise that won't put you to sleep or interfere with your daydreams. [No. 116, p.59]

Jamaica Plain feels fittingly tentative and exploratory. [No. 105, p.58]

Try to listen to a whole [Azure Ray] album and time stands still, not out of boredom, just deja vu. [No.91, p.52]

Algiers appears designed not to define, defy, offend and - most heinously- explore. [No.91, p.53]

Over a full-length album, he's as annoying as ever. [No. 96, p.61]

Taken in one sitting, Our Thickness is just wearying. [#68, p.110]

From a fan's point of view, this [playing the same songs for years] rarely works. And it rarely works here. [No.99, p.55]

For the most part, we're just not feeling Everything. [#82, p. 60]

Love This Giant fitfully achieves its aim of unlikely, unearthly pop. [No.91 p.56]

He [Emil Svanangen] has a high, expressive tenor that often slips into a keening falsetto that fights to be heard over the sound of the dark, frequently overwhelming synthesizer symphonies that fill the background. [No. 147, p.55]

There's never a sense that the singer convinces himself he's got anything beyond the rote punk/blues motions to draw from. [#67, p.112]

The lack of focus and discernible melodies keeps CANT from being anything more than an interesting diversion. [#81, p. 53]

Songs that actually shoot for happy tend to slide into saccharine. [#69, p.96]

The hooks fail to sink in, and Kinski is occasionally too clever for its own good. [#68, p.100]

A quartet of droney sameness [in the second half] essentially grinds Moonlight's funkiest ingredients into a sluggish, repetitive pulp. [#68, p.111]

Orbserver is the latest chapter in that legend's [Lee Perry's] ever-lengthening history, and it works ok in that sense. But it's barely an Orb album. [No.91 p.58]

Overall, this still feels very much on the level Placebo was at with 1999 single "Every You Every Me," minus more artfully constructed, impressive instrumental compositions and lyricism. [No. 102, p.59]

Too frequently, though, the new material doesn't have the constitution to withstand the heavy hand of producer and former Dawes guitarist Blake Mills. [No. 137, p.55]

A concept where every title is a different animal should've wielded funnier, more songful results. [No.98, p.55]

Sadly, Beams doesn't show Dear changing up his game in any meaningful way. [No.90 p.55]

Not Stars’ best, and far from their worst, but an album’s worth of the usual string-laden drama-pop seems a thin substitute for what today’s kids are seeking.

Overall, though, Mr. Love & Justice is a collection of broken promises and lyrics that don’t live up to their potential.

After a promising start, the album charts a steep and steady decline into ersatz Bowie and slapdash psychedelia. [#58, p.96]

Only the last song, Wild Sun's straightforward, vulnerable take on "Easy Way Out," finally hits the mark. [No. 137, p.61]

The Whole Love works best as aural comfort food.[#81, p. 60]

Vacancy has a more organic, "big indie rock" real feel to it as opposed to something automatically designed to blast from convertibles and iPods in high-school lockers. [No. 134, p.53]

There's melody and rhythm, but mostly the overtones float through the ether, seldom resolving into anything approaching a song, although the overall effect is soothing and dreamy. [No. 135, p.54]

The nine songs blur together over the 36 minutes, and they offer few surprises once you enter their heavy-handed world. [No. 138, p.58]

Hexadic too often misses the point by honing in on formlessness and esoteric explanations instead of solid consistency. [No. 117, p.61]

A mixed bag. [#71, p.102]

Gradually succumbs to torpor, with track after track given over to midtempos and pretty-yet-languid riffing. [#64, p.104]

We still find this trio a little yawn-worthy. [No. 93, p.55]

As meticulously milquetoast as the entirety of this is, there are deadly sharp adult contemporary hooks on "Over & Over" and "The Pin," though the pervasive electronic beats, the obnoxious layer of acoustic strumming and raise-your-beer-and-hum choruses are symbols of a band lock-stepping in with whatever goes over best with casual listeners. [No. 132, p.55]

The odd, sublime nod to the blues is a pleasant shock in what registers as a 45-track hour-long lark--the latest in a long, winding series of digressions from the auteur's core competency. [No. 93, p.55]

The emotional mood of At Best Cuckold never breaks away from the spell of his comfortable lethargy. [No. 114, p.53]

The melancholia lacks distinguishing marks. [#64, p.80]

Atomic offers rare glimpses into the band's writing process and exists as an anomaly in Mogwai's catalog that's sure to intrigue diehard fans, but offers little more to anyone else. [No. 132, p.57]

Good-natured, utterly accessible dance pop with meta-awareness of its own shallowness and disposability. [No.92 p.58]

More often the singing is submerged in the mix, making it impossible to understand the dreamy wordplay that makes Oelsner's lyrics so memorable. [No. 145, p.59]

Interesting sounds? To be sure. Impenetrable songs? That, too. [#73, p.94]

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

Too much of Everybody's Coming Down limps along on wounded extremities, with quirky cleverness displaced in favor of sloppy indie-rock tropes that answer the eternal question about what Ween would sound like minus a sense of adventure. [No. 123, p.59]

The lyrics are often buried in the mix. [No. 128, p.61]

Even though bombast spawned the band's biggest hit, it sinks a lot of this record's second half. [No. 85, p.53]

There are plenty of vocal effects and a seductive use of harmonies, but they're seldom more than pleasant. [No. 111, 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]

A draining listen due to its scatterbrained ideas and patchy sequencing. [#73, p.106]

When everything's working, the band is a force. Which doesn't happen enough on this oddly-timed eponymous release. [No. 85, p.53]

Sonically, it's all pretty enough, but the songs rely too much on goofy valentines and cliches. [No. 104, p.55]

[Frontman Jesse] Elliott seems more preoccupied with packing prosaic lyrics with regional references than encouraging the participatory response these large-band arrangements often beg for. [#88, p.60]

Its successes just about match its failures. [#70, p.100]

Flute and saxophone abound on this record, employed with a degree of schmaltz that works against the songs more often then not. [No. 95, p.57]

Everything with this band is bigger and more over-over-overdubbed than [Ruess' former band] the Format, which makes fun. about 10 times more annoying. [No. 85, p.54]

He mostly sounds like a fish out of water. [No. 95, p.57]

It seems so mild. [#64, p.98]

[The final track Love Is Love] has the sprightly energy that's missing on most of the record. [No. 143, p.61]

Beyond often rings with the bumbling awkwardness of a band taking itself too seriously for the first time. [No. 108, p.55]

This LP does little to propel her anywhere near the ranks of the big-name women of contemporary pop/rock. [No. 108, p.61]

Like a tightrope walker toeing a slack line, the Helio Sequence enters and exits this fifth full-length at its highest points... In between, Negotiations breaks down. [No.91, p.55]

DJ Shadow first made his name by delving deep into the world's bottomless pile of debris to redeem the wannbe hits and half-formed artistic statements of our musical past. Now, he contributes to it. s[#82, p. 54]

Although the harmonies and pickin-skills are still top-notch, Carry Me Back falls short in songwriting. [No.90, p.59]

At it's best, Barragan sounds like typically inventive musicians sleepily phoning it in. [No. 113, p.54]

Hold/Still tries so hard to be ominous that it almost always forgets to be interesting. [No. 130, p.61]

Sadly, "Everything Is Wrong" announces another second-half fade, the back side congealing into the same zombie histrionics that sank Interpol. [No. 113, p.57]

This album isn’t a total disaster, but it’s difficult to imagine most people wanting to listen to Anywhere I Lay My Head more than once.

Consider this follow-up one step back. [#69, p.98]

It's hard to get too hot and bothered. [No.88 p.55]

Rouen is all long jams and breezy acoustics, the telltale signs of a band that feels it's time to sober up. [#70, p.110]

An ambitious album... but it's undercut by Fink's inconsistent readings. [#69, p.96]

Most disappointing about PersonA is that it oscillates between gutsy and lazy. [No. 131, p.51]

Nearly buries itself in interesting ideas that are ultimately unrewarding. [#69, p.98]

Joker unwittingly set the bar high for his debut full-length. Unsurprisingly, it falls short. [#82, p.56]

Space-rock created in an energy vacuum. [#47, p.104]

Unpatterns is indeed mostly patterns, in fact - moody, bloopy instrumentals that don't really fit into one subgenre box because they barely muster the strength to be defined by a category. [No.87 p.59]

Van Dyk can only do one style, and by the time the album is two=thirds over, you're already ready for him to mix out. [#86, p.59]

Much of Synthesized sounds like a rather bland concentrate of whatever musical style Holkenborg has chosen to upgrade. [No.94, p.56]

GRRR! is a total cash grab. [No. 94, p.59]

Marshall’s second album of covers, mostly continues the cleaned-up, virtually lobotomized aesthetic of 2006’s unfortunately heralded "The Greatest."

With a few exceptions, the rest of Goodbye remains little more than background music destined for life in service to candle boutiques and Saturn commercials. [Summer 2007, p.106]

An eight-song album that flounders too much in mid-tempo purgatory. [No. 107, p.55]

The arrangements here never add anything to the songs that you haven't heard a thousand other bands do just as well, if not better. [No. 118, p.55]

On Makers, Votolato rarely digs deep enough to scar, and he tends to wander where he thinks inspiration might live instead of letting it find him. [#70, p.110]

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]

She's a ghost in the machine; unfortunately, the machine is an Atari 2600. [#57, p.80]