Anachronism never sounded so good. [#53, p.72]

It's that rare sort of just-about-perfect record that demands to be played over and over again. [#53, p.82]

If Seaworthy is more restrained than Macha, it's just as colorful. [#83, p.89]

Howdy is vintage Teenage Fanclub. [#53, p.92]

This may be more apple peel than you care to chomp on for a sloppy experimental pop act making its debut. [#53, p.92]

A phenomenal recording of sonic and lyrical depth. [#53, p.69]

Hefner is new at this, so things get clumsy. But it's endearing, because [Darren] Hayman's melodies and the idiosyncratic worldview he espouses are still irresistible. [#53, p.79]

The magic is still there. [#53, p.73]

The jaunty-yet-subtle tunes sneak up on you slowly, so you don't notice O'Rourke's corrosively misanthropic lyrics until they're inextricably lodged in your head. [#53, p.86]

Another step in Hood's continually compelling sonic evolution. [#52, p.89]

Merging synth orchestration and genuine strings ins't new, but [Marc] bianchi pushes the form toward and organic/technological inevitable. [#52, p.89]

Regeneration is pretty, clever, meticulously planned and tastefully executed.

At points, Life Is Full Of Possibilities certainly sounds as if Tamborello realizes what distinguishes the good from the great. [#53, p.72]

The music seems to matter, and for the listener, that's welcome relief from indiedom's groveling. [#52, p.82]

Her built-in fanbase will exult in the sulky ruminations found here. [#52, p.101]

Wratten makes the kind of albums most of us would record if the defection of a muse and lover still haunted us years later--and if we could write unabashedly pretty songs. [#52, p.109]

The members of Fugazi exercise a controlled intensity that exudes grace, their concise-yet complex songs experimenting wisely. [#52, p.87]

Everywhere you turn on Photo Album, [Ben] Gibbard is in transit, singing songs of traveling across America while his bandmates slowly perfect the post-punk melodies that snake their way through these crooked pop songs. It's a great pairing. [#52, p.82]

Finds the group farther afield than ever from the playful, energetic randomness that made its first records so utterly fantastic. [#52, p.88]

A twisted funk masterpiece that simultaneously evokes bad pornography and an outer-space barrio. Yeah, Change Is Coming is that good. [#52, p.97]

These quiet, stripped-down songs are so narcotically enticing that when an occasional burst of moderate-volume guitar noise pops up unexpectedly, the effect is excruciating, like wires burning in the brain. [#52, p.102]

Little short of brilliant. [#52, p.79]

Often, there's a subtle, troubled uncercurrent that pulls the cheer back when it threatens to turn saccharine. [#52, p.103]

It isn't very clear what the Rev is trying to get across, if anything at all. But it's a lovely listen all the same. [#51, p.100]

The Convincer gives Lowe yet another gold star with which to pad that resume. [#51, p.99]

The Hartnolls sound more relaxed and at ease than they did on their last album. [#51, p.105]

In spite of its shortcomings, there's something fascinating about this saccharine new Butthole brew.... Like driving by a head-on collision late at night, it's almost impossible to avert your eyes. [#51, p.88]

It's a Wonderful Life raises the bar already set high by fellow post-modern woodsmen types like Grandaddy and Mercury Rev. [#51, p.116]

I don't know which Stereolab album is more nauseating: Sound-Dust or the last one. [#51, p.118]

A wonderful album, with Coomes and Weiss at their very best. [#51, p.107]

Life On A String also reveals the tedious aspects of Anderson's muse. [#51, p.82]

Welch and longtime partner David Rawlings weave a spellbinding mix of desperation and salvation across this album's 10 tracks. [#52, p.111]

Unlike its predecessor's quirky pop stance, Hot Shots is defiantly, mindbendingly progadelic -- suitable for controlled-substance consumption galore. [#51, p.85]

Martsch and Co. have dipped their bucket deep into the well of pop's past to create a recombinant, joyous sound that has few modern equals. [#51, p.87]

Each soft, slow hymn to the darkness makes the band's beauty more pronounced. [#51, p.102]

In the face of today's painfully formulaic R&B/hip hop, they come off as the most soulful act on the planet. [#51, p.123]

The one-man band does pretty well for himself in finding a place for his songs between sonic textures. [#51, p.117]

This secret society's sonic output is nothing short of sheer musical buggery, a hip-hop twilight realm where Dr. Octagon performs transplant surgery on Mellow Gold with the cast of Scooby Doo in the gallery. [#50, p.89]

Eno brings interesting and complex rhythmic counterpoints to his 3-a.m. atmospherics.... It all sounds so very sleepy in the end, and quite numbing, in a most uncomfortable way. [#51, p.92]

While there's certainly nothing on Poses so riveting as to signify a rock revolution, there's something to be said for the virtue of a simple crooner operating at the top of his game. [#51, p.122]

Sexsmith doesn't succumb to a single false move or note. [#51, p.112]

Wow, is Beyond Good And Evil bad. Thudding, empty albums about nothing, held together with some of the worst guitar solos since late-'80s Lou Reed. [#51, p.90]

The Bunnymen haven't sounded this vital since 1987's "Lips Like Sugar," and some of Flowers' standout cuts rank among the band's best. [#50, p.87]

Eitzel is a far cry from Dido, but he still manages to find a proving ground where his nicotine-stained fingerpicking and tales of emotional erosion can make an uneasy peace with the precision of the Portishead crowd. [#50, p.90]

By no means a radical album; challenging as it may be, it's a natural extension of earlier work rather than a sudden departure from it. [#51, p.105]

It's four-on-the-floor disco that thumps its way through this polyphonic orchestral funk like a bully. [#51, p.92]

This is a decidedly more rocking Placebo. [#50, p.102]

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.

On Dilate, Bardo Pond does the trick by adding a bit of restraint and space to its familiar blend of Iommi-grade riffing, volume-induced overtones and Isobel SOllenberger's inimitably blasted moan. [#49, p.69]

The songs on Sucker aren't the greatest tunes Brock has ever committed to tape... [#51, p.103]

It's amazing that, however slowly, the Ex is still exploring fresh terrain. [#50, p.87]

Sure, Pocket Radio is quirky... but that's what pop is about in the 21st century. [#50, p.94]

Their dizzy, easygoing drone-pop has been replaced with faceless consistency, a sonic chutzpah that cries out "modern rock." This in itself doesn't mean Take Back... is a flop -- far from it. [#49, p.71]

She once again raises the bar for her personal best... [#50, p.85]

With the release of Old Ramon, Kozelek shows he's capable of sustained inspiration.... It's Kozelek's most successful LP: consistent, heartbreakingly sad and filled with gems that will linger in his fans' psyches. [#49, p.85]

A total triumph. [#50, p.82]

This California band seems to be one of those rare times when the major labels get it right. [#50, p.80]

One of the band's best.... While 1999's Ric Ocasek-produced Do The Collapse was criticized by some for its thick, pop-radio gloss, Isolation Drills shows more restraint, reconciling Pollard's idiosyncrasies with the track-to-track consistency great rock albums demand. [#49, p.75]

The Facts of Life is a more polished affair, casting vocalist Sarah Nixey's wispy hush into a pool of plucked strings and orchestral flourish -- duly poisoned by some blippy Air trippiness. [#49, p.68]

Some artists stimulate your brain, others tickle your senses. Matmos does both. [#50, p.101]

The guitars are gorgeously recorded, the vocals are gently understated and the occasional keyboards are carefully mixed into the background with a simple, earnest warmth. [#49, p.79]

Some of the lyrics are so biting they practically melt through the speakers... [#50, p.90]

Let's face it: Group Sounds is shit. But it's pure shit, which makes all the difference.... Everything is overdiven and mixed to within a decibel of ear-shattering heaviosity. It isn't just monstrous, it's gleefully, unapologetically monstrous. [#49, p.88]

The pure-pop masterpiece everyone knew McCaughey had in him. [#49, p.84]

While in his mind, Momus might indeed be a giant, to those of us growing weary of his increasingly tedious shtick, he just might be a weenie. [#50, p.99]

Cydonia is a welcome return to the sensual, dubby, progressive trance that marked its best early work... [#50, p.102]

Continues to mine the same sparkling vein of crushed-velvet pop/punk Spoon has perfected as its stock in trade. [#49, p.91]

Labradford continues to make music so quiet and haunting that, like falling leaves, creaking floorboards or the gentle flapping of bird wings, it seems to exist on its own terms... [#50, p.97]

Tortoise makes like Herbie Hancock wandering through the '80s, all lost at the jazz-fusion supermarket. [#49, p.95]

A flawless display. By turning former earache classics like "If You Want Blood" and "Love At First Feel" into beautiful acoustic ballads, much of The Moon sounds like his previous hits... [#49, p.86]

Simplicity never sounded so sinister. [#49, p.78]

Low is the heaviest band in rock. [#48, p.100]

Dog is Black's safest record in years.... As such, however, the album is a bore. Rollicking American rock and pedal-stell ballads don't suit Black, and the resulting arrangements are both unsurprising and uninspired. [#48, p.78]

They've tempered the cheerleader quality of their vocals, and the breakneck pace has slowed down just enough for you to discover that, somewhere along the line, they learned to play and sing. [#48, p.85]

Just when the Los Angeles-based trio's fourth album threatens to dissolve into another sleeping-beauty effort you might enjoy as a nightcap, something happens... [#48, p.74]

You can't take your ears off it. [#48, p.86]

Pelo pumps up the beat and subtly shifts the band's sound from the lounge to the club. [#48, p.75]

Musically, the quartet is borderline worthless. [#48, p.84]

Halfway applies Cook's fading trademark of playful repetition to similarly crackly sampling and comes up almost wholly unlikable. [#48, p.89]

The guitar-free I Guess Sometimes offers evidence that some of the most compelling "rock" music today doesn't come from conventional rock musicians at all. [#48, p.100]

What lends Bee its buzz--beyond the purring keyboards, the plump wah-wahs and sexy whistles--is its subtle edits: dreary snowdrifts in synthetic time that cautiously subvert the electro-charge like a savage nipple twist on the pale body of the vestal virgin that is Llama pop. [#48, p.93]

The results [of the combination of DJ culture and blues] sound less contrived on this outing [than on 1998's Come On In]. [#48, p.81]

[David] Gedge's fragile, understated vocals and keyboardist Sally Murrell's soaring, wordless harmonies only add to the sense of desolation.... [#48, p.79]

This twisted, sublime, and otherwise genious U.K. pop outfit's toss-offs, b-sides and radio sessions border on surpassing the group's albums. [#48, p.92]

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]

Warning may not only be the most beautiful Green Day LP but also the bravest. [#48, p.93]

Liquid guitar licks, bobbing bass lines, slow-tumbling vibes and lush strings float in and out of the mix, wrapping snugly around Sam Prekop's mellow croon. There's nothing life-changing here, but it's nice; and sometimes nice is enough. [#47, p.116]

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]

Despite the disparate source material, each Suitcase disc feels organic, like a "real" Guided By Voices album.... Even a casual fan will find enough gems spread among the hundred songs here to justify spending the $50 to purchase Suitcase. [#47, p.107]

It's exquisitely constructed sound with a sharp punk edge and an anarchist's ear for chaos. [#48, p.92]

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

The potential is here for Bettie Serveert to be marvelous.... But [singer Carol] Van Dijk's always-ominous lyricism, her need to play variations on the fallen and fallow, leaver her warm, tentative voice too vulnerable, too nervously open, too much like a desperate character among the bones of Lou Reed's once-famous dead. [#47, p.86]

For the most part, Excuses plays like a companion piece to 1998's Out Of Tune--chock full of the lethargic pedal steel and Topanga Canyon-rock cornerstones that make [Neil] Halstead's songs so powerful. However... Excuses leaves room for more delicate moments and patient ballads... [#47, p.108]

Through the first three songs, Confessions sounds for all the world like the masterpiece John Wesley Harding has seemed unwilling to make throughout the detours and bypasses his career has taken since his magnificent 1990 debut.... Unfortunately, he has a difficult time reaching those heights again. [#47, p.97]

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]

Sounds like lovelorn, half-baked philosophy for the Mariah Carey set.... Lucky for Justine Frischmann and her reconstituted Elastica, rock 'n' roll doesn't require lyrical profundity, just great beats, riffs, and attitude. All are here in spades... [#47, p.90]

Their most sustained work... It's sometimes ethereal, sometimes sedate, sometimes dissonant--but it's always artufl, quoting tiny fragments of Steve Reich, Brian Eno, and Miles Davis to steer the music toward a smart new seriousness. [#47, p.122]

One of 2000's most consistently compelling listens. [#48, p.95]