The record's two pieces are fields of rhythm that seem to pull away from your reach like a curtain blowing in a breeze, yet swing back to knock you on your ass. [No. 208, p.57]

Trentemoller's flawless ear for melancholy, melodicism and atmospheric drama gives Fixion the feel of a soundtrack to a gothic/cyberpunk indie film and provides further evidence of its creator's electropop mastery. [No. 135, p.61]

Everybody's A Good Dog is crisp, shimmering and bombastic. [No. 125, p.55]

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

The stylistic range is surprisingly broad and definitely campy. [No. 122, p.61]

In Our Heads sees them take their craft to its most dizzying heights yet. [No.89, p.54]

Harcourt holds nothing back, transcends theatrics and reaches the top. [No. 135, p.59]

Like Oskar, Otto luxuriates in tiny, clicking blip-beats with a sense of sythn orchestration. [#68, p.102]

Picks up where [their debut] left off. [#69, p.108]

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]

The Icarus Line has created a masterful artistic achievement that can scarcely be listen to. The musical sweep is epic, highly orchestrated. [No. 125, p.57]

Cease To Begin is a fine, fitting return to familiar ground. [Fall 2007, p.91]

The music on Weekends is balanced between bright, up-tempo numbers and cheerless explorations of loneliness and heartache, but even on the dance tunes, the somber lyrics keep things from getting too exuberant.

By keeping it simple, Bowie has avoided the stupid, said more with less and made the clearest record of his career. [#61, p.88]

[A] very rewarding LP. [No. 103, p.61]

Capturing the band at its creative zenith, the three albums on Volume 2--Music To Strip By, Charmed Life and The Band That Would Be King--are hip-shaking, chin-scratching things of beauty rife with bent-grooves and wacked-out, sexed-up story songs that fall somewhere between Jonathan Richman and the Residents. [No. 117, p.53]

With Rounds, Hebden has found the secret meeting place for man and machine; he uses his cunning to exploit it and all of its startling possibilities. [#59, p.94]

Equitable with the Fall's bossiest, most brazen moments. [#70, p.94]

Musically, all the touchstones that made "Passover" so riveting are in place. [Summer 2008, p.96]

The songs on Citizen Of Glass feel more solid and lyrically grounded in the known world. [No. 138, p.59]

Same Language is excellent ersatz Russell. [No. 135, p.53]

Get lost with them. [No. 102, p.54]

As mood music for a particularly rainy series of months, it's a perfectly bummed-out comedown. [No. 138, p.60]

There have been many very good Jon Langford albums; this outlier is one of the best. [No, 147, p.54]

That Vol.1 can capture that energy and enthusiasm of the [excellent] live show, the youthful vigor that prevents it from going into the realm of self-indulgent fogey prog pretty much guarantees we'll be following their career until they're old men. [No.88 p.60]

As she meanders through disappointment and hope, with pedal steel, accordion and strings focusing emotion, Mandell channels Nilsson and Newman to make a lasting impression. [No.89, p.56]

That this LP is less summit than plateau says more about the level of past work than anything lacking from this one. [No.88 p.61]

The tunes sound lustrous but Amos, the singer and writer, sounds richer. [No. 93, p.53]

Musically and lyrically, she shares more with Barbara Manning and John Darnielle, able to tell affecting late-night confessionals with sharp attention to detail and very little drama. [No. 97, p.61]

Every bit as visceral and thrilling as fellow Manhattanites the Strokes. [#54, p.98]

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

If Low or Acetone pull your melancholy levers and there's a need for some hurt feelings, then go ahead and reserve Skyscraper National Park a space on your 2002 top-10 list. [#54, p.92]

Like everyone from Young Marbles Giants to Stereolab, less is always more with ARS, making every choice more deliberate and powerful. [No. 102, p.52]

Subtle acoustic bass, quiet drums and occasional strings and piano accents support his strummed acoustic guitar, leaving his quiet, expressive singing at center stage. [No. 138, p.61]

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

At an hour long, Infiniheart occasionally feels infinite, but moments of perfection make VanGaalen's meanderings seem a necessary part of the whole appealing coincidence. [#69, p.110]

Third Eye Centre is a wonderful addendum to the band's prolific and enchanting catalog. [No. 102, p.53]

Another fine showcase for her savvy and adventurous approach to both song selection and interpretation. [No. 147, p.59]

He sparkles on his own. [No. 93, p.53]

Paternoster invites you to get ugly and rotten with her like it's a call to arms. [No.86, p.57]

Even the twosome's weakest album has undeniable substance in its slow burn. Don't call the Yes Age just yet. [No. 102, p.58]

Gonzalez is a romantic at heart, given to an array of lyrical possibilities even as his music ripples with the taut simplicity of someone strumming alone in his bedroom. [Fall 2007, p.96]

Musically, Honeybear is more polished effort than Fear Fun, with more production and horns to fill out the songs and an even bigger experimental streak. [No. 117, p.56]

Pere Ubu was changing rapidly, but this is shrewd stuff on which the band built its legend. [No. 130, p.61]

Ultimately nothing curtails The Sides And In Between from taking large, genre-defying outbound steps. [No. 135, p.57]

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]

MCII never quite gets to the point of pastiche, but its fondness for grunge-era distortion and '60s-style harmonies makes it entirely contemporary. [No. 98, p.53]

[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]

While not on par with the best from those two bands [The Clash and Stiff Little Fingers], American Fail is still potent. [No. 148, p.53]

Full of life and sunshine. [No.87, p.53]

It's best to take each line as a scene, each song an onslaught of images, but embedded indelibly into your brain by hooks that won't quit. [No. 102, p.53]

Save for the grooving, frizzy "Dreams," the ambient alterna-pop/R&B of Colors is sleek, clean and clear. [No. 148, p.53]

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]

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

A damn good sophomore effort. [#54, p.86]

It's not only the supremely crafted song structures that give this album its classic feel but also the trickery-free production and Russo's slightly grayed tenor. [#64, p.107]

Crazy Itch Radio is catchy overload. [#73, p.86]

Angels just rocks. [Winter 2008, p.108]

The whole album rocks. [#53, p.74]

Overgrown is a fuller, more heated album than its predecessor, denser and more tender. [No. 98, p.52]

Control is the finger-pointing punk record of the year. [#54, p.101]

Pollard's songcraft remains intact regardless of presentation. [No. 130, p.61]

Even at their most obvious, the Buzzcocks can smoke the young guns. [#58, p.83]

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]

His deft handling of the pop-song idiom makes even these smaller-scale songs soar. [#64, p.89]

The pair rips through a hard-rockin' 11-song set without messing much beyond the four-minute mark of any track. [No. 93, p.56]

The new/old Psychedelic Swamp LP of today fuses the best of both worlds. [No. 128, p.51]

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

Credit sludgemeister Alan Moulder's mixing with fashioning this trio's graceless clamor into a pop blasterpiece (though the high-gloss context occasionally suggests a randier, more cacophonous No Doubt). [#59, p.111]

With each layer adding something to the stew when time on their own endeavors allowed, Nevermen is a successful and forward-thinking act of sonic maximalism. [No. 128, p.52]

A looser, more causal and countrified LP than a formal Heartbreakers release, these longtime friends use Mudcrutch to have some fun, jam out and exude a little bit of that old-fashioned Laurel Canyon psyche-twang sound. [No. 132, p.57]

At it's best, the record finds her swapping the heavy-handed concepts that've largely driven her work to date for the irrefutable impact of raw lyricism. [No. 93, p.56]

Remarkably, the shifts in tone and mood only serve Guero in the end. [#67, p.85]

Their best record since reuniting. [#68, p.95]

The Foo sextet has made its hardest, yet most curvaceous and warm-blooded record to date. [No. 148, p.54]

Unexpected exits drop like hailstones throughout the Athenian psych/pop institution's 13-track 13th album. [No. 103, p.55]

An album that’s rewarding--and pleasantly intelligent--from start to finish. [No. 128, p.53]

If the fanboys and motorheads are equally turned off by it in places, you get the sense the Puppets themselves--who sound happier and more comfortable here than they have in years--would be perversely pleased. [No. 98, p.58]

It’s easily their biggest-sounding: a bright, trebly, disco-poppin’ melody feast bursting with keyboards, harmonies, Tinkertoy production flourishes and chorus after towering chorus of fizzy, whiz-bang pop goodness. [No. 132, p.57]

The most enjoyable weird record of its career. [No. 101, p.52]

She's inverting the musicians' aging curve, each album more challenging and less easily digestible than the last. [No. 103, p.58]

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

Matt Pond PA shows it can rock out tastefully. [Fall 2007, p.102]

No matter the song or guest, it always sounds like the Melvins, and that's a good thing. [No. 98, p.58]

Golightly brings out rock'n'roll's original transgressive spirit. [#60, p.98]

Like much of Francis' most compelling work, the album is a mediation on a muse. [Fall 2007, p.96]

It's sharply focused--and sonically beautiful--but also abstract, with an open-ended feeling to the swooping voices and lyrical ambiguities. [No. 145, p.51]

It's not so much airily psychedelic as totally stoned. [#69, p.99]

A gorgeous, seductive album. [No. 114, p.56]

Familiar moves all, by two musicians with whom familiarity breeds contentment.[No. 93, p.57]

[Lee delivers] some of the most impassioned performances he's ever recorded. [No. 104, p.58]

With a snarl on their lisp, drums set to bash and guitars red-lining all the way, snotty new Cribs anthems such as "Year Of Hate" and "Partisan" shine within Albini's typical sonic verite approach to recording. [No. 145, p.53]

There's so much good music here, performed affectionately but not reverently, that it's a keeper. [No. 132, p.60]

The songs are tightly constructed, the recordings clean and largely devoid of production effects, allowing the melodies, all quite lovely to take center stage. [No. 147, p.61]

[A] return to the simpler production style of 2001 debut The Optimist LP. [#68, p.112]

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

A sinister, slinky catwalk with sharper melodic angles and a propulsive, post-punk groove. [#75, p.99]

It's a truism that embedded in most double albums is an even better single one, but that doesn't apply here. [No. 114, p.58]