It All Starts With One's songs all deal with love's discontents, and their desperate beauty should make a hit with those who like to wallow in desperation and unhappiness. [No.87, p.52]

Everything about the resulting album elevates what could've been a gimmicky lark into something affecting. [No. 136, p.53]

A pleasant bedroom-style record that sometimes sounds more like rough sketches than fully formed ideas. [No.99, p.58]

Sadly, the first full album of new Swervedriver music since 1997's 99th Dream is 10 loud and thick attempts to recapture the catchiness, energy and all-important mood of timeless classics and exactly that same number fall short of the magic. [No. 118, p.55]

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]

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 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]

Sounds like somebody has exited the coffeehouse with a strong jolt of caffeine. [#74, p.101]

Darnell has written and produced as many alluringly and subtly contagious melodies -- featuring lyrics rapt with cuttingly humorous tales of ruined relations, self-satisfying sexuality, vacation thrills and street-level detritus -- as Sondheim. [#81, p. 57]

Better than ever. [No.92 p.55]

It's bright and shiny and perky.... But it also risks being faceless--it's Tegan and Sara's least personable, most superficial record. [No. 95, p.60]

With All The Times We Had, they've nailed the harmony-drenched, foot-tapping folk/rock of the Seattle sound. [No. 96, p.55]

It's a treat to hear Cohen so comfortable in both his old and new skins. [No. 121, p.53]

The Sword continually updates ridiculously classic rock tropes in the most wonderful ways. [No. 123, p.60]

Between Waves might be the least Relapse of all Relapse titles, but that's what genuine eclecticism looks like. [No. 135, p.53]

It's not as fun as [1999's Play], but the broad outlines comes from a similar Play-book, with Moby talk/sung vocals amid coos and hums of female singers. ... It's an inviting album but it's bleak. [No. 150, p.56]

There's plenty of upbeat rockers, but a bulk of the record is made up of ballads and slower jams. [No. 102, p.57]

As with his solo output, Jose Gonzalez has a clear vision for his music's direction, and he sticks to it with admirably rigorous discipline here, making the majority of Junip more steady than indistinct. [No. 97, p.57]

Passage has all the elements of a classic, from undeniable hooks to head-spinning shards of noise. [No.87 p.55]

It's as crucial and cool as set of eternally intertwined new-wave voices as Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson, and that's saying a lot. [No. 106, p.54]

Mountain Battles turns longtime engineer Steve Albini's bare-bones studio work into a virtue and spins Deal's ADD-afflicted worldview into gold. [Summer 2008, p.97]

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]

EZTV's debut is unassuming, and impressively so. [No. 122, p.55]

The musicianship is smart and faultless, but also too subtle. [No. 96, p.54]

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

The music works well on its own merits, though it's sometimes tough to know how ironically we're supposed to hear the Yawpers' penchant for the standard furniture of hardscrabble Americana. [No. 126, p.61]

There are moments when all this earnestness turns sickly and Burns gets too serious about his gifts... but the eclectic moments of bass, banjo and French vocals... manage to jerk things back into focus. [#71, p.88]

We're left with a meandering, psychedelic buzz--not a dizzying, mind-expanding head-trip. [#71, p.102]