He indulges in too many mudane romantic/spiritual invocations and vague geopolitical maunderings. [June 2008, p.112]

Although on occasion Simon verges on a tinkly supper club sound, these awkward moments are thankfully outweighed by her rich melodies and candid lyrics. [July 2008, p.101]

Imperial Wax Solvent is a swift two-finger rejoinder [to middle aged mellowing]. [June 2008, p.112]

By and large, though, Cajun serve up a smooth, folky breed of indie-rock, only rendered unlovely by Blumberg's histrionic yelping. [Jun 2008, p.103]

The bass-fuzz stomp and chain-gang holler of 'Grounds for Divorce' couldn't be more immediate, Guy Garvey refusing to let emotional intelligence blackball a decnt tune. [Apr 2008, p.106]

Mr. Love and Justice unvels a warmer, less blustry, more soulful Bragg. [Apr 2008, p.102]

Restless, relentless, righteous: this guru of the primeval groove is once more helming an exceptional rock'n'roll band. [July 2008, p.108]

The rolling melodies, stately pace and closed-miked, out of phase vocals result in an off-kilter whole, tempered by contributions from the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. [July 2008, p.111]

In catharsis lies energy, and this, ultimately, is a very joyful, uplifting album. [Nov 2008, p.108]

All told, it sounds a bit like a band searching for a new direction, and while they don't always find it, it's a worthwhile endeavour either way. [June 2008, p.106]

Unobtrusive producer Tony Hoffer again extracts clarity while adroitly leaving the sense of a happpy mess. [May 2008 p.112]

The sneeringly portrentious title and tracks called'Being Bad Feels Pretty Good' or Epic Last Song' would be forgivable--japes, even--if there were a sense of bona fide abandon bubbling beneath the synth squelches, vocoder-shrouded vocals and obligatory cowbell bashing. [Apr 2008, p.114]

A stopgap while The Gossip work on new material, this album is nonetheless worth the price of a hand-stamp. [May 2008, p.102]

A definate contender when those Best of the Year polls gets underway. [Aug 2008, p.105]

The fourteenth Bad Seeds record is willfully untidy and, at times, pretty chaotic. It also rocks like crazy. [Apr 2008, p.104]

Here are 13 reasons why we don't need another Pixies record. [Apr 2008, p.101]

Antidotes feels like riding a tea-tray down an icy mountainside. [Apr 2008, p.106]

A crash, bang, wallop delivery, plus an organic fuzz, like stubble against a microphone, colour 'Headshock' and 'Le Ruse,' but smart arrangements and Josh Grier's slackjawed, cryptic confessionals tap into something beyond blokey bluster. [June 2008, p.106]

It's the kind of inimitably throbbing slice of neo-psychedelic unease they've knocked out with biennial constancy since 1999's Internal Wrangler. [May 2008, p.109]

A fun day out only slightly marred by clinical execution that lacks the emotional tug that lovers of this vintage seek. [May 2008, p.102]

The best songs here more than compensate for the near misses. [May 2008, p.112]

Sampling Serge Gainsbourg's quivering strings for 'Sensitized,' however, only serves to highlight the album's lack of truly knee-wobbling moments. [Dec 2007, p.98]

At it's best, it's a picaresque, altered-states voyage through old school hip-hop, black-leather electro and techno menace; elsewhere it's as invigorating as trying to get served at a bar. [Apr 2008, p.101]

Danger Mouse asked the pair to write songs for Ike Turner and ended up producing the best album of their career so far. [May 2008, p.111]

It really does seem that a decade-long period of interbal artistic crisis has been resolved, beautifully, even triumphantly. [Apr 2008, p.98]

The quartet's grandeur evokes Maiden and Priest with a hint of Thin Lizzy, yet they avoid European power metal's widdly overkill. [May 2008, p.109]

This third Sun il Moon album demonstrates Kozelek spinning luminescent textural webs on original compositions which, like the ravishing 'Moorestown,' rank among his very finest.

Highly politicised, yet leavened with deft vocal harmony and potent melodies, the album drips with passion and thoughtfully targeted ire. [Oct 2007, p. 90]

As feisty good-time rock goes, the Stones get good and gone and its worth every penny for the duet with Buddy Guy on Muddy Waters' 'Champagne and Reffer' alone. [May 2008, p.103]

Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson's endless calls for us to party hearty sound like nothing less than Shampoo's sozzled grans on a hen night, Fred Schneider's ironic lounge lizard is just creepy, and the same old tuned guitars spar against the same old Barbarella beats. [Apr 2008, p.102]

Frontman Brendan Urie has a knack for jaunty pop but Pretty Odd is too clinical and calculated for one so young. [May 2008, p.102]

It's not a bad album, just not that distinctive. [May 2008, p.111]

Efrim Menuck's off-key wail remains an acquired taste, but there's undeniable collective commitment. [Apr 2008, p.112]

The formula makes for a kick-ass sound, one which you can imagine rocking a festival tent to its foundations, and yet uncomfortable echoes of Lenny Kravitz keep reappearing. [Dec 2007, p.108]

The Jets sound cohesive and settled but losing their saucer-eyed charm can't help but make them a less mesmerising alternative to the competition. [Apr 2008, p.114]

Sometimes there's a danger that comes with being too damn clever, namely that the melodies at the heart of songs can suffer or a feeling of too much fiddling around. [Apr 2008, p.104]

A second album every bit as upbeat, funny and furious as their eponymous 2006 debut. [Apr 2008, p.105]

New Puritans sound best when living up to that Fall-derived name. [Feb 2008, p.113]

The Kills sound and feel like no other band--nocturnal, wayout, untouchable. [Apr 2008, p.100]

Street Horrrsing is a six-track, 50-minute melange of iridescent synths, psychedelic drone, distorted vocals and tribal rhythm, peaking with the deftly layered counter-melodies and blissed -out propulsion of epic single 'Bright Tomorrow.' [Mar 2008, p.113]

Surface and feeling, Neon Neon dream the life with boundless imagination. [May 2008, p.108]

With producer Danger Mouse's nuanced psychedelic rock and soul backdrops, scintillating pop music with substance results. [May 2008, p.103]

What she shows via sweetly understated arrangements, are beautifully simple love songs delivered with a summer-scented voice that echoes Karen Carpenter one minute, Linda Ronstadt or Peggy Lee the next. [Aug 2008, p.102]

The benchmark for 2008's best electronic record has been set. [July 2008, p.102]

Green writes with a compulsive frequency, like an office joker cracking funnies. And after 20 of his songs, the appeal wanes in not dissimilar fashion. [Apr 2008, p.114]

It's top quality stuff. [May 2008, p.106]

Infectious, propulsive, unselfconscious, The Dodos are good enough to keep such company [as Brian Eno or David Byrne]. [Aug 2008, p.106]

Wolf's sing-speak vocals are arresting. [May 2008, p.112]

With too many pastel-shaded instrumentals, the album lacks the previous album's molten touch and her live show's surging spirit. [June 2008, p.114]

Spiky-sounding pop dominates with abrupt or obtuse song titles the rule not the exception. [Apr 2008, p.110]

The Unfairground finds Ayers rejuvenated and stands comparison with his best work. [Oct 2007, p.98]

Superabundance is a record to treasure. [Apr 2008, p.104]

Preposterous, but this time knowingly so. [May 2008, p.114]

Real Emotional Trash conjures a virtuoso meld of folk rock, prog and cosmic blues tropes, all filtered through the ex-pavement frontman's tradmark arch surrealism. [Apr 2008, p. 101]

It's a gloom that suits them both. [Apr 2008, p.112]

It's a fantastic collection, there's still nothing else remotely like it. [Apr 2008, p.104]

It's not a great album but it is good, bar a slapdash feel to some songs and too much squealing, dated guitar. [Apr 2008, p.100]

With her co-producers, they fashion some perfectly weighted, tastefully adorned grroves but her voice, an idiosyncratic mix of Lucinda Williams and Dolores O'Riordan inflections, sometimes jars. [Apr 2008, p.100]

Lovely. [Nov 2007, p.102]

Their sun-baked, lyrically feverish chooglin' is more textured and melodic on these addictive new jams, ripe with Hammond-flavoured funkadelia and visionary gospel-prog. [May 2008, p.111]

Ryan's predilection for Wilsonesque harmonies, glokenspiel, etc, erupts into twinkly fairytale pop that's bold and forward-looking in equal measure. [Mar 2008, p.113]

Brevity obviously suits them as the results are both evocative and sublime. [May 2008, p.111]

The Bros' songs mostly rollick on witrh the agreeably vaudevillian bonhomie of The Band, when not essaying gloom with swooningly lachrymose balladry. [June 2008, p.114]

A lush and trippy affair with shades of Edward Lear-like surrealism and John Winston Lennon amid strawberry Fields. [Mar 2008, p.103]

NuAmerykah is her boldest and best yet, brilliantly eccentric but repaying every indulgence. [May 2008, p.106]

Scally's armoury of drum boxes, Bontempi organs and electric guitars provides shape-shifting backgrounds--classic '60s pop arrangements filtered through the fuzzy prism of a dream. [Mar 2008, p.108]

Opener, the self-referncing 'Better Get to Livin'' is cheesy and disposable even by Nashville standards. The title track, also autobiographical, is better, but like several songs suffers from '80s-style over-production. [June 2008, p.115]

Here her wonderful voice, smooth and warm with throaty twang and unforced power, has free rein to do what it does best on 11 fine new songs. [May 2008, p.111]

A giddy chaos of fuzz-noise and thundering drums ensures these sclectic experiments still sound like no one else but The dirtbombs. [May 2008, p.114]

Despite its promising title, Lust Lust Lust is mighty forlorn. Or, optimistically, transitional. [Dec 2007, p.100]

Aficionados will welcome a renewed emphasis on Vudi's idiosyncratic string-bending, erecting iridescent frames around Eitzel's through-a-glass-darkly vignettes. [Feb 2008,p.105]

The polished arrangements of Heretic Pride do Darnielle's songwriting no favours. [Mar 2008, p.106]

Isolation doesn't get more splendid than this. [June 2008, p.100]

His gentle mantric vocals and concise, evocative lyrics drift through layers of treated instrumentation and ambient electronica. [Apr 2008, p.112]

Not every number here reaches its perfection, but 'twas ever thus with the works of Raymond Douglas Davies; warts and all, and even the warts are interesting. [Dec 2007, p.109]

The use of borowed items invites comparisons, not only with the originals but also with other versions of the same song. And there Moorer fails the test. [Apr 2008, p.102]

Those who liked the first two albums will be pleased to hear the Deep Purple-esque, brazenly '60s organ-rock sounds and indian religious refernces still firmly in place. [Sep 2007, p.104]

This is musical wheatgrass juice: wholesome, virtous, but ultimately fun-free. [Mar 2008, p.115]

Grand Archives are a modest outfit, never as anthemic as Bridwell's widescreen My Morning Jacket-lite, but with a celestial line in harmonies. [May 2008, p.114]

Here is a pop masterpiece so toe-tapping and huggable that we might just have to rearrange the canon. [Mar 2008, p.106]

As a snapshot of Friday night through Monday morning in 36 minutes flat, this is a joy. [Mar 2008, p.106]

Briitsh Sea Power's third album proves once again there's more to them than stuffed owls and a facination with odd geological landmarks. [Feb 2008, p.100]

They wear their ideas on their sleeves, certainly, but under all the layers, a heartbeat is sometimes hard to find. [Feb 2008, p.104]

That play of sonic summer and spiritual winter shades this. [Mar 2008, p.102]

Possessed of hazily catchy and irresistible choruses, the end result is an endearingly affectionate blend of radio-friendly AOR and homely indie-rock touches anchoring their grand pop to something human. [Mar 2008, p.106]

Deceptively simple, Watershed highlights what Lang does best--fulsome ballads sung with precision timing, intelligence and a humourous twist. [Jan 2008, p.100]

The new dad has ditched the gap-year spirituality to reach for a more adult world where poverty, war and uncertainty must be confronted, and it's a world beyond his expressive abilities. [Mar 2008, p.102]

There's substance to 'Long Sad Goodbye's accusing lament for his late father and Vietnam's denunciation of the Iraq war, but Kravitz generally limits himself to muscular yet uninspired multi-instrumental expertise and sloppy-thinking hippitude. [Mar 2008, p.114]

District Line is Mould's strongest song collection since Sugar's alt-rock paradigm, "Copper Blue." [Mar 2008, p.102]

Old Growth has the primeval, fuzzed-out power of the trio's earlier albums, but with a new clarity and groove. [Mar 2008, p.113]

Dev Haynes' debut is a sinewy, surprising move for one steeped in metallic noise bridging semi-acoustic country rock and chamber folk with a folk-prog detour on the 10-minute centrepiece 'Midnight Surprise.' [Feb 2008, p.112]

In short, genial, infectious guitar pop like they used to make. [Feb 2008, p.102]

The pace is relentlessly uptempo, but the sheer feisty spirit and conviction with which it is delivered ultimately brooks no argument. [Feb 2008, p.102]

This is unlikely to expand thier fanbase, but The Mars Volta are making music built to last. [Feb 2008, p.113]

Most tracks are sophisticated, jazzy pop songs and ballads about relationships, but the angry young man of yore occasionally peeps over the parapet. [Feb 2008, p.102]

With Keep Your Eyes Ahead Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikel have pushed their fringes out of the way to display a new focus. [Mar 2008, p.112]

Such a bad idea. Such a stunning result. [Mar 2008, p.114]

At their best, as in 'Sometimes,' they drag you into their circling obsessiveness and measured rhetoric. But, too often, Yoav's cleverness feels calculating--unless it's the reverse that, over-tasked. [May 2008]