A fairly routine batch of middling-to-turgid funk numbers about lurrve performed with rather more duty than excitement.

Jones admits a queasy air of self-congratulation to her third album of jazzified covers.

Her songs, paradoxically both epic and intimate, shimmer and pulsate as their kaleidoscopic images and mysterious characters drift in and out of focus.

Godspeed have taken their by-now familiar elements and rearranged them in often beautiful or surprising ways.

The big tunes--Push Upstairs, King of Snake, Born Slippy--are brasher and more powerful, and while the studio subtleties evaporate, they are replaced by thundering rock-n-roll energy and even wilder streams of lyrical consciousness.

They deliver breathless, urgent rifferama, elements of which can be traced to RATM, The Stooges and Placebo.

The results can, surprisingly, prove as musically rewarding as they are entertaining.

As with all Stephin Merritt productions, the real stars are Stephin Merritt's wonderful songs, and the 14 love songs on Hyacinths And Thistles are as sweet and prickly as the title suggests.

While it still whispers, this third endeavour works its way into your soul.

Damon and Naomi haven't so much altered what they do as augmented it, often beautifully. The results are occasionally breathtaking.... A rare and graceful record. (Oct 2000, p.92)

Unlike many of dance culture's dedicated dilettantes, theirs is a smooth and millifluous whole, underpinned by the gentle pulsing of liquid bass lines.... Delightful. [Sep 2000, p.94]

The Menace is a far more varied and ambitious LP than the first and, one suspects, than the Elastica album we'd have got four or three years ago. A very pleasant surprise.

Highly listenable and equally danceable, a kind of Pet Shop Boys meet Gary Numan at the gates of Georgio Moroder. (Sep 2000, p.95)

The synth-laden tunes are relentlessly upbeat--sort of New Order on Prozac--with a Lightning Seeds blitheness.... Though no groundbreaker, 'Monaco' is catchy as flu.

An endearingly petulant collection of nasty hardcore guitar tunes.

Often he sings with a richness, depth and conviction worthy of Johnny Cash. [Jan 2001, p.98]

An earthy, beat-oriented album... It ain't '3 Feet High'--or even 'De La Soul Is Dead'-- but it ain't half bad. (Sep 2000, p.96)

A stoner's paradise from start to finish. Most pleasurable.

Neither great nor golden, then, but not bad either.

The rehearsal-room feel of Mwng succeeds in capturing the organic, woody, mystical atmosphere that was sometimes missing from its highly-polished, heavily-digitised predecessors.

The production... is appropriately lush and celebratory, brimming over with strings, synthesizers and layered, sensuous vocals. [July 2000, p.111]

Often, Sinead's words are infected with the pernicious post-therapy psychobabble that blights the contemporary female singer/songwriter...

The Moon's musical and thematic diversity is glued together by Brooks' ability to instill even the most desolate musical climes with warmth and emotion.... One of the year's most oddly endearing records so far.

There's still a warm heart beating under all this newly-assembled machinery.

This is a truly freeflowing masterpiece that stands shoulder to shoulder with Mos Def's 'Black On Both Sides.'

Earle has let the spook out of the closet, so he can bare his spiritual chest (as it were) with a Lennonesque honesty and a vocal delivery that increasingly resembles Tom Petty's sub-Dylan sneer.

Given time, fans will warm to Peasant, but ultimately the inconsistency of it's songwriting is a tad disappointing.

And if nothing on Killing Puritans has quite the commercial potential of last year's You Don't Know Me (a UK Number 1), it does have the same cheekily opportunistic spirit, Van Helden's sticky fingers busily probing all kinds of forgotten pop cultural corners.