The first five tracks here are on par with anything you loved about Us.

Miller offers more than enough quality material here to justify stepping out on his own: what he's occasionally lacking in energy, he largely makes up for with craft.... That said, it's unlikely to instigate much beyond some afternoon head-nodding, and even some of Miller's fans will be somewhat put off by the album's borderline MOR sound.

The Creek Drank the Cradle is made of small epiphanies.

Despite its flaws, though, The Lost Tapes is nice. Not a return to form, per se, but possibly as close as we're likely to get.

A Hundred Days Off is enjoyably uninspired; it defines both "pleasant" and "unremarkable".

The album preserves their defining qualities: superb lyricism and powerful tension. But it's missing two key elements of Low's last outing. That is, the engaging songs and captivating production.

These tried-and-true structures can seem fried-and-false.

Aldhils Arboretum and its inverted career-path singles focus disappoints.

While Demolition forgoes the overproduction and even much of the shameless rock-god posturing that plagued Gold, Adams hasn't yet found his way out of his songwriting rut.

Ladytron has succeeded at programming a record so distant that you'll wonder just what comprises the wind beneath their wires.

Martsch continues the sub-greatness trend of his recent work, releasing another record that fails to carry the weight of the canonical two-fer that lies at the center of his career.

Lif has managed to transcend the gimmicks and wankery that generally mar this kind of grand opus, and emerge with his strongest offering yet.

The monotonous stretches of this concert package make it difficult to feel anything about him at all. The proceedings lack a transporting element; if this disc is playing while one is stuck in traffic, one will feel very much stuck in traffic.

Although How Animals Move has solid arrangements and melodies, Parish is at his best when he mixes hard work and detail with spontaneous, rough-edged playing. It's not that the slow stuff doesn't work; it's just not as exciting or even as inventive as his rock music.

A unique, gripping listen that's certainly not for everyone, but manages to carve out an appealing niche for itself.

Could easily have been the dullest, nicely produced thing in the world, if not for the fact that the songs are remarkably good.

It's probably a smart move for Columbia to release a reconfigured sampler of her early songs to catch people up on her talent. Yet, as an ardent fan, it's hard for me not to feel a little let down.

When these guys are on, it truly is the wrath of the righteous. However, Songs for the Deaf vacillates constantly between soaring heights and mind-numbing lows, making for a true hit-or-miss affair.

But while the sound of this album is more expansive, the influences a bit less obvious, and the approach more varied, the guys forgot to tote along their initial strength: the songs.

Lost in Space leaves you feeling that she's already covered this terrain.

Pulp have pulled off yet another remarkable reinvention of their sound and outlook, while simultaneously making their most organic album since their full-length debut, It, was released almost two decades ago.

Eternal Youth feels like more of a lackluster stopgap than equal-footing sidecar for Merritt's songcraft, a frustrating teaser from the Merritt portfolio of aliases.

This is the sound of Grunge Past, raised from the dead to parade its rigor-mortised corpse around for a few moments before returning to the grave. And it's kinda fun, but hardly bears a second listen.

Blacklisted's accompaniment is roundly excellent and evocative, but Case's voice is what really sells the record.

A return to textbook Mekons-- from gracefully shambling country to deep-beating tribal rhythms, by way of good, clean rock 'n roll.

Zoomer is a very, very good album, but one thing it makes clear is that the songwriting aspect of this sort of lap[pop] hybrid must continue to improve.

Spoon's latest is their magnum opus to date; it takes a scalpel to the highlight reel of their career, cutting and pasting a 35-minute tour de force that ends too soon.

The problem is the production.

If nothing else, Frank's 33-minute Devil's Workshop is the punchy record that should have followed Teenager of the Year.

Loss, regret, and a minor key brilliantly permeate jangling guitars and rhythmic and tonal shifts-- and although it's no Closer or OK Computer, it's not unthinkable that this band might aspire to such heights.

None of these tracks are all that interesting beyond a listen or two-- even the best ones get tired fast.

An uncompromising, energetic monster of a record.

It's jaw-dropping, certainly, and what's more, it actually works.

After a few tracks, it becomes increasingly more difficult to ignore the pathetic lyrics and boring flows-- even the production seems redundant, bland, and horribly imitative and regressive.

They've managed to broaden the nervous-tic angst-rock of their previous band into something more readily adaptable without reducing it to mealy-mouthed pop regurge.

There's very little on Son of Evil Reindeer to perk up the ears for anyone with more than a couple Jeepster products in their Case Logic.

The results as a whole, whether fabulously disastrous or formidable, offer an aural spectacle that other 55-year-old, or even 35-year-old, rock stars should dream of wrangling.

Love it or hate it, the precious, nasal vibrato Oberst affects is the tie that binds all these varied tunes together in the end, and in most cases, it compliments the music admirably.

The album crawls from the speakers like a stabbing victim and gives up a great moan; it's a difficult listen, but the rewards are great.

Better to track down this decade's insane explosion of tangents individually than to be given a brief summary by a hit-or-miss marketing device.

What truly separates Daybreaker from other Orton efforts is its lack of emotional resonance-- moments where Beth just belts it out or where she actually seems engaged with the songs she's singing.

Despite these moments when PE shows their age, they have largely prevailed with Revolverlution by revamping the very structure of how we digest music.

The Vines get credit for ambition, but Highly Evolved covers so much ground that none of it seems convincing: there's just no emotional depth here.

Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots is a bold and inventive work, brimming with ideas and sublime moments of brilliance. But it's also unfocused and top-heavy.

Charango reeks of Warner Brothers' attempt to find a viable audience for this waning band.

Fans of Superdrag will like this, provided they're okay with more of the same.

This isn't a record, it's a portfolio: it's noisy but catchy, it lets them try out different styles, and it makes you give a good goddamn.

After the initial bustle of a few extremely strong tracks, Optometry wanders blindly for far too long.

The detached, semi-ironic delivery doesn't play well with the perky club beats.

Loewenstein's problems seem to spring from a penchant for textbook hard rock and an almost astonishing lack of range, failings that are amplified by his choice to record all of At Sixes and Sevens' instrumentation himself.

Heathen Chemistry also takes the time to cop riffs and progressions from previous Oasis hits.

Gedge seems oblivious to the fact that all the gushing critics and cliquey consumers are crowding the 60s, 70s, and 80s lounges, leaving him to hog the stage in the remember-the-90s room.

It sounds like a home studio project, a whole album of ideas that sound almost-clever but go absolutely fucking nowhere.

Read & Burn is still Wire, and without even retreading the past.

Murray Street is Sonic Youth's first successful convergence of envelope-pushing guitarwork and accessible songery since 1988.

It's a damn good pop album, with a little muscle behind its melodies to boot.

While it doesn't recapture the magic of the Sprout-era Guided by Voices records, Universal Truths and Cycles marks the return of some of the most sorely missed qualities of early Guided by Voices: strong vocal melodies and refreshingly atypical song structures.

The disc is enhanced with gleefully absurd, marginally interactive cartoons, and packed with that Eisenhower-era zip-twinkle.

Heathen is the best Bowie release in years.

As with most of the 70s sensitive guy genre though, a lot of the music here toes the schmaltz line. And by the second half of Three, Prewitt's tripped right over it, landing in dangerous Neil Diamond territory.

Now, for what it's worth, Dirty Vegas won't rob you of the gift of sight or make your ears bleed; it's just boring.

A disorienting hodgepodge of new songs and instrumental score padded with annoying segments of dialogue from the movie.

An album that's full of drama, without the tiresome excess.

The Private Press is more solid an album than anyone dared expect from an older, wiser DJ Shadow, and though it won't be televising another revolution, I'd be lying if I said its celebratory pleasure centers didn't communicate directly with my own.

It's the kind of meet-you-halfway hipster party record the Dismemberment Plan has decided they don't want to make anymore.

The more anthemic crowd-pleasing numbers littered throughout The Beginning Stages of the Polyphonic Spree boast such endlessly repeated refrains as "Hey/ It's the Sun/ And it makes me Shine," which lose a lot of their appeal when taken out of their natural habitat (the live setting) and placed between your headphones.

The band's best release since 1996's whoopass and splashy Firewater, though it just sounds like uninviting racket the first time you hear it, and it continues Firewater's preoccupation with alcohol.

Easy to dismiss, smirk at, or even hate on the fist listen, nine out of The Snare's ten tracks are grind-and-pause, semi-sultry pairings of exotic keyboard settings and mid-tech beats that exploit their refrains and come weirdly close to the patterns of 'risqué' after-dinner radio pop circa 1999-present.

The album does offer the listener the high-quality mix CD that techno purists have long suspected Speedy J could deliver.

He's playing the same old marshall vs shady real-or-fake game as usual and its as interesting and complex as it ever was.

The collaborative nature of Sharpen Your Teeth, of course, yields a few missteps.... There are some damn fine moments here, though.

Title TK picks up where Pod left off in 1989, with a jagged sound nowhere near as tight as the Pixies' but a heartfelt enthusiasm for creating music.

The Golden Dove has moments of significant achievement.

As a follow-up, 18 plays it safer than a quadruple-condomed fundamentalist Christian at an abstinence rally.

On a Wire has that glossy veneer that only happens with the help of a good decisive manager, a fast-talking label guy with All The Answers, and that bloodthirsty, all-encompassing desire for yet another Big Tour.

With Maladroit, Weezer has finally given the full punt to the nerd-rock label they sorta invented and always shunned, settling instead for being our generation's version of Cheap Trick.

It seems now that the band is terrified of change, leaving them to rehash what their first five albums accomplished in lieu of actual progression.

Problem is, where Elf Power previously made every extra instrument sound like an essential part of their songs, here, these things just sound like last-minute additions aimed at making one song sound remotely different from the next.

While better than some of their previous releases, One Time Bells still isn't a mind-blowing album.

While the rest of pop culture infantilizes itself with cussing puppets and manufactured bands who willfully dangle like marionettes, Waits is serving up vintage brittle fusion and somehow breaking the law of diminishing returns. [Review of both Alice and Blood Money]

While the rest of pop culture infantilizes itself with cussing puppets and manufactured bands who willfully dangle like marionettes, Waits is serving up vintage brittle fusion and somehow breaking the law of diminishing returns. [Review of both Alice and Blood Money]

It's Loverboy-style lite-metal meets new wave, without the riffs, melodies or red leather pants. In other words, it's Survivor.

The sound and songs of [Aden's fourth album, Topsiders]... are no different whatsoever from the band's already homogenous and uncharacteristic previous three.

Invention has very few peers, in my opinion. Though Schlammpeitzinger's Collected Simple Songs of My Temporary Past and Andrew Coleman's Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt come close, I'm firmly resigned that I'll not hear a more effortlessly charming album this year.

Instead of coming from noise and chaos, they're rooted in pastiche and show business-- especially on their one midtempo song, the 50s pop knockoff "Find Another Girl." Your parents might dig this album as much as you do.

If anemic blues guitar riffs and half-assed attempts at white-boy soul were the only problems with In Our Gun, it might almost be passable.

Every card Gough plays is painfully transparent from the first time you play the disc. It's elementary stuff. It sounds manufactured, refined, cosmetic and sterile; in a word, silicone, like a pair of Badly Sculpted Breast Implants.

An immediately engrossing and challenging collection of moody, evocative songs-- an entire album of "I Want You" and "Watching the Detectives" for those so inclined.

A charming enough document that fans will almost certainly find worthwhile.

What separates the album from previous Luna product is not so much instrumental alterations as the newly unabashed sentimentality of Wareham's lyrics.

Mono and Stereo would be fine records from any musician-- that Westerberg himself is the source makes it all the sweeter.

Complex and dangerously catchy, lyrically sophisticated and provocative, noisy and somehow serene, Wilco's aging new album is simply a masterpiece; it is equally magnificent in headphones, cars and parties.... No one is too good for this album; it is better than all of us.

Feels more like failed market research than soul searching.

An exhilarating but disorienting ride.

While Millions of Brazilians is easily the most potent and concentrated effort Dianogah has yet to produce, it still lacks tonal variation.

All of Denali consists solely of minor-key electric angst, with languid orchestration and predictable compositions. No crescendos, barely discernable choruses, a dearth of interesting dynamics. The result is stagnancy, kids, and it kills the album.

Where [Winners Never Quit] moved with confidence and conviction of purpose, Control wallows in an amoral netherworld of overamped midtempo ballads and incomplete thoughts.

Though some might say that Armstrong's music is powerfully evocative and serene, such people hate music and all its subtle possibilities and intricacies.