On succeeds not in spite of its simplicity, but because of it.

An infectious collection of grooves that proudly utilizes the traditional vocabulary of rock and roll.

Perhaps the Blues Explosion is aware of the garage revival, and looking to claim some kind of Neil Young-esque patriarchal crown. If so, the dozen tracks of Plastic Fang fail miserably, giving off the appearance of a 35 year-old accountant hanging around the old frat house on Homecoming weekend.

An album that emerges as a solid, infectious effort, but eventually collapses under its own weight, unable to keep all its stylistic efforts coherent.

Without sufficient songwriting versatility, things can get pretty mediocre and, well, boring by the end of a ten-song album.

A pleasant, atmospheric diversion.

So then, what is the excuse for a typically elitist music nerd to bow to Andrew WK's blistering tard-rock? That's right, folks: there isn't one.

Now, this is a pretty straightforward album, so the possibilities do exhaust themselves somewhat by the end; there's only so much that can be done with this sort of visceral, no-frills rock.

By co-opting and debasing punk-disco's vitality and sincerity and thereby rendering the style accessible to the botox-and-bulimia set, Jackson betrays the visions of those whose ecstatically powerful music he lavishly degrades.

Their best album to date-- a bold claim to the upper echelon of rock.

There's invention and heart in these tunes, and the range is impressive.

The beats are just fine, but they lack the risk or innovation that could potentially make them truly engaging.

The album is about a quarter filler, but the songs that hit on Too Late to Die Young make the tedium worth sitting out.

A band that displays a fine grasp of orchestral pop and baroque studio flourishes on some tracks should be delivering something better than Souljacker.

While Rap-Metal 101 drums bang away in the background, the basslines are replaced by chugging guitar riffs reminiscent of your high school hardcore band. What remains, though, is the exceptional quality of Pharrell's voice, which, unlike the bass sound, doesn't lose its intensity due to repeated radio exposure.

Although its best moments don't reach quite the altitudes of his prior releases, Skyscraper National Park, as a whole, is the most complete and coherent album in Hayden's catalog, a delightful listen from track one through track eleven.

All the clichés from French pop and house music collected in one shiny package.

Buzzkunst doesn't exactly offer any revelatory music, but it certainly is good, sometimes even great.

Buffalo Daughter produce exceptional-sounding tracks that cover a wide spectrum of genres, texture and mood; they perform well on a variety of instruments, and their voices blend nicely most of the time. But they don't write great songs-- too often, they don't even write good ones.

In the process of recording another incredible album, he's discovered that light is most visible when it's flickering alone in the dark.

Slightly-too-frequent derivative moments can be mostly forgiven thanks to heaping helpings of youthful earnestness.

Walking with Thee is neither an album of triumph nor of disappointment.

The good stuff aside, if hard whiskey, hard women and aboveground pools aren't your thing-- and I would imagine not-- it's tough to recommend Lucky 7.

But the thing is, somewhere between all the vamping and forced attempts at being hip and irreverent, they found the time to write and record a fine record.

Dense, beautiful, intricate, haunting, explosive, and dangerous, this is everything rock music aspires to be: intense, incredible songs arranged perfectly and performed with skill and passion.

Jump Leads has a few more slip-ups than its immediate predecessor, A Touch of Cloth, but I'd like to think they result from the addition of a vocalist (Steve Edwards of Presence) rather than being an indication of pending obsolescence.

It's Broder's careful balancing act between the traditional and the abnormal that makes his music so interesting.

From Here On In is inches away from being a success. It's just that it's weighed down by so many repetitive textures and songs that fail to impact.

Lacking any dynamism, complexity, or invention, the relentless drone of most of these tracks is a shallow, reactionary statement to the progress of the post-rock genre, and completely unedifying.

Is a Woman is a disappointment.

Monkey comes off resembling either a padded greatest-hits comp or an "inspired by" soundtrack for a non-existent movie. What it certainly isn't is a DJ mix where previously hidden links between seemingly unrelated songs are unearthed through the ancient art of juxtaposition.

Beautysleep's weakness is that so many songs are pretty instead of awe-inspiring-- that she gives us only a little greatness.

The majority of the album's highlights come courtesy of the songwriting tandem of Bracy and Hoffman, whose maturity as songsmiths is notable-- this record is consistently concise, punchy and poignant.

While some will complain about Boards of Canada's failure to cover new territory, the rest of us will delight in what we see as a very accomplished album packed with great music.

It's not a bad album by most standards-- in fact it's pretty good at points-- but in the end slides into a mire of adequacy after generating high expectations early on.

It's surprising to see how well Holes in the Wall holds up under the weight of its own hype.

Though thoroughly enjoyable, the album isn't always riveting, either, and occasionally the attention does stray.

There are certain things they do very well, yet they don't seem to be content with being pigeonholed as one-dimensional. Unfortunately, one-dimensional is about the only thing they can pull off convincingly.

You've got your acoustic guitar base, your occasional slide guitar fill, your Dylan-esque organ, your chug-a-lug drums, and your mildly catchy melodies. It would be offensive if it wasn't so obvious that Cracker doesn't aspire to much more than this sort of rustic middle-America mediocrity act.

It's the first good 2002 album I've heard.

Taking into account the sometimes spotty songwriting and its overtly dreamy similarities to Mojave 3 (like if they'd had a back massage and 1200mg's of Valium), there isn't much to save it from solo slump status.

Their music,... while pretending to be candy-coated pop-rock, shares all of emo's key indicators, including melodramatic vocal delivery, seamless production, and shameless overambition.

Working outside of the framework of the pop song, Merritt is left to explore more exotic sound sources and song structures. Unfortunately, without that framework, these elements often fail to amount to anything significant, providing somewhat interesting, meandering background music, but little more.

The cleverness, technical mastery and ping-pong stereo effects are all there in spades, but this time they're all much more mellow than you'd think. Listen right and you'll hardly notice them, because you'll be wrapped up by the thing I initially completely missed-- some of these tracks are just plain lovely as songs.

Kittenz and Thee Glitz is Housecat watered down by trivia and outside egos.

There's lots of good stuff on Age of the Sun. It's just that sometimes, there's a bit too much of it.

While the band has a very developed sense of texture and sound, though, they rather desperately need to work on changing things up a bit more with regard to the songs themselves.

Dead Media works on occasion, but primarily when Hefner revert to the traditional pop trio format of bass, guitar, drums.

Lyrics aside, there's nothing distinctly unappealing or half-assed about this album.... It just feels awfully familiar.

Love Is Here isn't bad, and its prospect for radio play is far more appealing than, say, Train. The four just don't have the depth of their admitted influences.

It's the most solid Wu album in years.

AOI:Bionix takes a belt sander to hip-hop's rougher edges, resulting in refinement, sophistication and undeniable accessibility.

A shockingly insightful and resonant look at the workings of a musician generally more given to hiding behind absurdly twisted turns of musical phrase than letting us in on the inner-workings of his mind.

While some moments are absolutely stellar, I Might Be Wrong is only a shadow of what a Radiohead live album could have been.

Cold House takes a fantastic batch of songs and intelligently mixes in cutting edge electronic elements a la Autechre and Nobukazu Takemura, a couple of west coast underground hip-hop artists, and some delicate backing arrangements, and creates one of the most innovative releases of the past year.

Party Music is an effort both entertaining and politically motivating, a feat which many have attempted but few have successfully pulled off.

It's all pretty silly stuff, but if nothing else, it manages to establish Flickerstick as a frontrunner for the Varsity Blues II soundtrack.

My biggest gripe about Lovage is that it finds a number of clearly talented artists constructing the same song continually without variation.

There's not a bad song to be found anywhere on this disc, and it remains engaging for nearly its entire duration, only falling into the background in a few isolated spots.

The Avalanches have managed to build a totally unique context for all these sounds, while still allowing each to retain its own distinct flavor. As a result, Since I Left You sounds like nothing else.

A matchless combination of scratchy indie rock and post-Oval electronics.

Though lyrically ponderous and humorless, Titles and Idols is far from being an unpleasant listen.

Change, while unquestionably more mature than anything the Dismemberment Plan have released in the past, is also, at times, an incredibly powerful record that can make mundane ruminations seem like Socratic philosophy.

Like all of Mazzy Star's releases, Bavarian Fruit Bread works well as a mood piece and makes good background music, but it doesn't reward close listening.

A lot of bands venture close to soft-rock territory and come out unscathed. Trembling Blue Stars aren't so lucky.

Something fresh might help Orange Can retain their strengths as musicians, while developing their own voice and avoiding blandness.

Yet another leap forward for a band that has constantly pushed itself in new directions.

Finds them as able as ever, playing as though they'd never been gone, and offering their most organic album in ages.

Feminist Sweepstakes wants to be a terrifically fun album, yet with no deviation from the ceaseless politics and endless drum machine beats, things go stale.

When I take into account that 1) there are actual songs here, not just parodies, and 2) most of the tunes were fun to listen to, I remember that playing rock-- psychedelic, trashy or otherwise-- doesn't have to be an exercise in originality.

Lilac6 is a much more musically upbeat album... and features a crop of enjoyable, summery pop songs that are hard to argue with in the middle of winter.

Albums this unpretentious are increasingly rare, and I think that's what makes Her Mystery Not of High Heels and Eye Shadow so seductive.

The Strokes are not deities. Nor are they "brilliant," "awe-inspiring," or "genius." They're a rock band, plain and simple. And if you go into this record expecting nothing more than that, you'll probably be pretty pleased.

[Robinson's] kind of soft rock-- closer to "I Want to Know What Love Is" by Foreigner than I'm comfortable with-- probably isn't going to score many points with the indie crowd, but it's not going to throw off your concentration for very long.

Overall, it reads like a look through some stranger's photo album-- there are a lot incredible images contained within it, but there are also a few embarrassing shots and the occasional moment in time that isn't framed quite right.

When measured against Four Tet's prior output, this latest effort does come as something of a disappointment; but by most other yardsticks, it's downright brilliant.

Fantasma offers a better introduction to Songs: Ohia than the last couple of proper albums.

A maddeningly spacy, fairly inconsistent, but very rich set of songs that capitalize on the leftover space from guitarist Gibb Slife's departure.

Gold comes off as clean, shiny, and over-the-top as Elliott Smith's XO, replete with strings, horns, and female backup singers. I double-checked the credits. Jon Brion wasn't listed.

Granted, a few tracks here require perhaps too much patience, or never peak as one might expect, or are overburdened with sound. But even these lesser tracks contain the simple, yet stunning affirmations that make Pierce so engaging.

A testament to the influences of their youth; echoes of Lennon and McCartney, Simon and Garfunkel, Nick Drake, and Fairport Convention glide through the album before tiptoeing into a corner and reappearing a few tracks later.

A perfect party. A perfect soundtrack to your perfect party. You'll sleep like a baby, and inevitably wake to realize that Change Is Coming doesn't play so well by the light of day.

Much of Rain on Lens sounds remarkably detached, and the end result is an album that, while musically excellent, lacks the impact of the pre-parentheses days.

Part vibraphone-laden, Chicago-style post-rock, part electronic minimalism, and part pure melodic exploration, Happiness occasionally manages to slip into an immensely blissful groove.

The true beauty of Clinic is that they have, using a relatively standard rock vocabulary, constructed a truly distinctive, energetic, and magnetically appealing sound.

It helps that Labor Days is as terrific a record as anyone could ask for, really, and you should buy it.

The consistency of Solex material is potentially the agent of its own downfall. Play Solex vs. the Hitmeister after Low Kick and Hard Bop and you might think that they were recorded at the same time, rather than four years apart.

Though their approach hasn't changed from the radically orchestral turn of 1998's Deserter's Songs, these songs are far more personal than their last set.

A worthy, but occasionally frustrating album...

Wonderland takes the sound of that last album and pumps it full of the energy that dripped from the band's previous releases, resulting in a record that can oddly be both fragile, danceable, and anthemic all at the same time.

Yes, Mink Car is crap. All the charms They Might Be Giants once seemed to possess have dissipated into a cloud of embarrassing awkwardness.

The Blueprint is possibly the least sonically inventive hip-hop chart topper in years-- stunning and captivating for sure, but still loungily comfortable enough to sleep to.

The Coast is Never Clear sounds a lot like its predecessor, but it lacks the originality and heartfelt delivery that won When Your Heartstrings Break a constant presence in so many disc players a couple summers back.

In ten years, you'll be mistaking their superficial work here for the Chemical Brothers, Crystal Method, or Fatboy Slim's big-beat bullshit.

A fairly nice little slab of French Anglo-pop, and pleasant reading accompaniment if you can reach the skip button from where you're sitting.

The Butthole Surfers have finally become shocking only in their sheer banality, like a watered-down mix of the worst Beck and Perry Farrell material you can imagine.

The most focused Sparklehorse effort yet, the album flows along with the grace of a river occasionally stirred by a rapid or two.

All This Sounds Gas might not have been such a weak effort if Kannberg's lyrics actually had anything to say, but nonsense prose has never meshed well with lush, jangly alterna-rock.