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.

With its illusory, ethereal production, wistful melodies, and oft-funereal pace, this is one of those rare albums that can completely absorb you in such a way as to almost dissolve the world around you, and make you feel like you've been transported to another realm of existence within the course of 58 minutes.

While undeniably beautiful, Vespertine fails to give electronic music the forward push it received on Björk's preceding albums. Rather than designing sounds never before imagined, the album merely sounds current, relying on the technology of standard studio software and the explorations of the Powerbook elite.... Still, Vespertine makes for an intriguing listen, and manages to hold its own after hours on repeat.

Lupine Howl essentially take the bluesiest moments of past Spiritualized records and use them as the starting point for their sound, placing the emphasis on gritty rock rave-ups, and adding another Marshall to the stack for every orchestra member Pierce hired for Let It Come Down.

Getaway sounds remarkably youthful, split between brief, upbeat rockers, and longer, more meditative swaths of noisy psych.

Unfortunately, the efforts made by the band to expand their oeuvre on The Sword of God just fall flat. Long-winded instrumental passages, extended exploration of new instruments, and more bird noises do not a good record make, and The Sword of God makes this all too evident.

We Are A&C is feckless junk.

More than simply an expression of her music, Time (The Revelator) is a glimpse into the artist's personality.

It's all third-rate bar band stuff.

Dan Geller and Amy Dykes have a buried knack for the driving groove; songs like "Move On" and "Holland Tunnel" want to rock your body and jack you up hardcore, but are limited by their sound and recording quality.

Nothing short of elemental in its beauty.

The album awkwardly divides in two: the first half showcases Wiles' forward-looking tunes; the second takes a brief historical look at his dated earlier work.

At 45 minutes, Can Our Love... is Tindersticks' most concise album yet, and it sacrifices nothing in content. Eight songs may not seem like much for a full album, but it's all this band needs to make a fully rewarding listen that only gets richer the more you visit.

White Blood Cells doesn't veer far from the formula of past White Stripes records; all are tense, sparse and jagged. But it's here that they've finally come into their own, where Jack and Meg White finally seem not only comfortable with the path they've chosen, but practiced, precise and able to convey the deepest sentiment in a single bound.

A few fatal flaws eclipse all of Rooty's abundant qualities. Basement Jaxx have taken kitsch a few steps too far.

Go Plastic exhumes the corpse of stuttering, fast-paced percussion and arbitrary programming that was bled dry and buried in a time when the Y2K bug still signified economic collapse and nuclear meltdowns.

Everybody Wants to Know is the kind of album that grows more rewarding the second and third times through, as the subtle hooks gradually sink in. But once those hooks have engrained themselves in those old skullbag, it's pretty unlikely they'll offer anything you can't get from any other anonymous alterna-rock record.

It's impeccably recorded-- pretty at some points and vaguely somber at others-- but it never distinguishes itself.

The tracks here are supported by a fuller sound and more complex arrangements than on either of Travis' first two albums.... They're all competently played, but never really inspiring.

An epic album that speaks with grand gestures and a refined eloquence rare in young songwriters.

Quality aside, the questionable sequencing of Amnesiac does little to hush the argument that the record is merely a thinly veiled b-sides compilation...

The disjointed juxtaposition of styles on this disc is so pronounced that it feels intentional; like The White Album or Jega's Spectrum, this record underscores its versatility at the expense of consistency.

For better or worse, this is not Moon Safari Redux.

In fact, despite the thoughtfulness of the arrangements, it quickly becomes clear that nothing truly surprising will ever happen.

Because Flowers doesn't maintain the urgency of Echo and the Bunnymen's early records, it's not the place to begin any investigation into their trippy delights. But for us old-timers who remember reading NME before the editorial policy changed to shameless oh-so ironic hyping of teen pop acts, Flowers stands as a gorgeous bouquet of memories.

This is an album packed with abrasive tones of unimaginable density and uncertain origin. Oval shares with Autechre the ability to craft sounds that defy explanation.

That the archaic should sound this fresh is at least a mini-miracle.

I Believe is one of those albums that hardly anyone could bring themselves to hate, but almost no one could truly latch on to.

Sigur Rós effortlessly make music that is massive, glacial, and sparse..... They are the first vital band of the 21st Century.

Opens with a six-track attack that's rare for any genre, especially contemporary R&B.

From a production standpoint, the record sounds great, but at its core, it comes up empty, lacking a solid foundation of good songs to rest its adventurous studio trickery upon.... It's the most frustrating type of album there is-- one that's full of promise and shining moments, but never fully delivers.

Average from beginning to end.

Confield promises elegant production, accessibility in moderation, and one of the most enveloping, thought-provoking listening experiences to come forth from leftfield this year.

What makes Reveal so disappointing is that the additions to the classic R.E.M. sound are all merely superficial. The increased reliance on burbling, jittering synthesizers actually makes the album a less engaging listen, turning many of its songs into messy sonic muddles.

Now, with the early new century demanding "opuses," Tool follows suit. The problem is, Tool defines "opus" as taking their "defining element" (wanking sludge) and stretching it out to the maximum digital capacity of a compact disc.

Long time fans will undoubtedly be delighted, but it's tough to predict if this record will inspire converts.

Unexpectedly, though, some of the record's best moments come when Byrne strips away the rhythmic accessories and relies on basic orchestral backing... And yet, the majority of the album still relies on primal, swinging grooves.

Perhaps as a direct result of I-Sound's presence, Music is a Hungry Ghost is a looser, more abstract affair than previous efforts.

I suppose that the backstreet Black Market Music will endear itself to gender-exploring teenagers who find the girl-on-girl action in Buffy the Vampire Slayer "fucking awesome."

The Cliff's Notes of classic rock.

Granted, it's not mind-blowing, and it's not nearly as masterfully executed and affecting as their earliest work. But there are only a handful of bands out there that can put out an album as well-constructed as Rock Action and still expect people to bitch and moan about it.

While previous albums gave a studio sheen to the noise, Dilate has a looser, more spontaneous feel to it.

Coquelicot, like most Of Montreal albums, is at times sublime and lovely, at times infuriatingly catchy, at times simply infuriating, at times overly twee, and at times seriously fucking scary. What sets this record apart from its predecessors, though, is a level of intricacy and detail that Of Montreal have never previously attained as a band.

Overall, Sad Sappy Sucker feels as if it was sort of put together in a hurry, despite it having sat around in the warehouse for seven years. The album part has plenty of good songs, though, and any completist will want to hear it.

If the additions are what make this record distinctive, what's left out is what makes it brilliant.

Know Your Enemy finds the Manics attempting to write a protest song in just about every genre. This project, stretched out over 16 tracks and 75 minutes, quickly reaches epic proportions, with an ambition approached only by the magnitude of its flaws.

The excitement is sustained so consistently over the hour-long running time that you'll almost begin to wish the six-minute songs were even longer.

There are a few key moments of guilty pleasure, and the overall aesthetic of the record is appealing on the surface. But underneath the scratchy record sounds and the canned Casiotones, Fountenberry hasn't got enough substance to sustain him for ten minutes, let alone the length of an entire album.

In many respects, Leaves Turn Inside You is the band's most ambitious, sweeping, and difficult outing yet.... I'm convinced that, if you've been following this band's development, the initial bewildered expression on your face will give way to total enchantment, and this new, boldly different Unwound album will have you in its grip for months to come.

Considerably tamer than their stadium-rocking, chart-topping previous albums, Just Enough Education to Perform sounds less like a band voluntarily growing into their new-found maturity, and more like a pet's first, forced visit to the castration clinic.

Really, if your parents don't dig this, there's something wrong with them. This is music for the drive to pick up the kids from soccer practice, or to the doctor for dad's yearly prostate exam.

Lemonjelly.ky's nine tracks consist largely of samples from atrocious Nana Mouskouri songs and soundclips nipped from 100 Strings mood music albums. What binds these samples together is a series of predicable hip-hop beats and root-note basslines.

Many slower outfits-- Low, American Music Club, Codeine, et al.-- are sometimes pinned with the theory that if you've heard one of their albums, you've heard them all. Such is no longer the case with the Red House Painters.

Goddamn if he doesn't sing like a cranky Neil Diamond here...

Everyone needs to have a doomed romantic stage, but Lloyd's is going on twenty years.... The lyrical juvenilia is a bit of a shame, because this is a solid collection of pop songs otherwise.

Consistently excellent and deserves to be heard by fans of 70's glam and shoegazer alike.

A solid, riff-driven rock record that may disappoint those still awaiting Bee Thousand II, though it offers plenty of treats to those who are willing to approach it with open ears.

Its best moments come with the one-off experiments that propel the band further from traditional dance music.

By bombarding the listener with innocuousness, Alpha forge a test to determine exactly when the pedestrian becomes excruciating. By the third track, they more or less have their answer.

It's all extremely pretty, and without seeming completely manipulative or cloying. Black Box Recorder, however, are still a bit dopey when it comes to lyrics.

The test of any conceptual record is how well it stands on its own, removed from the angle. And A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure is a first-rate work, even if you're unfamiliar with the backstory.

In truth, Discovery rarely invokes its predecessor's slap-bass funk, and few other tracks resemble the obviously single-designed "One More Time." Instead, Daft Punk focus on fusing mid-80's Kool and the Gang R&B beats with post-millennial prog flourishes and more vocoders than you can shake at Herbie Hancock.

This is a great album to throw on when you need something to enhance the mood or otherwise fill the air when working on something else.

The Posies, if you'll recall, used to compose entire songs of understated pop brilliance, instead of just moments.