Not simply an excellent album, Chutes Too Narrow is also a powerful testament to pop music's capacity for depth, beauty and expressiveness.

Coral Fang impresses not just by some nebulous "punk" standards, but by the standards of just about anyone who wants to be rocked gently out of sleep by the dulcet tones of thrashing guitars, pogo-friendly love songs, and possibly the most compellingly forceful female punk vocals since Exene Cervenka wailed her way out of the nihilistic abyss that cartographers call "L.A."

Each new direction leads into a wall or dies for lack of momentum.

There's plenty of Minutemen twitch, Dog Faced Herman tick, Bikini Kill bossiness, and a cleverly wrapped polemic that even recalls the Desperate Bicycles' delicious DIY rhetoric.

Yes, it sounds quite a bit like The Books' debut, but it also sounds like nobody else. The Books remain more or less a genre of one.

Though still often warm and tender, Sleep/Holiday lacks the surprise or the diversity of some of their better work.

Some of these remixes are truly excellent, and some of them are disastrous.

It's a brilliant ambient musical experience-- you can tune it out if you choose and it'll still enhance your surroundings, or you can engage yourself fully and allow it to positively hypnotize you.

This is the band's most beautiful record, an expertly arranged blend of their acoustic old school country augmented by pedal steel guitar and bowed saws and sometimes colored by elements of mariachi, gospel, and rural folk.

Swallowed whole, Autumn Was a Lark can seem sonically disjointed, but it's also an apt representation of Portastatic's ever-roaming muse.

Unfortunately, Hold on Love's more serene moments only weaken the lure of their more intricate and involved songs, ultimately underscoring the group's true strengths.

Do Make Say Think have presented us with their best work yet, a varied and unpredictable album capable of imparting the chill of the winter and the warmth of celebratory joy to you without ever presenting you with a human voice.

As could be expected, the production is sharp, and the song structures are tightly wound and delicately unraveled. The problem is that the effort as a whole is too slick, and its charm suffers as a result.

Manages to ignore the essential art-rock flourishes of Sound-Dust, and in fact, [has] done away with anything even remotely interesting or new.

You don't often come across a modern album that sounds so damn old.

In many ways, Some of My Best Friends Are DJs is little more than a brief comedy album, filled with strange samples of eccentric characters pontificating on their record collections and audio systems.

On one hand, Dear Catastrophe Waitress ranks as one of the most delightful surprises of the year, although that's primarily because I'd completely given up on them. On the other hand, it's a very flawed record that at its quirky worst features harmonies so brow-furringly cheery they'd be comfortable amidst a cruise-ship revue or one of Up With People's halftime routines.

Replace crackling vinyl and subwoofer bass with somber piano and mournful cello, and all you're left with is... well, a pretty goddamn miserable woman who happens to have a great voice.

There's an undercurrent of darkness on this record-- particularly in Olsen's on-the-verge voice and lyrics-- that ultimately prevents the band from ever wheeling too far out of reach.

A career low.

We sound like everyone's favorite old rock bands, we have insipid lyrics, we say 'Come On!' and 'Oh Yeah!' every five seconds, we have no discernable identity, and we're from Australia. What could people possibly dislike about us?

Transatlanticism dulls the edges of their usually acute divinations.

The Young Machines will rank among your favorite albums if you're someone's mortifyingly jaded ex, but if you come to it craving electronic vocal-pop keeping pace with anything north of Jimmy Tamborello's shoulders, you'll end up frustrated by the simple and repetitive violin bits that drive the big retro beats.

As a technical achievement and as a piece of pure sound, The Civil War is inarguably Matmos' best record.... [but] there's less of an emotional core here than on previous offerings.

Since LFO hardly need to be innovators to produce a good record, I don't have much problem recommending Sheath, with the caveat that when pleasant, easy-going atmospheres set in, sometimes amiable disinterest on listeners' parts follow shortly.

Though it's no masterpiece, With the Tides is certainly a good record. At the very least it should ease your Britpop jones better than Menswe@r.

A top-heavy album, with his best material-- the more operatic and unconstrained works-- all unfolded within the album's first half hour.

The subject matter here is repetitive, pseudo-intellectual pandering runs rampant, pointless skits and mid-song dialogue sessions interrupt the flow, and most importantly, wasted beats fall at the hands of Slug's newfound penchant for verse-long tracks and poorly realized singsong bridges.