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.