The Roots work hard and play hard on undun, but there's not enough pleasure to balance out Thought's business-like, consummately bland reading of the character who's supposed to bring the entire album to life.

Smith's intentions cry out from the album's every discordant corner--he clearly wanted to test himself, to unhinge parts of his sound. [Nov 2004, p.105]

In their third decade, Melt-Banana have, indisputably, made their most insane record and, arguably, their masterpiece.

From the rock of “Nganshé” to the roll of “Coco Blues,” two forward-looking cosmopolitans (plus friends) craft new directions in urban sound.

The album succeeds because all that cold, clinical lab work hasn't eliminated the warmth from their music. [Dec 2007, p.111]

The record plays with sonic extremes throughout, but VW stay comfortably in the preppy yet philosophical space they dominate—with the usual voice of God omnipresent in the chaos that is this record’s alpha and omega.

Slow was born of isolation and betrayal, but it’s music that was meant for concert halls Cobalt deserve to fill, music that rewards both introspection and reveling in like-minded rapture.

The result is indie-rock as passive-aggressive blues implosion. [Sep 2002, p.128]

[Tame Impala's Kevin] Parker's little boy may be emotionally bruised, but his capacity for capturing bliss remains unblemished.

Well known as purveyors of viscous guitar sludge, the duo of Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson expand their ambitions and make some startling jazz-ensemble noises on their seventh album.

Bandana isn’t a sequel so much as another helping of what worked so well the first time: a selection of Madlib’s finest beats, cave-aged and peppered with the same Gibbsian blend of lighthearted flexing and street philosophy. It’s a more refined take on a proven formula, with sterling track after sterling track cementing Gibbs and Madlib as a remarkably effective duo.

This is the first stateside CD reissue of the stylistically peerless album.

That Converge can dabble in so many styles and still inherently come out sounding like themselves is what makes All We Love work.

In her willingness to tread the line between the crushing flood of data and irrepressible pop hooks has created a record so undeniably of its time and place (that is, cyberspace) that it can’t be easily ignored.

Dawn FM is well-polished — co-executive producer Max Martin makes sure of it — while maintaining its dexterity, punch and sex appeal, in step with most of The Weeknd’s catalog. It’s mercifully cohesive, too, a rare A-list pop album that actually rewards the listener for engaging with it in sequence.

The Lyre Of Orpheus is effectively Abattoir spillover: more mellow, less grand in conception, but--somehow--more pretentious in execution. [Dec 2004, p.118]

Scarily intimate and irresistibly beautiful. [Mar 2005, p.92]

Toning down his oddball style and ramping up his storytelling, he drops a pusher’s odyssey as developed and cinematic as any Scorsese joint.

Again working with Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann, they graft 4AD atmospherics ("A Darker Forest"), frosty power-pop hooks ("Magnets Caught in a Metal Heart"), and Mogwai pedal-effects crescendos ("Stay True") onto their post-hardcore template, which now churns even more fiercely with an expanded palette.

It is uniformly confident and generally looser than past releases, but it is no singular thing.

Will likely be the best political album this year. [Mar 2005, p.88]

By seamlessly incorporating disparate collaborations into the fabric of this City, Crampton summons a greater collective strength than they’ve exhibited on their own--and implies that, going forward, her muse could lead her anywhere, with anyone.

A stunning, sprawling sucker-punch of a finale equally amenable to die-hards and newcomers, Science Fiction is a worthy (if bittersweet) send-off to one of the most brutally honest, forward-thinking rock bands of the new millennium.

Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest distinguishes itself in Callahan’s catalog not just by its subject matter, but also by the holism of its compositions. Paradoxically, they achieve their feeling of tossed-off informality through an astounding intricacy of form.

Tokumaru counters the tweeness of his Japanese-language croon (plus the unrelenting innocence of his twinkly, trebly melodies) with arrangements that densely interweave oddly organic twittering to suggest psychedelia without ever stooping to its cliches.

Vernon's voice--delicately layered and yearning--gives standouts 'Skinny Love' and 'Flume' their stunningly direct emotional impact, but his sturdy folk cords, earthy melodies, and plainspoken, pastoral lyrics prevent the album from descending into self-pity. [Mar 2008, p.97]

The raw-throated, harmonically rich ballads transcend the occasionally schmaltzy production [June 2008, p.119]

This 53-year-old minor folk vet’s drawl doesn’t obscure his flow, making it all the easier to follow his tales in real-time, inhabiting a husband cleaning his deer rifle or the bent-backed Deaver who watched as “Uncle Sam took away the neighbors’ land.”

Rounding off the edges of its tried and true punk-rock grind with the melodic and rhythmic tropes of '60s psychedelia, Unwound has perfectly re-imagined a sound that most art-students wouldn't even spit on the first time around.

Plunge feel vibrant and more alive. There are crucial moments on the album where Dreijer slows things down a bit to let everything sink in. Even on the quieter moments, however, the mood of the album is deeply human.

At its best, Fleet Foxes is warm and cathartic, with all the hopefulness of a balmy summer night.

Her ability to transcend her influences has always been song-to-song, and that’s true here, too. But it also feels like she is inching closer to a breakthrough: an album that fully lives up to her reputation and ambition.

Somehow, these constant flourishes enhance, rather than obscure, the disc's plentiful catchy bits, giving Person Pitch a resonant, off-kilter charm. [Apr 2007, p.93]

Most producers who approach the mic do so at their peril, but on Dropout, West turns out to be a full-service hip-hop artiste.

Twenty years later, he returns with Upland Stories, and the prolific singer-songwriter has never sounded better.

Despite expert camping, the title track, lodged like a splinter at the beginning of the sequence, strikes as too reliant on wintry rue. But when three-note fuzz guitar blasts answer each lyric in “Lazarus,” or Bowie harmonizes with himself on the nonsense lyric of “Girl Loves Me,” it’s hard to resist 40 years’ worth of craft resulting in so intriguing a record.

Its stakes are a little lower, and he’s no longer revealing grand truths about life, but documenting once-dire realities from a rosier lens is still a worthwhile undertaking.

Like The Eternal and The Seer, m b v is a late-period return of the repressed, a middle-aged freak-out tempered by hard-won mastery.

It moves according to the oblique logic of the subconscious, entering your mind through the back door. A newfound attention to space has allowed Big Thief to expand their palette even as they’ve brought the volume down.

The anticipated follow-up to her Grammy-winning masterstroke, 2018’s By The Way, I Forgive You, is once again magnificent — a triumphant patchwork of Americana, folk-rock, pop and soul anchored by yet another show-stopping centerpiece in “Right on Time,” the album’s towering lead single.

The frequent Röyksopp collaborator has clearly learned a thing or two from the dance mavens, sprinkling Ten Love Songs with the mainstream-minded, four-on-the-floor thumping that should make American pop stars seethe with envy.

Her most adventurous album yet. ... On Mañana Será Bonito, the future looks bright for Colombia’s next pop queen.

It's still the best mix of fury and fluency since phony Beatlemania bit the dust. [Jan 2002, p.107]

A raging, ragged Behind The Music--15 coal-black odes to the casualties that art leaves behind and that life can't avoid. [Aug 2003, p.111]

At its core, Showtime is a classic sophomore album in the hip-hop sense: puffy with bluster, brimming with indignation. [Nov 2004, p.107]

The first half of Blonde is astonishing, sustained beauty. The second is more distant, closer to the shower improvs of Friday’s sounds-like-a-soundtrack-and-it-is Endless.

Feral intensity abounds. [Apr 2008, p.98]

Just about every song here has a couplet Elvis Costello would be proud to call his own, and the money shot "Elephant" has several.

Both sucks the air out of Dixie legend and revives it. [Sep 2004, p.122]

Feel Flows is an absolutely essential document that takes the first steps toward rewriting the story of a band that managed to persevere against overwhelming odds.

Central bulbs in the now-blinding chandelier of Philly indie-punk, Hop Along’s thrilling sophomore effort plays out like sonic arrhythmia.

Just as you've got Cold House pegged as a way-underground cousin to Kid A and Vespertine, another element comes in from far left-field: hip-hop. [Dec 2001, p.163]

While Essence was lyrically spare, World marks Williams' return to the painful sensuality of the specific. [May 2003, p.109]

It's impossible to discern whether Mimi Parker's newfound assertiveness as a harmony singer was inspired by, or the inspiration for, this more aggressive batch of songs, but it's this record's signal grace. [Apr 2001, p.158]

It's all willfully abrasive, unflinchingly depressing, occasionally tedious, and intermittently triumphant.

Purple Mountains was produced and accompanied by Jarvis Taveniere and Jeremy Earle of Woods, with eight other musicians filling the gaps. The arrangements, some of the most gracious Berman’s ever had, hum and glow with foggy organs and soft golden horns. Their serenity is at odds with his desperation: This is a portrait of a shattered man.

Puberty 2 isn’t shaped like an opus; it’s jagged and slight and the auteur has already expressed second thoughts about the liberties taken with its addiction-themed coda. But it’s a high-watermark of post-irony indie, a cracked safe of perspectives previously unheard in lump-throated punk.

Peeling back the density and obtuseness of Xen and Mutant, Arca is his most engaging, emotionally draining and confrontational album to date.

Virtually every song slaps like crazy.

Let's Stay Friends almost captures the band's sweaty, live weirdness on record, and it leaves enough breathing room for their wicked smarts to shimmy up through the hip-shaking indie punk. [Oct 2007, p.106]

After a decade of diving deep into the abstract, Björk's now more grounded and human than ever, thanks to the two most unfathomable ideas of them all: love and heartache.

Airtight's Revenge has its soul affectations, but even standard fare like "Little One" bears Bilal's impressively reedy, insistent voice. He sounds like a man unburdening himself.

It is the best distillation yet of his tortured hustler mystique.

If Tillman's this brilliantly pointed as a paramour, we're scared to hear the breakup album.

There's an exhilarating bleakness at the center of Virgins--the hollow at the heart of all things, nibbling inexorably away.

Be the Cowboy largely dispenses with the distortion of Mitski’s guitar-oriented recent work, getting all the fuzz out with intro track “Geyser.” What’s left are short and thwarted pop songs. (Only two are longer than three minutes.)

[Wet Leg] is witty, self-referential and danceable, loaded with anthems for the extroverted introvert.

They're not robots, they're "robots." They "rock" and want you to "dance." In that sense, this is absolutely in keeping with the band's legacy. It is theater: absolutely sincere and totally fake.

The resulting soil is almost tangibly immediate.

Neither a timid repeat nor a knee-jerk departure, the bigger, bolder Neon Bible better captures what Arcade Fire achieve live. [Mar 2007, p.85]

Being bombarded with mortality is a tall order for what is ostensibly a summer pop album; but rather than let her words fade into the background of washed synths and drum machines, as on previous releases, the breathing room in the production of Norman Fucking Rockwell leans into the intimacy.

The Roots have never sounded this raw on record, this much like an actual band playing in an actual room. [Jan 2003, p.95]

At times, that there’s as much “subversive” pop music as there is music that is supposedly being subverted, not all of it as deep as advertised. Poem, thankfully, is far more thoughtful about it than most.

Though it's not exactly Leave Home to its predecessor's Ramones, Annie Up is still a pretty tasty serving of grits and sass.

Radiant with apocalyptic tension and grasping to sustain real bonds, The Suburbs extends hungrily outward, recalling the dystopic miasma of William Gibson's sci-fi novels and Sonic Youth's guitar odysseys.

It is exceedingly rare to find a producer who does so much, with so little, that he distilled from, again, so much.

Like Elliott Smith after ten years of Sunday school. [May 2004, p.108]

M.I.A.'s border-crossing dance pop is a revolutionary manifesto set to the victory-party vibe of the future. [Sep 2007, p.127]

McMahon’s most transcendent statement yet. ... Freedom rings as both immediate and timeless, intensely personal and easily understood. ... Freedom exalts in subtlety. It offers powerfully economical songwriting.

Simultaneously joyous and joyless, all downloaded beats, downhearted lyrics and down-the-hatch daring. [Aug 2003, p.113]

The wonder of 22, A Million is how beautifully he melds the disparate forms--inside and outside, acoustic and digital, past and future, ground level and interstellar. It’s a stunning record, well worth the wait.

Sung with warmth, these tracks offer a welcome antidote to her more familiar performance mode--spectacular austerity. They're as bloody and forceful as the battles Harvey references.

Over and over, these songs reveal how a wisecracking record geek can still achieve rapture. [Mar 2007, p.98]

As the conviction of his verses grows throughout the album, so does the scope of its production. Building on the more upbeat instrumentals of last year’s Disco!, MIKE continues to expand his musical palette on production, adding dancehall, bossa nova and more to his signature slowed vocal loops. The result is some of his most uplifting songs yet.

Packed with more than enough ideas to constitute what’s still ostensibly a “debut album,” OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES pushes new limits of bombast only to settle into the same sort of razor-sharp, high-concept pop that’s worked for SOPHIE since the beginning.

It's a busy, dazzling record, though more detours--like "Storm Returns," a dreamy guitar-and-beats collage--would help aerate things. [Aug 2003, p.118]

Unlike her major-label LPs, this is a stringently stripped-down, dark-side-of-the-mountain album that's near impossible to cozy up with. [Oct 2001, p.131]

The songs are more consistent, too, flashing a certain lyrical swagger, careening from terrific sex to celebratory violence to uncomfortable cultural realities.

The CD is like spending a cloudy afternoon on Jupiter with the old man, his quizzical sonic tricks at arms reach, his singing as ageless and haunting as the ammonia rain. [Dec 2007, p.128]

Remind Me Tomorrow turns on thoughts of growing older and reflecting on the past, resulting in some of Van Etten’s most mature lyrics to date. Most bittersweet is “Seventeen,” which applies radiant clarity to the hazy, faded production aesthetic of a band like the War on Drugs. Even when swamped in overproduction, Van Etten’s performances are uniformly the best of her career, and Congleton for once gives her the perfect amount of space.

At times the writing struggles to keep pace: The concepts behind songs like “needy” and “fake smile” are as relatable as they are predictable, and begin to stretch thin after a couple of minutes. Still, there is an awful lot to like.

The follow-up (without Chao) is a more straightforward Afro-pop record, with a few exceptions.

With Simpson self-producing Earth, and with the Dap-Kings always ready to land on the one with a bari-sax skronk, it feels like a Nashville album that’s been dudded up and funked out.

Rock that's both fist-pumping and forward-looking. [Jun 2007, p.90]

Vernon re-accesses that potent sense of self on Bon Iver, a stunning sophomore set whose landscape-painting cover art underscores the idea that his songs inhabit their own psychological space.

The title of the Roots' ninth studio full-length suggests a more fulfilled mood (Obama victory, gig as America's favorite late-night house band), at least compared to the screw-faced abyss of their last two records.

Like all of Four Tet’s work, New Energy can be viewed as an addition to this unlikely canon, whose practitioners share a desire to remove a listener from their surroundings and bring them someplace higher, no matter the means.

Sparrow transcends its own tastefulness, and odds are excellent you’ll find it gorgeous.