[Hannon] deserves to be recognized as the unsung genius of symphonic pop. [Nov 2006, p.97]

It isn't just a celebration of the warm-up DJ; it's a self-portrait of an artist who wouldn't be who he is today without once having had all those empty rooms to fill.

Jones has always savored extremes, and here, she's alternately demonic (the toothy gleam of 'Corporate Cannibal') and angelic (the gloriously autobiographical 'Williams' Blood').

His voice emerges from the din only occasionally, embodying the sound of ANIMA itself: half-man, half-machine, totally immersed in the beat.

Sun is hardly sloganeering, but its Power to the People ruminations are more potent and topical than you'd expect from a pop record--and certainly one made by Cat Power.

Fans who pass this latest test of commitment will find another studied and resolute replica of one of Swift’s most compelling and formative albums.

The thought and vision tucked into these constructions are inexhaustibly fun to listen to and unpack.

Take their third album, Holy Fire: It shreds.

The Argentinean TV actress emits powerful hallucinogenic vibes, creating a slippery soundtracj for the subconscious. [Nov 2008, p.98]

Her fifth album is indeed one of the most alt-friendly jazz cycles you’ve ever heard, pivoting constantly on tight, proggy arrangements that evoke St. Vincent, tUnE-yArDs, and Incubus in their odd-angled crunch more than anything on Blue Note.

Nobody gets credited for "echo" on this San Francisco quartet's remarkably mature second album, but that's an oversight. Play It Strange is suffused with a deep, widescreen ambience that assumes an almost physical presence.

Her latest musical effort, More Issues Than Vogue is proudly campy (that cover art) and deeply poignant.

Marion's approach varies, but his surprisingly soulful songs consistently connect, a significant feat considering we only hear his voice through a Fender.

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]

A decade-plus of refining this particular sound has led to the purposeful pop of Okovi, her sixth album. Danilova’s vocal performance momentarily recalls darker and more secretive Sia songs.

With such a steady-rocking formula, the record loses from repetition (and occasional knuckleheadedness) but gains mightily from shaking the groove with rhythm switches and guest voices. [Nov. 2000, p.203]

His new self-titled record slips out of the leather jacket in favor of body-oiled synth-pop that balances between swagger-happy and tooth-rottingly sweet.

A stunning collection of 36 instrumental tracks that is one of the most varied and ambitious releases of Reznor's career. [May 2008, p.104]

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.

This smart, jagged, contemplative work makes you wonder if Williams could wring amazing stuff out of Bennington too.

Love letters, brief smiles, a touch on the arm, friends, and pets abound; throughout, Russell poignantly captures and echoes life's ephemeral delights.

With Drive-By Truckers, singer-guitarist Jason Isbell learned to embrace some of those [Southern rock] cliches; on his gritty, vibrant second solo album, he begins to transcend them.

Her enthusiasm immediately leaps from the grooves, but this debut also reveals an emotional and musical range her neo-retro peers lack.

Dark, electroshocked eighth album from Brit rock's premier party people. [Jan 2003, p.99]

Kissing goodbye to the obsolete racial and gender roles that pop, hip-hop, or indie rock still demand, Youngblood and pals throw a thrillingly subversive victory party to lift the country out of eight years of anguish.

With help from frequent collaborators Paul White and Black Milk, UK electronic producer Evian Christ, and crate-digging maestro the Alchemist, Brown brings his persistent terrors to life.

In lesser hands, all this weight could feel leaden. But Miguel remains a craftsman, and leisure gets its due.

Though it runs just 33 minutes, Tourist in this Town feels like a road trip movie, a scrapbook of mixed emotions compiled from postcard-sized travel diary entries.

A wildly inspired blend of tribal rhythms, wah-wah guitar, fatback bass lines, and the heated unnnhs and yeeowws that typify James Brown funk.

Parquet Courts' over-the-top energy, speed, and succinctness makes the combination sound fresher than anything the original elements have managed in years.

Robyn achieves the sort of pure pop perfection that her more mainstream records never did. [May 2008, p.108]

Even emo and chamber music get roped into Sidewalks' exclamatory gush, verifying that there truly is no sound these two won't use to support their almost religious commitment to spreading huge grins.

On WIXIW, everything is in its right place.

Quieter and more uniform in sound than the wilfully eclectic Let It Die, the new album emphasizes her sumptuous vocals and ear for a handsome melody. [May 2007, p.85]

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

This stream-of-consciousness head trip blends tricky, delicious melodies and slippery lyrics, yet never lapses into annoyingly smug artiness. [Mar 2007, p.88]

Neither Cocker's chewy structures nor his voice's subtle shadings are particularly well suited to Albini's you-are-there engineering. Fortunately, this collection of surging and reeling tunes is the former Pulp frontman's strongest since "Different Class."

Turn is a haunting, often painfully beautiful example of how songs that may seem dead and buried can sublimely rise from the grave.

Repackaging it all as a six-disc set (including remixes and alternate versions) is pretentious, extravagant, and romantic--U2, after all.

This debut is a different kind of soul music, as meditative as it is evocative.

Forging modern myth and cryptic missives into something as immediate and accessible as this is no small feat. Almost 25 years on, Ulver has crafted the best entry point for their catalog–a dramatic pop saga impossible to deny.

Where Cox's Atlas Sound output is scattered and eclectic, Microcastle, Deerhunter's third album, is focused and consistent.

This mysterious Swedish dream-pop band's music remains hazy--mucho echo, blurry harmonies, soft acoustic instrumentation buoyed by generous synth strings, and a bright white ambience suggesting both sunny Balearic beaches and blinding Scandinavian snowstorms. Yet its emotions are conversely vivid.

The combination of titanic chunk-chunk riffs, sleek lead guitar, and radio-ready harmonizing comes across as heroic. [Jun 2006, p.82]

The album is curated like a museum, preserving the best of their sound while polishing the crucial details. Spaceman continues to fine-tune his astral pop sound with shocking consistency throughout the familiar but delightfully hypnotic space rock album.

Phantogram drives straight through, with a clear purpose, no rest stops.

A couple of the drone bagatelles, though masterfully realized, break Gas’s signature hypnosis and could be mistaken for any number of Kompakt artists rather than being unmistakably his. But at best, Narkopop faithfully upgrades Gas’s murky fundamentals to HD.

One of the pleasures of Charlene is how we can now enjoy Tweet--years removed from the burden of carrying Aaliyah’s legacy--as a startlingly unique voice in her own right.

Power in the Blood is the work of an elder working against genre, knowing history, and moving forward into aesthetically unknown territory. For a septuagenarian, the optimism of it is heartening.

It’s rare when two creative forces like Yorke and Greenwood step away from their still-active primary band and create something this worthwhile on its own merits, and who knows how, if at all, the experience will influence Radiohead’s canon moving forward. No matter what happens, A Light for Attracting Attention is a most welcome vibe flip.

There's a grandeur and purity of intent to the whole doofy concept that prove hard to resist. For Kavinsky, B-grade electronic '80s gunk is rocket fuel, and it makes Outrun soar.

Pressure Machine is, in totality, a commendable and genuinely surprising big swing, which mostly connects. It’s a project that proves The Killers won’t yet settle for festival-headlining rock legacy status.

Thanks to its introspective depth, it's equally well suited to solitary listening, the rare mix that connects dance music's public sphere--joyous, communal, kinetic, chaotic--with a more private kind of rapture.

Though Django and Jimmie could have been a mere nostalgia trip, it’s more akin listening to your favorite uncles at family reunions, telling stories that they aren’t supposed to.

Miracle Fortress' jubilant indie pop effortlessly integrates cuddly mammalian coos, cottony guitar fuzz, and gentle falsetto choruses.

Less deadpan and more florid than its predecessor, Now Only is heartrending in new, different ways. Sonically, the record doesn’t stray far from Mount Eerie’s elemental standard operating procedures, where meandering, nylon-strung acoustic strum or heavy metal thunder underlie Elverum’s streams of consciousness.

It successfully excavates old and gorgeous Garbage: digs it up, dusts it off, reassembles it, and lovingly crafts replacements, piece by vivid piece, for the strange little sounds that have rotted away.

Friedberger has always been a storyteller, but these tracks are rife with the kinds of details that breathe life into fiction, like white socks on a girl roller-skating down Market Street ("When I Knew"), and characters with names like Reggie and Peter ("I'll Never Be Happy Again").

Ant perfectly underscores Ali's gruff cadence, simultaneously self-assured and stressed, with a melodic lope that scrunches soul voclas underneath loops of bluesy guitar. [Apr 2007, p.86]

As is often the case, we hear why certain iterations remained on the cutting room floor, but there are plenty of hidden gems in this vault-clearing effort. ... The fifth disc is composed of session outtakes and jams, and arguably is the most eclectic batch of obscurios (even if George gets a bit shouty on a couple of tracks). The jamming is more coherent than much of what was originally assembled on the third vinyl disc of “Apple Jam.”

Happiness hasn’t blunted his keen social insight, though, as he empathizes with latchkey teens (“Tight Rope”), reflects on friends trapped in the street life (“Slippin’ Away”), and rues slavery’s consequences (“The Travelers”).

Agalloch have never sounded so rich, so full.

Deep Fantasy is exhausting, cathartic and a little scary.

Soul deftly blends caprice with the ensemble’s usual care. Anything featuring Daniel’s scrunched-up, uncommonly expressive yelp and high-strung guitar can’t help but be Spoon-y.

Riveting porch noir. [Feb 2007, p.86]

On her melodically powerful third studio album, she matures into the matriarch of her genre. [Dec 2007, p.120]

Though firmly planted on the dancefloor, Record is for sunshine and joy the way 2008 masterpiece Out of the Woods was for moody rain and 2010 chamber-pop charmer Love and Its Opposite for snug wood paneling. But for all its color and vim, it’s also a brave, grave survey--emotionally if not always factually autobiographical--of Thorn’s relationship to London, her family, and her own heart.

As a sonic experience, Tempest kicks most Dylan albums in the cojones.

The Breeders can still crank out straightforward rock songs, but iy's the creepier stuff that gets under your skin and stays there. [Apr 2008, p.104]

The hopelessness that loomed over his prior work gives way to a sort of circumspect hope on The Horizon Just Laughed, a new sense of things working out or having the chance to, and that’s victory enough.

Milking the quiet-LOUD dynamic a drop more, this four-song EP's title track morphs a gentle guitar bath into a fuzz-pedal masterpiece.

With double-time beats, Trent Reznor-level distortion, lost-in-the-matrix digital doodles, and the occasional gunshot, megamixxx3 works like a headbanger companion to El's 2007 album, I'll Sleep When You're Dead-soaring, paranoid, and ghoulish.

Libraries seems huge, a cathedral of the grandiose emotional desperation that Phil Spector and Brian Wilson once framed so dramatically.

Like art, Vampires is dense; like pop, it seems to float in effortlessly from some place you're sure you've been, but by some trick of déjà vu eludes your conscious brain.

Kelela obviously doesn’t shy away from wearing her label’s signifiers, but on Hallucinogen she transcends them, the same way she outlasted lazy classification into PBR&B in 2013, swimming to the hazy surface of a new kind of future sex/love sounds.

Without truly breaking any paradigms, the well-respected veterans in VHÖL do all kinds of things well that evade heavier peers, never relying too hard on the math or surprises for a thrill. If anything, its 42 minutes fly by so smoothly you’re surprised to discover there wasn’t a hitch or even a dead spot.

Happily, his killer solo debut offers more of the same. [Apr 2007, p.87]

Motion City have deftly filled that space between emotional adolescence and responsible adulthood with this set of near-perfect pop. [Oct 2007, p.112]

The shadows come richly dark, and the brillance pierces. [May 2008, p.104]

After mucking about for more than a decade, spacey Norwegian producer Rune Lindbaek teams up with London disco pranksters the Idjut Boys to create this surprisingly focused debut, and the results are nothing less than total sun-soaked beatitude.

Its lyrics, though often hard to discern in the mumbles, start to get to the core of what Mess is all about--trying to find some sort of peace in this anxiety-breeding world.

Killing Time is no breakthrough, but it does pack actual hard-rock crunch, not just sure-shot emo punch.

In contrast to Miller's usual earthiness, this Americana super-session is sonically lighter than air--thanks to spectral six-string ambience from Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot, and pedal-steel ace Greg Leisz, who adorn heavenly voices including Emmylou Harris and Patti Griffin.

On Epic, she's grown as brassy as vintage Lucinda Williams while still drowning in the intimate bite of street noise, the confessional feel of studio chatter, and the postmodern swirl of dream-pop slurry.

Interstellar succeeds in expertly appropriating its forebears instead of regurgitating them.

It sure does prove that Bob Dylan isn't bigger than rock and roll--while also proving that rock and roll needs ace songwriters more than many current rock and rollers think.

Repurposing tired metal tropes for ecstatic sensory trips, these songs are steel-tipped pointillist portraits of vitality itself.

Cheerfully ignoring stylistic boundaries, Brit duo Malachai (formerly Malakai) polish their cut-and-paste skills on this follow-up to last year's tantalizing Ugly Side of Love.

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.

Reign of Terror is evidence that these kids never stopped Armageddonit even once they got punk cool.

Beach House’s releases to date have come fogged by intoxicant, nostalgia, and hypoxia, but Thank Your Lucky Stars does what their work has begged for all along and wipes the dew from their rearview mirror. You’re going to like what you see.

Though the set's marathon length may keep casual listeners at a distance, fans of the eccentric characters, styles, and emotional arcs that compose Waits' oeuvre know there's no such thing as a "casual" Tom Waits listener anyway. [Dec 2006, p.103]

Kinetic and thrilling as the uptempo blasts are, where Your Queen shines is on the slower pieces, revealing that Hutchings can purr, murmur and wax lyrical as well.

Big Fish Theory doubles the ambition of Summertime ’06’s corroded soundscape but condenses that breadth within a tight 36 minutes.

Her minimal songs--just one guitar and sporadic drums--unfold laboriously, as though forcing themselves from Niblett's clenched mouth and hands.

FLOTUS chases a particular spark of inspiration across its hour-plus runtime, as if attempting to prolong an ephemeral moment when anything felt possible.

While there are mistakes and bum notes — and the group's enthusiasm about recording for the BBC had pretty clearly waned by the later sessions--the gorgeous harmonies from those legendary young larynxes sound as glorious as ever.

A far more thoughtful album than the glossy and disconnected Magna Carta Holy Grail, it’s a 36-minute confessional that attempts to bring JAY-Z’s narrative full circle.