Reflection takes a shallow look inward and a deeper look outward than you'd expect from a nonstop party.

Cass McCombs confronts life's miseries with a smirk and a softly rocking beat on this enjoyable sixth album.

This folkie indie-pop band doesn't slam you with hooks on its fourth album--everything is catchy in a modest, reasonable way.

Deep Fantasy is exhausting, cathartic and a little scary.

Just as his piercing voice and languid tunes echo Neil Young's rustic side, a Neil-like tough-mindedness runs through Green's stark meditations, which confront despair head on.

Some will find it a disappointing follow-up to one of the great rock records of the past few years. Some will jump around and pump their fists to every chorus without giving the lyrics much thought; some will live and die by every word. Some will even find it all kind of funny. Nobody is necessarily wrong.

The Stand Ins, is packed with the same compound sentences, sprawling narratives, and precarious, barn-dance guitars that made its companion piece, 2007's "The Stage Names," so weirdly gripping.

Nocturnal Koreans, the band’s 15th album, forgoes power for stillness, and manages the unprecedented: It’s the best thing they’ve done in 14 years.

At times, F&L rival Ariel Pink for eccentric sonic pastiche, while there's enough elasticity in "Too Much Midi (Please Forgive Me)" to hold up an entire generation's leg warmers.

For good and ill, this jumble couldn't come from anyone but Malkmus. [Jun 2005, p.104]

Hoffer preserves [Trevor] Horn's professional sheen but not his swinging charm, leaving us with all bathwater and no baby. [Feb 2006, p.86]

A motley crew of producers (Diplo, El-P, Rostam from Vampire Weekend, Drake affiliate Francis Farewell Starlite, one of the dudes from Yeasayer) serves up shinier, harder, louder, thornier beats, and our heroes occasionally respond in kind.

The Julie Ruin’s second full-band album, Hit Reset, slides with similar grace [as “Rebel Girl”] between the personal and political--between funny (or sad) polemic, and sad (or funny) pop romance.

It's his most varied record, but it also sounds for the first time like he's tryinig to make a "Beck album." [Apr 2005, p.97]

His weathered voice has fissured in all the right places.

Totally grimy. [Nov 2004, p.118]

A warm and deeply engaging snapshot of fractured relationships and existential dread. [Aug 2003, p.116]

Cryptic and cutting. [Aug 2004, p.108]

It's a kick to hear them hoist the MC5's "Kick Out The Jams" as a sexy freak flag and drop an honest-to-God fresh conga break into Afrika Bambaataa's "Renegades of Funk." [2/2001, p.106]

The vibrant Revelry is tougher and deeper--the sound of traffic lights reflected through Rolling Rock empties, of clothes permanently reeking of cigarette smoke. [Apr 2002, p.124]

Hazy, almost-there stadium anthems that don't quite fill the stadium. [Sep 2003, p.115]

For what it's worth, Hypnotize is the project's better half. [Dec 2005, p.102]

The Broken String pares down the track list and polishes the best of the EPs. [Sep 2007, p.123]

The album is a dark gem, a high-IQ song cycle that combines guilt, neurotic lust, and low self-esteem into piano-based tunes that come studded with lyrical daggers.

Rae Sremmurd are at their best when they're doing what they want, rather than eschewing their oddities in favor of radio-friendly hooks ("Safe Sex") or buzzword phrasing.

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.

Jeremih’s no saint, certainly, but this album feels universal in its depictions of desire--his sexiness is satiable, his desires multifaceted, and the way he chooses to explore them deliberately diverse.

Cost of Living outpaces its predecessor in large because of Downtown Boys’ newfound mastery of dynamics in their performances.

ken, Bejar’s sparest album in terms of lyrical density and length in some time, is an aggressive, well-chiseled shift.

The album manages to balance the extremes and convey the chaos of it all. The sound, which Lee wanted to be bigger and bolder, is both of those things. The anthemic choruses are plentiful and unforgettable, and the instruments explode in a way that hopefully can be played live in the near future, vaccines willing.

This is no mere studio project. The Smile are an actual, organic live band.

Too Late definitely scans as a transitional work, a transfixing moment-in-time sort of recording that sees an unprecedentedly fortified Drake firing off paranoid and power-drunk thoughts from his basement, sounding even lonelier than he does than when he specifically talks about feeling lonely.

The rapper's inborn goofiness just gives his words more bite. [Mar 2005, p.85]

You just wonder how songs this miserable can sound so excruciatingly gorgeous. [Jul 2005, p.104]

An eclectic, rippin' record whose only shortcoming is its commitment to artistic quality. [Apr 2005, p.99]

Like its creator, Matangi is flawed, frustrating, and occasionally confusing, but it's also intermittently brilliant and completely unique.

LaVere sounds like a gifted kidnap victim--scared, angry, resourceful. You just know she's going to set herself free.

Hypnotic and strangely thrilling. [Feb 2007, p.86]

General Dome's force is relentless, but about halfway through these 12 songs, things run together, with muddy, [mid-dy] waters polluting the mix.

His proud croon and the band's surging folk rock mean the emotional effect is closer to rebirth than suicide, but by the time the fourth song to feature a metaphorical drowning rolls around, the string parts start to matter more than the sentiments, which was probably not the intent.

An inspiring “is this even rap anymore?” record.

You'll find [it] either icky or inspirational. [Jul 2006, p.83]

Oberst's countryish genre studies have deepened with a very adult loneliness. [Apr 2007, p.89]

Their fatalist slow jams get more rickety as the minutes pass, but they're prettiest when they break down. [Sep 2005, p.109]

The best album of Dave Matthews' career--the most coherent and graceful, the least wanky and aw-shucks messianic. [Aug 2002, p.107]

Rancid is a roots record, scouring off any glossy residue left from the Alternative '90's by returning to pure punk... [Nov. 2000, p.209]

Unlike When I Was Born, which made similar pileups sound subversive, Handcream often feels mapless. [May 2002, p.122]

The sound remains crisp, ensuring that its rough-hewn beauty shines through. [Oct 2006, p.104]

That she succeeds on a record as sophisticated as the self-produced Pretty Little Head is not only a testament to McKay's talent, it's also a tribute to her artistic sense. [Jan 2006, p.90]

Musically, his sixth Silver Jews album is a low-key treat, country-inflected folk rock goosed by melodies that conjure both the Velvet Underground ("Open Field") and Johnny Cash ("Candy Jail").

Here they expand their primarily folky sound, importing rhythms from abroad and morphing electronic ticks and stutters into a field of chirping crickets.

It's comforting to learn that Lady Gaga's supposed dark side--The Fame Monster offers a flipside to The Fame's sexy fun--is just as fun-loving and club-rousing as the songs that made her famous, because, really, her playful façade is a huge part of her appeal.

Rife with acid-burn guitars, levee-breaking drums, and vocals that recall Peter Gabriel at his wooziest. [Feb 2006, p.87]

On her excellent second album, she brings us the whole block.

Lovers Rock is an airy album, demo-like in its simplicity. It has none of the agression of a "comeback." In fact, Sade has never put out anything quite so ephemeral. [Jan 2001, p.114]

Tom Araya's shriek has grown ponderous, and not until rosary-ripping closer 'Not of This God' do the four mid-fortysomethings bypass their rigid polkacore hopscotch for a devastating groove.

The warmth feels sweeter the longer you’ve spent inside.

Jim White's Joe Pernice–produced fourth record deftly melds Southern-flavored soul with California twang.

Desire Lines sits with remarkable ease next to Camera Obscura albums released a decade ago.

Frontman Ricky Wilson is an average singer but an extraordinary melodist. [May 2005, p.102]

Unerringly lovely, but best when the drums heat up. [Feb 2006, p.87]

Romantic defeatism can be charming if you infuse it with enough daydreaming, art-school blues. [Mar 2005, p.92]

For a band named after a benchmark of mediocrity, it's fitting that they bow out consumed by matters so ordinary. [Sep 2007, p.134]

The album is more a rebirth, with Metallica exploring what they've learned durig their 20 years at the top of the heavy-metal slag heap. [Nov 2008, p.96]

Erasing the gap between the 1930s and today, this striking North Carolina trio brings a modern sizzle to the legacy of classic African American string bands like the Mississippi Sheiks, with fiddles, banjos, and even kazoos sparking an electrifying ruckus.

Her voice and her lyrics are just a part of what makes Sleeper such a gripping listen. The record evinces a rumpled bohemian chic resembling a Purple Fashion editorial come to life, but behind that effortless cool is an impeccable sense of craft.

If there’s a downside to Anything, it’s the exhaustive length: 17 heart-trying wisps-of-songs that near the 80-minute mark, akin to needing a tissue and buying a Costco pallet of Kleenex.

Funny how so much controversy can spring up over an album that is, musically, not all that noteworthy.... what could have been a brilliant statement, instead elevates Eminem to the rarified air of true platinum rappers: ie, those that drop outstanding rhymes over frustratingly mediocre beats.

On his Rhymesayers debut, Philly's bearded battle rhymer gets consistently meaty beats from producer Jake One, whose soul-stirring tracks perfectly match Freeway's energetic musicality on breathless anthems such as "Know What I Mean." Problem is, proclamations that he's "about to bring that '98 hip-hop back" gradually unravel into bizarrely dated dismissals of other rappers.

Cliche or not, Drive-By Truckers’ leftovers really are better than most bands’ main course.

The biggest, boldest, and best moments on their second album nod flamboyantly to influences never before evident -- Erasure ("Ambling Alp") and Haircut 100 (the tropical "O.N.E."), among others -- but somehow they're seamlessly integrated with trippier old jams.

Continues their quest for idyllic listlessness, setting claustrophobic love-sucks songs to shy bedroom beats that are always passing (out) into ambient ether. [Sep 2000, p.189]

This inspired, two-disc, 29-track set is one part musical grandstand like Prince's Sign O' the Times, one part marital saga like Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love. [5/2001, p.139]

Singer/songwriter Shawn Christensen's yelping Oingo-Boingo-ish voice gets grating fast. [Nov 2003, p.117]

On Destroyer's eight album, Bejar lives up to his stratospheric self-regard. [Apr 2008, p.94]

Her third self-produced, self-released record in less than two years, is checkered with sweet-and-salty Americana, despite Lynne's tendency to wander precariously close to Jordache-commercial territory

The Slip is primo death funk, with Reznor seething seductively about skies fading to black over grinding soundscapes that perfectly split the difference between computer-music clarity and live-band grit.

It's also in those nature-obsessed lyrics, delivered in tones so dulcet and hypnotic that the inclination to don a robe and commune with Vespertine-era Bjork is overwhelming.

She fills the space with more intellectual depth than she’s shown before, incorporating T.S. Eliot’s apropos poem “Burnt Norton” as a space-age interlude. Ignoring the most offensively nonsensical of her lyrics (“Baby you’re so ghetto / You’re looking to score”), such a relatively monochrome album spans a breadth of cultural markers.

While Brock's pop instincts have never been more refined, his jitteriness has never run more rampant. [Apr 2007, p.85]

Few can both formulate hooks on the ecstatic level of 'One More Time' and then tweak them into noisy oblivion. [Dec 2007, p.119]

Only a third of the album works. Obscure, seemingly unfinished, and nattering, this is Tune-Yards’ weakest album to date at a moment when Garbus, distrusting her music’s ability to explain itself, doesn’t need the slings and arrows.

Connecting blue-haired symphony subscribers to indie-rock bedheads, the twentysomething New York composer is all over the place with his second disc. [Aug 2008, p.106]

Ultimately, the curiosity of the song selection helps Best Troubador feel like a more thoughtful and earnest tribute. Sometimes the two men’s disparate sensibilities find an appealing point of overlap.

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.

She’s flipped the script on us, and in doing so has created her most cohesive work--and maybe even her happiest ending yet.

II, like the record that preceded it, is still a seasick and unyielding document of brutalist experimentation. But because the trio is willing to explore different avenues, there’s more corners to get lost in.

Holland swings far afield from folk and country on her third album, matching her hornlike voice to cool-jazz rhythms. [Jul 2006, p.84]

On his first solo studio album, the granny-spectacled guitar god unplugs for a set of gentle acoustic ditties.

Fans of TVOTR's early density and difficulty might get dismayed at their gradual transformation into the thinking stoner's Coldplay. But it's impossible to listen to Seeds' luxurious fuzz and think that this is a band who mean to be anything but fat and in love.

Smith sounds less joyful than usual, unable to reconcile religious faith with everyday hope. [Jun 2006, p.79]

Time to Go Home breaks new personal and political ground for contemporary goth-influenced music as Chastity Belt trades cliche nihilism for proactively feminist post-punk.

It just might be a masterpiece all over again. [Nov 2007, p.118]

Late Nights: Europe is a dirty, delectable paean to the mischief that takes place after three in the morning.

Startling turns of phrase are just another of this stunning album's grim charms. [Nov 2006, p.103]

It's a little creepy hearing such adolescent voices hooked to Miami booty bass. [Aug 2003, p.116]

It's somewhere between the album we've been waiting for Eno to release since 'My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts' and the album we wish Phish would stop releasing altogether. [Apr 2001, p.154]

Gough's dewy little tunes are mere scribblings in the margins of alt-folk's dog-eared hook-book, while his too-cool-to-care singing is drip-dry dreary. [12/2000, p.232]