The Meanest Of Times moves beyond connecting the dots between working-class punk and ancient Celtic ditties, with surprisingly thoughful songs that explore lives shaped by drunken violence and Catholicism. [Oct 2007, p.100]

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").

The duo's virtuosic picture of the 21st-century city feels so alive it might convince Escape From New York's Snake Plissken to return.

Wildflower is a shaggy document, to be sure. Not everything’s a stunner like “Because I’m Me” or “Harmony”--sometimes there’s moldering AM Gold like “Light Up.” But now it’s not about the journey into paradise, more like a rush to the finish line. They’re out of time, but they still made it.

Quality-wise, the second half of the album has a higher batting average.

While Earle's brawny attack might seem ill-suited to Van Zandt's wistful angst, he does his idol justice on this vibrant covers set, delivering supersonic bluegrass and starry-eyed ballads with the same thoughtful finesse.

An odd gem in a catalog full of them, 1984 is a rewarding left turn from a band who’ve remained interesting for so long because they’re less likely to fall off than wander.

Amadou and Mariam were wise to forgo a full-on return-to-roots move: They're no kind of traditionalists, let alone folkies, and if their songs lovingly reimagine Bamako, cosmopolitan Paris is their spiritual, as well as their physical, home.

The work on PC Music Vol. 2 is more mature, less obnoxious, and much more deserving of the early hype PC Music received.

Whenever the party gets too polite, Gorillaz drop an unruly banger like the kaleidoscopic “Damascus” featuring frequent running mates Omar Souleyman and Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def), reminding us that everyone’s always welcome on the dance floor.

What you get on Perdida is a band that as they get comfortable with another new singer, is pumping out songs that are more reflective of who they are today.

Where last year's Loud had a hefty helping of unshakable singles, this album's arc, however simple--sex, love, sex, repeat--is cohesive and sweet.

Sydney Vermont and boyfriend Dan Bejar have spent the past two years quietly assembling their debut album's sublime folk rock. [Mar 2008, p.102]

What elevates this bove a cheeky tribute is the unselfish sweetness that Schwartz mixes with his smarts. [Feb 2008, p.94]

All told, it's an endearing bag of tricks.

Both chilly and warm, soulful and soft, Post Tropical is an intricate ice sculpture of an album, and a fantasy come true for anyone who's ever misted up over Maxwell's version of "This Woman's Work."

It's the rare rap album that actually rewards its mixtape following.

These performances never surrender to the anxiety of influence: All those comparisons are mere reference points for a loose aesthetic that values sustained chordal vamps above all else.

A patient, inviting album that feels like a fresh start from a guy whose recording career spans multiple boom-and-bust cycles, both for indie rock and the economy.

The selections range from pre-Frank material to the last song she ever recorded, all united by a distinctive rawness, her voice kept naked and slightly flawed, despite the sophisticated production.

The nakedness of Crutchfield’s music is the source of both its confidence and its vulnerability.

Rice seeks 24/7 momentousness here. [Jan 2007, p.92]

The album is another leap forward for the producer, refining his sense of songcraft and expanding his instrumental palette without sanding down his rough edges in the slightest. Faith doubles down on the industrial brutality of Problems, while also balancing that with a sense of hope and comfort rarely heard from Stott previously.

The LP’s sunset pastels and recurring elastic bass lines at times threaten to rob the tracks of their singularities. But 99.9% is a success because Kaytranada fosters an environment where every guest shines.

On (), the band steer their ghost ship into darker waters, erecting a vast, austere cathedral of sound, then sticking around to score a funeral mass inside. [Dec 2002, p.140]

This double album (complete with lush art booklet) is styled like a toga party, but some tracks ("Fit for Caesar," "Lucretius") are closer to the 'shroom-chewing highlights of Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii.

Scales are Middle Eastern, obviously; tempos range from up to mid-plus; the programmed drums generate rhythms that few American tub-thumpers could map, much less replicate. There's far more variety in what Sa'id plays than in what Souleyman sings--flute sounds, an orchestra once. But Souleyman's intensity nails it.

Ostensibly a supernatural tale, Hotel Valentine challenges the listener to reflect on life, death, and nothingness. Whether that inspires joy or terror depends on you, but it'll inspire something.

Perhaps the most ambitious moment on the album is its warped title track which goes from a whisper to a scream when Eilish’s crystalline vocals burst from power ballad to an explosive Metallica-esque electric guitar anthem. Still, it’s the unwavering vulnerability of Eilish’s songwriting that makes Happier Than Ever most impressive.

Obviously, hip-hop loves its thugs, too, especially if they're the antiheroes of a relatively nuanced piece like this one.

The final result is a balm to soothe well-trodden emotional frequencies.

2 Chainz forges deeper emotional connections, but that surface is as entrancing as ever. B.O.A.T.S II ups the production values like a true sequel should.

Li's new album, Wounded Rhymes, is equal parts seething ice princess and lonely snowwoman, vacillating almost track by track between fury and despondence over a scotched relationship.

The duo leaven Perfect World’s miserablism with just enough smeared hooks and doom-metal licks to make converts of the underground faithful and the casual headbanger; as tortured triumphs go, this debut is a doozy.

This is dance music downsized for iPods but also indie rock expanded for the dance floor. [Jan 2007, p.89]

The abundance of spacey synths and clattering, reverbed percussion makes Thank Me Later feel like ideal cruising music for a ramshackle UFO, but it also incorporates dynamics like few other hip-hop albums before it.

Lewis' wordplay smartly unspools over the course of a song--with 'Breakin' Up,' she creates a 'Since U Been Gone' for grown-ups, and on '15,' narrates an Internet jailbait vignette without melodrama or moralizing. [Sep 2007, p.132]

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]

Exchanging their volatile tendencies for restraint and focus, Godspeed You! Black Emperor have created another incredible work and one that finds them again evading the confines of formula--even if it happens to be their own.

Reflektor is long and weird and indulgent and deeply committed. It has three to five genuinely great songs; it also wanders off into the filler hinterlands for 20 minutes or so (out of 70).

The narrative structure of nighttime reveries can often feel unsettling, but throughout Slowdive, the band use foggy images and slippery transitions as a soothing sort of déjà vu--you feel like you’ve been here before, even though you obviously haven’t.

Face Control's programmed electronics, in fact, ring deeply human, and Boeckner's tortured vocals express shared experience rather than alienation.

Fully in charge on The W, RZA ditches the longeurs of Forever, borrows some adrenaline from Ghostface Killah's relentless Supreme Clientele, forsakes the Alesis drum machine, and returns to the crates to make the dirty, inexplicable music Wu fans want. [2/2001, p.106]

A lot of a listener’s acceptance of Care depends on their acceptance for nervous candor; for purposeful titles like “Lost Youth / Lost You,” for earnest existential wonderings of what “care” means, for transcribed 3 a.m. chats about how everyone looks at their phones and how warm skin is awesome.

Why Love Now is reserved in its sonic experimentation. But for a band as sharp and capable as this one, that’s not really a problem. Beneath the acerbic jokes, Korvette is a humane and considerate writer and performer.

Adorned with piano and synth, the ten songs on Re-Arrange Us are fuller, more elegant vessels for the duo’s warm, intricate melodies.

Here, a founding multi-instrumentalist member, a longtime bassist, and several supportive additions forgo the initial trio’s psychedelic pop for angular guitar riffs and agile Latin rhythms that evoke an adventurous, timeless sense of fun.

Ian Parton's picked up Young Guv’s gauntlet and made the power-pop album of the year.

Welch may never do anything as dangerous and uncouth as "Kiss" ever again. But even the threat of menace works wonders on terrific follow-up Ceremonials.

Even the full-length's sleepier moments offer a break from its breakneck speed and succeed in balancing out an otherwise dizzying record.

The result, which is gentler and more eclectic than the Bastards' earlier releases, is also Wennerstrom's most glorious, a collection of salty, rousing rock'n'roll that'll leave you aching for a roadhouse, a sticky bar stool, and a chipped glass of bourbon.

Their excellent new Bless Off, which careens even more crank-ably--not to mention somewhat less grumpily--than 2011's also very good Primitive Blast.

The most rewarding Florence and the Machine full-length yet.

While it's still easy to dismiss his shock tactics as puerile and insensitive (if you're gonna sing about someone "pretty as a swastika," they'd better be really ugly), he hasn't sounded this vital--and tuneful--since "Mechanical Animals."

Though it lacks the electrifying newness of the Sung Tongs era, Eucalyptus is nonetheless a success. It is a patient, reflective, and decidedly low-key work, one that seems content to thrum along in its own corner of the universe without much regard for whether anyone’s there to receive its generous gifts.

His new mixtape's best moments gain their power from such good-idea/bad-idea indulgences and batty risk-taking.

She’s never more at home than when BJ the Chicago Kid accepts an offer of her “chocolate covered honey” on the closing “Beautiful Love.”

Mutant, even as it threatens to filibuster itself at over an hour long, feels like the album that Xen was meant to grow into, with every lesson that Vulnicura taught integrated at a molecular level.

Crazy for You is a soundtrack to bikini season as it's actually experienced, racked by impossible expectations and as high as the tide line.

Full Circle is like an afternoon on the front porch listening to Lynn tell you her life story, a trajectory with an impact that no single disc could ever fully sum up.

Luaka Bop has done a remarkable job of collecting recordings that were originally scattered across multiple releases and giving them the feeling of a consistent whole.

Their most relaxed to date. ... Whereas the first installment of the series seemed uneasy and disjointed in its span of styles, Love Yourself: Tear’s genre-hopping sounds like the group is simply having a good time.

Nosaj’s remarkable, entrancing debut album gathers sundry influences, from U.K. dubstep to Aphex Twin-styled IDM, into a 36-minute computerized symphony.

Gather, Form & Fly extends Megafaun’s back-porch mad science into unexpectedly epic realms, including straight blues and even pure pop, embellished with skronky, experimental sound effects.

Coffey is the star, and on tracks like "Plutonius" and "Space Traveller," his monstrously psychedelic groove still kills.

All over their eighth album, the Quins continue to demonstrate what makes them such fine songwriters.

The record’s brutal frankness belies its lyrical depth–small touches, like the reprisal of the intro track “Anytime” as the album’s closer, leave the listener with a sense of a hopeful, if ambivalent, closure.

Endless Now was recorded in the same upstate church where Dinosaur Jr. made 1993's Where You Been, and it sounds like a happy refugee from that alt-rock era, all battering drums and youthful, melodic confusion.

What's interesting about Saint Heron is that it trips giddily over the line between relatively conventional approaches (Aiko, Solange, Shawn) and more heavily processed, speculative stuff (Sampha, Iman Omari, BC Kingdom), but takes no pains to make an overarching statement.

This isn’t just glassy-eyed ambition--Hynes seems to have deliberately made this his blurriest effort to date, a blending of his chosen genres and ideas in a disorienting collage.

With their fourth album Värähtelijä they’ve finally made a record that fully follows through on the paradoxical promise of their component parts.

Like Robert Earl Keen, he has a way with a punch line and the frat-boy fans to prove it--they're gonna love 'America's Favorite Pastime,' which recounts the 1970 no-hitter Dock Ellis pitched on LSD. The rest of us will admire 'Bring 'Em Home,' a spirited call to get our troops the hell out of harm's way.

The music on their third album, Mind Control, shows a broader vocabulary of anachronism.

Savage Gold is of course far more than the sum of its parts, but those parts--Killing Joke, Deathspell Omega, later Death--make for an excellent starting point for the band's considerable combined talents to spring from.

Tinariwen's fifth album takes off on an acoustic path following the open-
ing track's otherworldy 
appearance by Wilco guitarist Nels Cline.

On Persuasion, which came out in August, Blondes waste no time stripping three tracks to their most essential elements, decorating them with just scraps of tinsel.

Dream River flows from one track to the next, with a similarity of tempo that makes it play like eight movements of one 40-minute song. But a few moments stand out.

Here, they’ve crafted a shag and wood-grained interior as remarkably indebted to its predecessors as it is now warm and full and huge.

Night Thoughts honors Suede’s longstanding place in Brit-rock history as theatrical brooders with a penchant for pop and post-punk, while also celebrating the five-piece’s growth by supplying listeners with another round of swirling dance ballads (the gloomy, arena-filling “Outsiders” and the twinkling “No Tomorrow”) and operatic, Dog Man Star-ry ruminations (“Tightrope”).

[Love Is All frontwoman Josephine Olausson's] aim is true on the Swedish quintet's third full-length, a fizzy, exhilarating hybrid of bubblegum pop and bratty punk.

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.

Closer in spirit to Rancid's bighearted radio punk than to anything Pink has put her name on before--all scrappy power chords and wounded warmth. [Jan 2004, p.97]

Howl is not exactly the group's Nebraska--BRMC dabble in too much "White Album" Beatlemania for that--but it's a general extension of that record. [Sep 2005, p.101]

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

Ultimately, Guilt Show feels about as transitional as its predecessor; Pryor has stripped the cuteness from his songwriting but hasn't figured out how to make his dispatches from adulthood resonate the way his teenland stuff used to. [Apr 2004, p.91]

Just as messy as the Mescaleros' first two stabs at relevance. [Jan 2004, p.102]

[Sinatra's] is a light, ductile weirdness, and nearly all the contributing acolytes here play to it well. [Jan 2005, p.96]

Sometimes Kieran Hebden's electronic music is dawn-over-the-Buddhist-shrine gorgeous. [Jun 2005, p.108]

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

Musically, Everclear sound almost exactly the same as when they signed with Capitol in 1995: punk, profoundly polished. But the details Alexakis sprinkles into the mix keep things interesting. [Apr 2003, p.102]

WWW stretches Whack’s stylistic range, reintroducing an artist who seems more deeply in tune with her emotions.

Mark Olson's harmonies are missed, but Gary Louris' shaky/sweet vocals suit the album's rueful vibe. [May 2003, p.116]

Packed with sparse, whirring, and danceable noise-rock refinements. [Apr 2005, p.108]

Alternately goofy, sweet, and weird. [Aug 2005, p.97]

MacKaye and Farina share a wobbly spirit that wears well. [May 2005, p.110]

A Death Cab For Cutie album you can listen to while ironing your cape. [Apr 2004, p.94]

In a world where 50 Cent name-drops [Talib] Kweli, Mos Def wants to keep the line between indie hip-hop and major-label rap nice and blurry. [Oct 2004, p.112]

The 'Sailor can often sound a little too elfin even by the standards of the early '70s orchestral folk rock they love. [Jan 2004, p.100]