Visitations sounds more alive than anything since 2000's near-classic debut, Internal Wrangler. [Feb 2007, p.82]

The whole thing is pretty, if a bit mild, suggesting not quite another green world, but something ideal for--as its cover art suggests--watching autumnal leaves turn.

For most of Neptune, the Duke Spirit graft sweet coatings onto a dark, swirling center.

Antony and the Johnsons' third full-length wisely focuses on the frontman's enormous talent, with Nico Muhly's classical arrangements plinking and waltzing but never overpowering.

Though modest, Skyscraper may prove to be an integral step in Interpol’s progression.

With nods to synth pop, electro, and funk, Sweden's Little Dragon fill their second album with bleeping keyboards and jazzy arpeggios, recalling both Howard Jones and Saint Etienne. But what sets Machine Dreams apart is frontwoman Yukimi Nagano's alternately yelping and cooing voice.

No one can say Black isn’t ambitious, and it’s nuanced too; easily Bentley’s most personal, affecting release yet.

Gainsbourg and Beck generate one catchy track after another without producing much heat, but sometimes canny dabbling is its own reward.

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.

Buckner's singular pipes and surrealistic lyrics tug the songs toward the esoteric, but the band pulls them back. [Oct 2006, p.95]

The pub stompers are as rowdy as ever, but they're balanced here by laid-back ruminations on romance. [Jun 2007, p.91]

Like Paul McCartney, Crowded House leader Neil Finn possesses a massive melodic gift, but no longer seems interested in writing anthems (à la "Don't Dream It's Over"). That's okay when the results feel as intimate as they do here.

Singer/songwriter Will Sheff gives overkill a good name on Okkervil River's fourth album. [Sep 2007, p.136]

Yet here they are on their third full-length, and rather than calcify into indie-scene shtick, Tilly's music has gotten funnier and more vibrant.

As usual, the North Carolina trio's latest is musically contemplative (mostly acoustic guitar or piano, bass, drums, maybe strings) and lyrically bountiful (camera-ready metaphors, idiosyncratic settings, characters with warts).

Straddling the line between street and pop, Attention: Deficit doesn't quite capture the pop zeitgeist. But it sheds light on Wale's evolving personality, and his circuitous story raps reward deep listening.

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]

Unlike Someday World, the far thornier High Life doesn’t improve much with repeated plays: These are egghead jams whose esoteric textures bewitch more than their relatively static frameworks.

Her deadpan delivery -- a more extreme version of awkward queen Maria Bamford -- and her truly singular material (how she saved the career of forgotten pop diva Taylor Dayne, an impression 
of someone doing an impression) don't need silly faces to be hilarious.

After three consistent, unique albums, the duo only flag when they abandon their sense of humor and mischief -- which is what made them so smart in the first place.

Even skeptics should find Bingham's second album, embellished with a bit more pop and politics, a convincing step beyond his promisingly earthy 2007 debut.

Embryonic finds these wild-eyed Okies sounding even more adventurous and less eager to please than at any time since 1997's four-CD experimental sonic goof, "Zaireeka."

Sorta silly lyrics like "Rollin' fast down I-35/Supersonic overdrive" indicate the road that Phosphene Dream navigates: It's all blacktop stretching through reverberating vistas--ultracool if a little predictable.

The two have widened and lightened their sound a bit from '99's Field Studies, with more, merrier guitars and varied selection of keys. [Oct 2001, p.134]

While the production's scope doesn't quite fit Chikita Violenta's knack for scrappy Superchunk-style guitar pop, the busy shimmer usually complements the songs' energy instead of burying it.

By giving us the best album of his career, and subsequently re-ascending to Top 40’s mountaintop, Bieber’s answered his own question: In pop music, it’s never too late to say you’re sorry.

These are the weirdest tracks Yorke has ever been a part of. [Aug 2006, p.75]

Lonely Avenue's two knights of music nerd-dom use their disarming pop smarts to wryly sympathize with the hapless Playgirl cover boy. The empathy and humor run throughout.

Gough sounds like a guy celebrating his birthday in an airport cocktail bar. [Jan 2003, p.99]

Tightly wound to the point of unease, the Brooklyn singer-pianist's third album has its occasional irresistible moments.

Her vocals are both pitch-perfect and emotionally resonant. [Apr 2007, p.96]

Wisely, the album flows like a mixtape rather than a stab at artistic self-definition, with Brooklyn funk band the Dap Kings laying down a unifying groove and Ronson's love of vintage '80s synthesizers providing a stylistic through line.

He's a natural co-conspirator: Collaborations with Drake, Young Jeezy, and T-Pain lack the BBQ spare-rib smokiness of vintage UGK, but still satisfy.

The lyrics chew as much as they bite, and the music -- ranging from twangy jazzisms to raucous blues rock -- lets Costello honor his roots while still showing off what he picked up at the conservatory. [May 2002, p.118]

Another One is a collection of a few of DeMarco’s best songs to date, all in a day’s work for this normal guy who just so happens to get a little wild on stage.

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

You've been touring nonstop in support of your first new album in seven years. What do you do next? If you're Texas-based scrungers Toadies, you redo your unreleased second album, recorded in 1997 and rejected by Interscope, presumably for lacking another "Possum Kingdom," which drove their debut Rubberneck to platinum sales.

They use mopey melodies and nature imagery to evoke heart's near the breaking point. [Nov 2008, p.100]

Add the pipes of Nancy Whang on most tracks--giving Future a boy-girl dynamic--and there's a distinct suggestion that the Juan MacLean might just become the Human League after all.

The Best Damn Thing rarely takes itself too seriously. [May 2007, p.89]

Big Black Coat works best when the music is as committed to frenzied, all-consuming libidinousness as the lyrics, and on those grounds, it’s a surprisingly successful reinvention for the duo: one that feels more in line than recent efforts with the strengths (if not the tones) of their earliest material.

It's an irresisitible, exhilarating mix that sounds like no band but Wolf Parade.

This deceptively named British band's second album revisits the terrific uproar of its debut only briefly before jumping headlong into more expansive, proggier territory.

Woozy, smoked-out hooks are strewn like cigarette butts--a Black Moth specialty that Fridmann dials up throughout this consistently twisted half-hour and change.

This reunion with producer Hi-Tek, Kweli's partner in late-'90s underground champs Reflection Eternal, fuels both camps with smart essays on addiction ("Lifting Off") and celebrity culture ("Got Work"), as well as forced, throwaway couplets.

Underworld is freed up to focus on crafting memorable tunes that hark back to their electronica heyday, as well as more personal, coherent lyrics. Earnest emotions surprisingly suit these dance-floor surrealists.

[It's] mostly a very good album, but the concept betrays the end listening experience, leaving the unshakable feeling that it could've been a six-track EP, not an over-padded full album.

While string-gilded klezmer ballad "Steak Knives" and steamrolling six-minute confession "Shameless" plod well-trod territory, the mod-pop swing of "Piranha Club" and the wry, multi-suite cabaret of "Oh, La Brea" place Honus' self-loathing in a refreshing, no less bizarre, light.

Utopia contains several solid entries into Byrne’s pop songwriting canon, but few revelations. Whimsical and surprisingly optimistic, it finds him following several different impulses at once.

How scary/ridiculous the lyrics are is a matter of personal taste (or lack thereof), but it'd help if the production were more Scandinavian and less like, well, the Rocket from the Crypt rip-off band that singer/guitarist J.D. Cronise was in before he devoted his life to "Paranoid."

Noel Gallagher wrote two more tunes here, both excellent. Unfortunately, age has softened his heart, and he cedes the album's other half to his bandmates (including lead-singing brother Liam), who offer subpar material.

Along with four new Pretenders, she's crafted a statement that's stripped bare and dangerous, just like Hynde herself, who abandons much of her haughty cool to expose some long-concealed wounds as painful as the ones that Janis Joplin unfurled on "Pearl."

They're still tilling the same murky patch, but they're pulling up prettier weeds each time out. [5/2001, p.147]

Their follow-up finds a better balance, albeit one that teeters toward a straight party groove. [Oct 2006, p.104]

If the least they do is keep revealing new shades of the familiar, it's worth sticking around and seeing this band through.

Nixing the sappy bits that dampened his debut, he rewrites the hooks from your parents' favorite Bon Jovi/Belinda Carlisle hits into earnest proclamations of teenage eccentricity, then waves his jazz hands in naysayers' faces.

Bloodflowers smartly pulls up the weeds and cleans a bed for mid-life flowers akin to Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man or Dylan's Time Out of Mind, though it doesn't reach the creative heights of those albums.

There are pleasures to be found on SremmLife 2 once you adjust your expectations and realize that it’s not a “No Flex Zone” sequel. Instead, it charts a different but still familiar path: Every youth explosion is eventually tempered by the grind and hard-won rewards of grown-man work.

The album’s escapism is alarmingly potent, to the point where it verges into the downright delusional, but its lack of self-consciousness is--somewhat ironically--the thing that keeps it in check.

She's not Katy Perry, not yet Carrie Underwood. But look out.

A masterful blend of electronic genres. [Oct 2006, p.102]

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

The sound isn’t funereal, but exultant, the slashing and stoned pinnacle of everything the trio had built to over the course of their decade of existence.

The duo's effortless ability to plunder electronic genres without losing their identity makes Attack consistently fresh. [Oct 2007, p.111]

Nearly every song on their second collaboration--but particularly the brooding 'Salvation' and sweetly melancholy 'Trouble'--reveals gorgeous comfort in the juxtaposition.

God's Father is, in that sense, the most fulfilling Lil B release yet.

Lyrically, he's back to his old tricks--shitting on haters, shouting out himself, somehow rhyming "orange" and having "diamonds like kablooie."

Fortunately, his muse digs punk and trash--these 16 basement screams are the B-sides of rock history.

Occasionally, Boeckner and Perry replicate the 
lo-fi bustle of city life too well, achieving only a dense, dirty muddle

His finest album since American Music Club split. [June 2001, p.145]

The ten songs that make up the surprise new Mr. Misunderstood are a step back from the arena-scaled grandeur Church has been trading in for the past several years. Many of the songs feel like scaled-down counterparts to some of the best tracks on The Outsiders.

All Delighted People documents his struggle between fealty to the here-and-now and preparing for the hereafter; accordingly, it's unwieldy, schizophrenic, and frequently devastating.

The lack of a hefty, definable, or easily digestible pop overhaul here means that Little Red probably won’t hit America as hard as even its predecessor did. But it does feel like the natural progression of an artist whose narrative is so wholly and convincingly embedded in club life.

The miserable bastard can still write melodies that make the medicine go down, and ultimately, that's his redemption.

A big improvement over 2007's ho-hum "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon," it's also the most consistently satisfying full-length he's made.

Blissed-out and surreal, featuring queasy slides between loud and soft, it's a work of patient design and bloody fantasy. Brutal beauty abounds, but for the first time, Deftones are imitating rather than exploring.

With pedal steel by Buddy Cage (Dylan's Blood on the Tracks), ominous percussion by Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, and Buckner's usual subtle craftsmanship, he creates wasted-night rhapsodies that demand you lean in close--however warily.

Very little here could be accused of being twee; Folds sounds invigorated to have a rock band behind him again, making him play harder, sing harder, be harder.

[Springsteen's] loosest, most vigorous album in two decades. [Jun 2006, p.84]

Now 22, she's full-on pissy and proud, pulling from some reliable forebears on this fascinating follow-up.

Sky eschews the occasional decade-hopscotching of 2007's Traffic and Weather, reaching a new, raw sincerity and cohesiveness.

He sounds comfortable with his new band, a pristinely recorded quartet that frames his lyrics with music just interesting enough to not overwhelm them.

It's not a radical departure--there's no 'Kid A' in their future--but rather an engaging sidestep for a band that does triumphantly normal better than almost anyone.

The distinctiveness of these three weirdos and their democratic approach gives this unexpecedly harrowing album a remarkable cohesion.

The best Pretenders record since 1994's Last of the Independents. [Dec 2002, p.141]

Call it Nick Diamonds Gets His Groove Back. Former Unicorn Nick Thorburn went a bit dark and dreary on 2008's "Arm's Way," but with Vapours, the transplanted New Yorker relearns his playfulness.

In many ways, this is his 'Nylon Curtain.' [Sep 2001, p.160]

What it does best is address the simple lament of not having anything to twist to in too long.

England's exoticism is offset by plenty of tough and tender ballads, and even the most stridently worldbeat numbers are joyous, well-made, and never patronizing. [Apr 2002, p.117]

Each song isn't particularly interesting or life-changing, but, damn, if every one of them doesn't boast a hook that sticks in your head until you're humming "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" just to exorcise it. For better or worse, this is talented songwriting...

Sound[s] like a band that's discovered how to enjoy itself again. [Aug 2006, p.85]

Deerhoof's... most ambitious record, but it's also their most familiar. [Feb 2007, p.85]

Warm, soulful, occasionally political, Wright was a private-press gem who deserved more.

Playing songs about cops on the take and dying in Penn Station with a hurtling forward motion that prevents the music from sounding (entirely) like a book report. Killer accordion solos, too.

Every space on More hums with blip-skipping bonus beats, phone-sex coos, and backing vocals boingin' like bungee cords. [March 2001, p.148]

Trip-hop pioneers give doom a romantic tinge.

Fluorescence, their fourth studio album, has an overwhelming brightness.

More often than not, X's hooks, tunes and Minogue's bubblegum-perfect hum achieve candy-coated ecstasy. [Mar 2008, p.106]