By recycling and loosening up "Two Thousand's" best elements--inventive instrumental passages, rich harmonies, across-the-board emoting--French Kicks get both poppier and deeper.

So, about 25 minutes into their fourth album, when Dan Fetherston's martial drums and Adam Rizer and Michael Pace's choral vocals begin the slow rumble of 'Children's Crusade,' the moment feels as revelatory as it is cathartic--Arcade Fire–size elation, without the uniforms and all the friggin' people.

Ultimately, it's the vocals that carry Endlessly. There's no whitewashing of the singer's eccentricities, which feel more pronounced here--she can be gruffly nasal (the oft-repeated chorus of "Well, Well, Well" never stops sounding like "whale, whale, whale") while remaining wholly beguiling.

It's patient, pretty music, tinged with a cozy claustrophobia.

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.

A couple of wooly moments aside, Monroe’s third album, The Blade, continues a remarkable hot streak for writers Luke Laird, Jessi Alexander, Chris Stapleton, and Monroe herself.

In spite of the giddy playfulness, it never comes off as a lark. You’ll get no closer to ascertaining his actual identity, but as the balance between jokes and earnest emoting narrows, Sold Out presents something of an abstract portrait of the man behind the haze.

The quartet's stubborn refusal to evolve yields genuine thrills on their typically irascible 13th album.

He takes Lambs Anger's used parts and models them compressing keyboard sounds and looped samples into a sci-fi party mix. [Feb 2009, p.82]

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who listen for lyrics, and those who listen for beats. If you belong to the latter group, then Views will be one of the best albums released this year. If you’re in the former, well...

After a 2009 album, assorted seven-inch singles, and a recent live recording for Jack White's Third Man imprint, Jacuzzi Boys have taken their place among the best sloppy racket-makers bashing out easy-boogie soundtracks to your next drunken night at the local rock dive.

Editors have acquired a sense of urgency and emotion they lacked on "The Back Room." [Aug 2007, p.98]

Like most extreme acts, this trash-talking MC's strengths are best showcased in wham-bam singles. To sustain interest between fourth-album climaxes, the Berlin-based sleaze queen collaborates with London's Simian Mobile Disco.

On this speedy live best-of, loads of smirky, self-deprecating one-liners about boobies, boners, and crooked wieners can't conceal the music's winning wistfulness. [12/2000, p.222]

Instead of a triumphant return to form, then, Innocence is more of a satisfying side conversation, a familiar face coming round to the back door and whiling the time away nicely till dark or dawn

Asya... has an immediate confidence, rolling through tricky time changes like Tori Amos' plucky little sister. [Jul 2006, p.87]

Free Energy know that what they're emulating is about bliss not meaning, and they're savvy enough to embrace pop simplicity without condescending to it.

With guest vocalists crooning over synth wiggles seemingly lifted from Aphex Twin's "Richard D. James Album," the Iranian expat's first record in eight years is as tuneful as it is brazen.

On his fourth album, Luomo (a.k.a. Sasu Ripatti, the Finnish electronic minimalist who also records as Vladislav Delay) stays true to the course he began with 2000's "Vocalcity."

Here they dial down the Black Flag–derived chaos of "The Bronx (I)" and "(II)," unleashing sharper melodies and boogie rhythms that Axl Rose might've admired before getting cornrows.

Rae is an absorbing enough writer to keep F.I.L.A. afloat. He does a good job of sizing up an unquantifiable horror: being too embedded to relinquish one’s bloodletting past ways.

Addictive listening. [Aug 2006, p.80]

Let those [few sub-par] parts slide into the ocean and enjoy the remaining hour of perfectly golden brilliance. [Feb 2007, p.89]

Silkworm's songs aim for a groove and grace almost completely foreign to their genre. They don't always get there, but when they do, the results are breathtaking. [July 2002, p.110]

Ferry embraces these Dylan classics... with undiluted sincerity, gently remodeling the barbed lyrics into graceful modern art. [Jul 2007, p.96]

The typically droll Video Star includes a cowbell-enhanced rave-up ('Do You Mind'), a bit of Lady Gaga–ish electro-pop ('Last Days of Disco'), and one track named after Transformers ('Deceptacon'). It's a charm offensive with stars and stripes.

Rome has the undeniably high-end vibe of an A-lister's lark. After all, what kind of no-name can book the recording studio once employed by Ennio Morricone?

[The] sense of resignation threatens to render Noctunes a laborious listen, but moments of lightness give the record a little bit of balance.

Though its list of guests may suggest a hedge, Echo largely hews to the road that's less heavily trod upon.

This time around, it's as if the script has been reshot by Michael Bay--glossy and viscerally stimulating--and we're watching a coming attraction for a film that never starts. [Feb 2007, p.88]

Laced with bariny raps, cooing backing vocals, and a keen attention to meloncholy melodic detail, Why? almost one-ups those heady precursors [Fountains of Wayne, Rentals]. [Apr 2008, p.106]

Write About Love also feels monumentally comfortable in its own skin. For a band that made its bones meticulously documenting awkwardness, that's a particularly impressive change.

This young band’s musical growth supersedes the album’s imperfections, and hopefully Down in Heaven will eventually be regarded as a transition to something more career-defining. Untapped potential is an energy too.

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

A series of six-minute tracks that set some sort of richly (or ripely?) spastic texture-beats against ethereal drone-shimmers. [Aug 2001, p.136]

Yusuf's supple folk tunes predictably take a more spiritual route, yet largely avoid cosmic corn. [Dec 2006, p.104]

Stevens sated his jam-band jones in a borderline amusing way on August's All Delighted People EP, but here all the engine-revving too often feels lazy, especially considering how vibrantly he embraces the album's fresh musical direction elsewhere.

Toward the Low Sun is what the Dirty Three do best: enigmatic instrumentals that redefine the notions of power in a power trio, a three-headed beast that trades off thoughts with nuance and grace, like a Cerebus dancing a waltz, then knocking back a beer at the bar.

Little Dragon's third full-length deepens the group's down-tempo mix of icy techno and smoldering R&B.

The arrangements simply aren't as sharp as before, even as the ensemble uses ingenious tricks, like shifting rhythm mid-number on "Q.U.E.E.N." and girding each song with string melodies that circle back to those suite overtures.

Weirdly calm yet supremely uneasy, On the Ones and Threes fluctuates constantly from folk to psychedelia to grunge, often in a single song.

Idealism shows off plenty of blaring synth riffs. [Jun 2007, p.92]

Last year's Merriweather Post Pavilion, SPIN's 2009 Album of the Year, forwent such formlessness, but the haze returns on this five-track EP. Fortunately, Merriweather's hummable, techno-indebted delirium also returns.

Verbal sound bites once provided subtext for Godspeed's cinematic symphonies. But on Yanqui, those voices have fallen silent, and there's too much barren drift. [March 2003, p.120]

Though restlessness is the dominant lyrical theme here, Nothing Is Wrong sounds familiar and comforting (see the airy, aching "Fire Away," featuring Jackson Browne)

For its all its pleasures, Hard II Love isn’t strong enough to convince you he’s decided to stick to a lane.

The record’s biggest flaw might be that it stacks the stunning “Sun” and “Lights” as its first two tracks, setting a challenge to which the nine remaining ones can’t quite rise.

An easy album to enjoy. [Jun 2007, p.93]

His debut solo album sports lyrics of the sort Loudon Wainwright III has been writing for decades, set to harp, oboe, strings, and horns. Lacerating sentiments clash with pretty sounds as Kasher holds forth on his "death wish," detailing the foibles of prodigal husbands.

If the band could bring themselves to record with anything resembling subtlety, they might win over some skeptics. But they also might end up hanging with Lightspeed Champion. I suspect they'll take the trade-off.

It’s a commendable effort, with Cole putting himself in a creative territory to respond to critics, peers and progeny. His messages are timely despite the fact that they continue, rather than conclude, a larger conversation.

The tropes in YG’s songs are West Coast traditional (women, realness, threats, repeat) but there’s a combination of veteran savvy and lane mastering that refreshes the more expected moments.

No, Virginia compiles a clutch of new tunes, old demos, B-sides, and cast-offs from the previous album, but it scores biggest with an obsessed fan's accordion-powered rendition of the Psychedelic Furs' 'Pretty in Pink.'

Bassist Jared Warren and second drummer Coady Willis (a.k.a. Big Business) return as the perfect-fit rhythm section for lifers Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover, who are still communicating in their own avant-boogie metal language like twins separated at birth.

Leo has now produced more Pharmacists records while we've been at war than not, and in a world that still needs Fugazi's oppositional fire, The Brutalist Bricks' Dischordant burn is welcome.

Their fourth full-length has certain recurring quirks: skittery hi-hats, guitar lines to whistle along to, junk poetry sneered as if into a wind chamber. Blame a new emphasis on songwriting, never their strength, over sound-making.

That combination of bottled passion and efficiency spreads itself evenly through the 11-track set.

Johnny Whitney has made an art of singing like a deliriously deaf 12-year-old, but the debut of his new trio with Blood Brothers bandmate/guitarist Cody Votolato and ex–Pretty Girls Make Graves guitarist Jay Clark (now on drums) plays like a preteen daydream.

Although most of the songs on Patterson Hood's second solo album predate the existence of Drive-By Truckers, they'd easily fit on any of his band's records--same low-life characters, busted dreams, and black humor, rendered in solidly gothic Southern rock.

Abyss weighs unnecessarily heavy at times--the obvious premise and barely-there smack drum of “Simple Death” doesn’t hold up against the other songs’ more nuanced examinations of the macabre subjects--but Wolfe makes a convincing case to follow her into the underworld.

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

Mostly the Keys just staple stuff to their good ol' R&B raunch and let 'er rip. [Apr 2008, p.92]

It meshes the two rappers’ sensibilities seamlessly, proving them kindred spirits all along.

Across the album’s 13 exceedingly catchy yet contradictory tracks, Puth laments his success and desirability while boasting about both. ... Voicenotes feels like a step, at the very least, in the right direction.

Their new songs are sunnier and jumpier than 2005's dirgeful "Feathers." [Mar 2008, p.100]

With dance-rock standouts like "Julius" and "Bury Us Alive," the Portland quartet's third album is its best yet.

Fifty-year-old men rarely sound this enraged and energized. Neither do twentysomethings. [Jun 2006, p.82]

The highlight "It's Not Enough"... proves [Townshend] hasn't lost his knack for pop precision. [Dec 2006, p.104]

Hints of folksy revelry may abound, but the dynamics are strictly library-level, and the lyrical focus is decidedly inward.

This set of songs recaptures much of their original nonchalant magic. [Feb 2007, p.86]

The pervasive sense on Visions is of a young woman carefully pushing out of her own introversion, which makes the moments where she sings from the gut instead of the throat ("Circumambient"), or strives for human-on-human sensuality ("Skin"), all the more thrilling.

It’s the spirit of community that defines Honey, a doting mixtape that cherishes the one thing that matters most to Katy B: club culture. From making it past the door to after-hours rejections, Brien’s narrative thrives musically upon teamwork.

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.

Sisterworld veers between frenzy and foreboding, exploring the City of Angels' demonic side, from Charles Manson to Bret Easton Ellis, while producer Tom Biller adds richly detailed Hollywood orchestration.

Pedals reveals a group of reenergized vets who've hardly mellowed with

Rest’s intimacy contrasts Gainsbourg’s personal reticence, and softens a storytelling void that might doom a lesser stylist.

The group... get more expansive--and more pop--on their second album. [Sep 2006, p.102]

The North Carolina native's third album unveils deceptively sharp tales of hearts in distress, implying fierce emotions just under the surface. [Mar 2008, p.106]

But for every song with a strong concept, there's another that meanders through so-so rhymes without any memorable phrases or punch lines. [July 2008, p.92]

Recorded at Jamaica's Tuff Gong studios, the record's strongest asset is making things that shouldn't work together sound natural.

That toughening process continues on this intrepid eight-song mini-album.

The tunes on Saint Cecilia--the patron saint of music, as any Art Garfunkel fan will tell you--were largely assembled from past albums’ cutting floors. The title track crawls towards wholeness on the lovely vocal meld of Grohl and Kweller.... Meanwhile, “Iron Rooster” is a bone-tired dragger that’s probably of recent vintage but could date back to Down on the Upside.

Galactic complement these inspired contributions [from guest rappers] with chunky wah-wah guitars, chugging rhythms, and beats so tightly action-packed that they could be the soundtrack to a sleek Hollywoood crime frolic. [Sep 2007, p.129]

A few moments of uncomplicated clarity (a stirringly memorable hook or clarion-call chorus) would elevate ExitingARM from brilliant mess to true pop genius.

The tonal palette is warm and lush, with a transporting quality that’s twofold, sending the listener both to the artist’s western locale and back in time.

Full of playful swagger, the Kidz rarely let their emotional guard down.

His 15th album--counting those as Smog--is a spare, rambling mix of country, blues, and '70s rock, but it detonates with lines so direct they barely sound written.

The mood is somber, mournful, and at times, downright postapocalyptic. But the best of these ambient orchestrations, gurgling uncomplicated beats, and scattered vocals add up to something emotionally wrought, even transporting.

Testimony brings rap's raw nerve detail to the sturdy slow jam, nullifying the need for nods to R&B of the "rap and bullshit" variety.

Galactic struggle to accompany all these signifying voices, sometimes resorting to hard, strident rhythms that don't really augment the performances.

Why Make Sense? smooths out Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard’s longstanding, ever-evolving musical partnership and collective existential quandaries into an album as polished as Larry Levan’s disco ball, and their most cohesive as well.

Ten tracks of heart-baring guitar-doodles by and for people who'd rather talk about feelings than have them. [Nov 2001, p.138]

Blue Songs' prevailing mood is deep indigo, not ultraviolet, yet that darkness heightens and complicates.

Tokyo psych-folk mystics Ghost add lavish accompaniment that lures these tiny, opining songs out of the bedroom. [Oct 2000, p.184]

Sonically, Emotional Mugger lands somewhere between all of these records [Manipulator, II, and Ty-Rex], maintaining the cohesion and (relatively) streamlined arrangements of Manipulator but nodding to the scuzzy ’70s hard rock of the latter two and Segall’s trademark haywire, lo-fi garage.

Buoyant voices erupt in urgent chants, while xylophones, thumb pianos, and percussion create a swirling, hallucinatory web of sound equal to the freakiest psychedelia. [Oct 2008, p.114]

Black Keys singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach opens his first solo outing with an acoustic country blues that sounds utterly authentic but signifies mainly as a museum-quality reproduction. Fortunately, the rest of Keep It Hid hews more closely to the Keys’ scuzz-encrusted, blunt-instrument assault.

Overgrown's biggest fault is lack of quality control; it's an uneven listen, with peaks like "Retrograde" segueing into the quotidian piano recital of "DLM," with an undistinguished back half that doesn't linger in the mind afterward.