Given its songs' consistent strength, Rings' extravagant extras rarely seem excessive. [Apr 2002, p.125]

I Bet on Sky is the sound of a great, influential band that, yes, picked up where they left off, but instead of luxuriating in the sentimental hue of the moment, got back to work and kept moving forward.

A freaky, moving masterpiece. [Aug 2006, p.80]

Clark's complex femininity, both self-possessed and keenly evolving, is what makes her music so powerful and fascinating.

Preposterous and sensational, We Love Life grapples with nothing less than how best to prove you're alive. [Oct 2002, p.116]

Thee Oh Sees are always the same but different, drifting through genres before twisting them out of shape, from the bubblegum of Castlemania to the metal-tinged Floating Coffin. On A Weird Exists, they do this more successfully than ever before. [Sep 2016, p.80]

Middle Cyclone carries case's unique vision one step further: here, she truly embraces the beast within.

Shoniwa is both impulsive and precise: Every string-swept disco flourish or arena-rock guitar break heightens an unflappable poise that bypasses rote R&B melisma for soul-shaking celebration.

Aside from "Lovealot," she proudly proclaims her intentions as a first-world pop star, de-emphasizing found collage and "third-world democracy" for melodic sway and punky bluster.

Fetch the Bolt Cutters is definitely the product of cabin fever and occasionally feels claustrophobic but it’s an undeniably fascinating and complex collection of songs. It manages to refine many of Apple’s already good ideas and displays a distinct sonic evolution.

If Slave Ambient represented a breakthrough, this one is an out-and-out star-maker that should rank among the year's best albums.

These are 50-year-old songs written by a man in his early 20s performed by a handful of 70 year-olds come to life and, thanks to the incredible strength and musical bond of the E Street Band, they dovetail very well with the new material. ... The results are stellar. There’s really not a bad one in the bunch.

Noname leaves little to no room for filler on Room 25, conveying a wide breadth of compelling ideas within 35 minutes. ... Though it can require attention to detail for her words to sink in, she gives off a feeling of effortless and whimsical grace as she speaks from a place of stark honesty over live instrumentation. A complete one-of-one act who continues to grow in real time outside of the limelight, Noname makes a subtle yet strong statement for women providing alternatives to one-dimensional rap archetypes.

Tightening the screws of his delivery, he's found a bruising poetry in a flow that once seemed clumsily conversational. [Jan 2003, p.93]

Vig both sweetens and strengthens Against Me!'s attack without sacrificing the band's innate Raggedy Andy appeal.

They've gone one step beyond the underrated Surrender by integrating their two sides: high-octane thrust and airy psychedelic dreaminess. [Feb 2002, p.105]

Since I Left You is so madly glad, it's demented. [Oct 2001, p.126]

As usual, her melodies stubbornly refuse to turn into hooks, preferring to twirl into new territory. But her approach suits the material, which flows like the colors on a weather map, from Los Angeles to Nevada, from New York to Virginia, gathering thunder along the way. [Nov 2002]

It’s an incredible album strewn with highlights obvious and sneaky, the rare debut that holds up the weight of its backstory, with the added brassiness of assuring us that’s just him on the regular. Now we know.

R.A.P. Music, the sixth album by from Atlanta firebrand Killer Mike, is a stunning anachronism.

A collaborative winner delightfully devoid of ego or pretense. Here, each voice works to create something greater than the sum of its parts, which is rare for supergroups.

Sung with warmth, these tracks offer a welcome antidote to her more familiar performance mode--spectacular austerity. They're as bloody and forceful as the battles Harvey references.

Even if your knowledge of Turkish is zilch, you can’t help feeling these 10 songs deeply. Verily, Garip is sonic alchemy.

As a body of songs, Lemonade presents Bey at her most skilled and fully matriculated as a pop studio maven and conductor of the present’s preferred orchestral mode: creative file-sharing. ... Lemonade the album, however, is out to sonorously suck you into its gully gravitational orbit the old fashioned way, placing the burden of conjuration on its steamy witches’ brew of beats, melodies, and heavy-hearted-to-merry-pranksterish vocal seductions.

Vol. II may lack the celebratory tone of its instantly gripping predecessor, but this trip through Guthrie's more tormented thoughts finds Bragg and Wilco yet again forging gold with their musical alchemy.

At any given moment, Gordon’s sing-speak Sprechgesang of catchphrases, commands, Post-It note poetry and cultural keywords (“Bye Bye 25!”) comes off clipped, desperate, laconic, near-death, dominating, erotic, craven, jaded, resigned, empowered. Captivating.

Mostly, it's the wilting pedal steel, warm analog tubes, and lush heartbreak flourishes of "When I'm Gone" that distinguish Rose from the merchants of new country's jingles.

It sounds awesome. [Jul 2007, p.102]

Accelerate will be rightfully championed as the defibrillator that shocked a once-great band back to its senses.

With Tomorrow's Harvest, the Sandisons' return feels natural. Rather than resort to hiring disco session musicians or citing Judith Butler to add a new kink to their sound, they've done something even rarer in the modern era: They’ve aged with grace.

The wonder of 22, A Million is how beautifully he melds the disparate forms--inside and outside, acoustic and digital, past and future, ground level and interstellar. It’s a stunning record, well worth the wait.

No Cities to Love spends much of its running time reminding us not what Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss can do but what other configurations of players can't.

That’s the trick of Middle of Nowhere: it never rushes to define what comes next. Instead, Musgraves lingers in the in-between, finding humor, heartbreak and a surprising amount of peace along the way.

Its sense of self-awareness, internal editing and transitional sonic wanderlust remains as compelling as ever.

Throughout, the musicians seem to be cooking in their own worlds, but their parts fortuitously interlock and tasty grooves frequently arise. There’s so much going on in How You Been, and it’s all interesting.

The swathe of great moments here is impressive. .... Indeed, Trixies might be the duo’s personal masterpiece.

Ellison has created one of his most concentrated and fascinating releases.

Tortoise are still on a creative roll, even if it’s a very slow, drawn-out one.

Though they've traded some of the unhinged thrash of 2002's Black City for keyboardy atmosphere, the band's Goteborg gloom can't hide the hooks. [Jun 2004, p.108]

Darnielle's written some of the toughest and most open-souled music of his lo-fi outlet's oft-brilliant history. [May 2005, p.110]

Gleefully impurist and highly addictive. [Sep 2004, p.122]

Here they fe-fi-fo-fum with the exacting crankiness of carny punks who've seen it all. [Mar 2006, p.95]

Eventually it hits you just how godlike catchy these banalities are. [Aug 2005, p.103]

The rubbed-rawness of Uh Huh Her might seem like backpedaling. But the best tracks use the pleasure principles of Stories to update her old approach. [Jun 2004, p.101]

[They] continue to play it sweet and low: hot-cocoa keyboards, heart-monitor beats, glossy high-end string arrangements--and actual songs, as it happens. [Apr 2004, p.94]

Varied and vulnerable. [Jun 2003, p.109]

Almost lives up to the hype. [Mar 2005, p.92]

Emo kids, hold your heads: An Eminem you can call your own is on line one. [Apr 2003, p.107]

In shifting the lyrical focus away from one songwriter’s experience—exemplified by the previous hyper-emotional adrenaline rushes of “Drunk II” and “In Love Again”—some of the lovelorn charisma that made Mannequin Pussy so special has been lost. Nonetheless, the record’s disparate strands mostly hold together, a formidable document of their fire and fury—and one that’s needed more than ever.

It's no mere gimmick. [Oct 2004, p.111]

This transcendent debut is the real stoner rock. [Aug 2005, p.103]

It's the album on which the Chems relax into a comfortable maturity, secure in their status as elder statesmen. [Feb 2005, p.87]

It's such a confident display that you barely notice the English-as-a-second-language lyrics. [Nov 2003, p.117]

The grimy, blues-black nuggets [PJ Harvey] pounds into armor for Faithfull are song-for-song stronger than Harvey's own 2004 album, Uh Huh Her.... But Cave's songs are a little too pitch-perfect. [Jan 2005, p.96]

Instead of updating psych garage folk, they allow its corpus to fester in skronky breakdowns, churning feedback, and... a wicked spirit-medium session. [Jan 2006, p.91]

He does have a sharp facility for steely Bakersfield guitar licks and cinematic countrypolitan strings and clever honkytonk wordplay and so many other elements that defined country in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. But he never feels out of time on $10 Cowboy.

These Brits deconstruct bombast via bombastic guitar riffs. [Jun 2005, p.108]

It's a busy, dazzling record, though more detours--like "Storm Returns," a dreamy guitar-and-beats collage--would help aerate things. [Aug 2003, p.118]

At War is gnarlier and a bit less tuneful than the group's previous two CDs. But the arrangements, and Dave Fridmann's signature blend of clarity and overmodulation, remain intricately weird. [Apr 2006, p.89]

Trail of Dead temper their thrash with welcome doses of art rock. [Jun 2003, p.109]

A better record than Come Away--less piano bar, more honkey-tonk. [Apr 2004, p.93]

[He] still knows how to make palpitating street anthems. [May 2006, p.91]

From the blocky organ chunks that lead “I’m Angry” to the fuzzed-out almost-boogie of “Shark-Shark,” the diversity of POPtical Illusion teases its way out after subsequent listens.

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

It's a testament to both Cee-Lo's vision and the producers' artistic sympathy that the collaborations maintain a coherent, vintage R&B vibe. [Mar 2004, p.91]

He’s not shaking those defining qualities on Light Verse. Instead, that distinctive voice is a foundation for towering songs, an album that grows and blooms with epic crescendos (“Yellow Jacket”), slow-burn earworm hooks (“Anyone’s Game”), and tongue-in-cheek, Shakespearean clown wisdom (“Nobody’s perfect or as dumb as their luck”).

Imagine Joni Mitchell if she'd made Miles after Mingus. [Feb 2005, p.92]

The swollen, baroque-pop arrangements... may ruffle the band's more delicate followers. But the songs are always smart, and it's the music-librarian's humor that helps keep things from slipping into the maudlin. [Nov 2003, p.109]

More prosaic and profane than many of his labelmates. [May 2004, p.108]

As a current-events commentator, Gray's got better beats than The New York Times and funnier lyrics than Fox News.

Though [Meloy] rarely cracks a smile, he finds creativity in defeat. [Apr 2005, p.101]

It's a techno album, straight up. [Aug 2005, p.98]

On Frog Boiling in Water, DIIV have once again shrewdly adapted, pivoting away from the chonky riffs of Deceiver and delivering the most tense, subtle, and cerebral music of their whole career.

Fang's edge is a bit more mosh-by-numbers than Hole's. [Dec 2003, p.129]

The bleaty rhythms and abrasive guitars start to pile up willy-nilly, and some of the more techno sections sound like kids going bazonkers in a toy store. [Oct 2004, p.109]

Both these records chronicle the physical and mental graffiti of figuring out how to emerge from some very large shadows, including his own, with nerve and power. [Jul 2005, p.96]

As dark and sweet as baking chocolate and as ambitious as the Mars rover. [Apr 2004, p.94]

At its best, Big Ideas jostles with brilliant songcraft that signifies her rapid growth as an artist—if the essential aesthetic is little changed, the execution is often warmer, more mature and expansive.

[Vocalist Beth Ditto's] temper-tantrum vocals turn tired indie-rock poses into two-minute biblical epics. [Jun 2003, p.105]

[Eitzel's] best album of closing-time kvetch since 1993's Mercury. [Dec 2004, p.124]

Twisted, quirky pop gems. [Feb 2006, p.86]

He's got an excellent ear, a savvy way with hooks, and an untrained voice that knows its limitations. [Mar 2005, p.88]

Gruff stuff... A few rockers lighten the load, but not by much. [Sep 2004, p.120]

Supercharged, furious, hopeful. [Jun 2004, p.107]

As ornate and bloated as West's ego. [Sep 2005, p.99]

They add enough kinks to the old herky-jerk formulae to make their half-hour in the sun blaze by like nobody's business. [Dec 2004, p.124]

This completely non-shitty '70s-Nashville country record reminds you why Adams was once a big deal. [Nov 2005, p.101]

She doubles the weird factor. [Feb 2004, p.104]

Juicing fragile melodies with weeping George Harrison guitar, frontman Luke Steele is pretty even-keeled for a spaced-out pop maestro. [Nov 2003, p.117]

The ballads are still as pretty as her fan base of shy piano students and unicorns. [May 2005, p.110]

Always charmingly dour and deathlessly romantic. [Jul 2003, p.110]

Crimson... still has its share of macabre wordplay... but the real attraction here is the music, which sounds just as dramatic as the imagery. [Jun 2005, p.105]

[Fox Confessor] shows that for all her versatility, she has a singular vision when it comes to her own music. And Lordy, it is dark. [Mar 2006, p.92]

Albini, drummer Todd Trainer, and bassist Bob Weston lock in together one last time—a wiry whirlwind of concision, all jokes and referents (including a wink to the late Mark E. Smith of the Fall) and honed dynamics on their leanest LP, at 28 minutes.

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

While Vitalic may add little to electronic music or its various subgenres, he interweaves effortlessly their prevailing styles into complex arrangements that are neither kinked-up innovation nor neutered homage.

Goes for basic sun-dappled guitar pop. [Nov 2004, p.118]

They find a woolly warmth and loopy generosity few English art-rockers have stumbled upon since the first Beta Band record. [Dec 2004, p.124]