Though it's more of a mash-up of two solo EPs than an album, we're just lucky these guys still bump into each other. [May 2005, p.105]

Even as they feature orchestras, women's choirs, and Beach House singer Victoria Legrand on Veckatimest, the album is still an intimate, ascetic affair.

Longstreth's prickly surface belies a bright pop center: tart, sweet, and gushing all at once.

Here, on record, buttressed by her own diaphanous back-up vocals, she's fading deliciously into the background even as she's finally stepping into the spotlight.

Not since Grateful Dead's Europe '72 has there been a live double album in which intimacy and expansiveness, guitar mess and piano reflection commingle this sweetly. [Dec 2005, p.107]

An atavistic orgy of recycled riffs and lifelong obsessions. [Sep 2004, p.120]

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

Every note fits. Every key has a keyhole. And King Push proper would be hard-pressed to beat this small wonder of great cameos (the always-undervalued Jill Scott, sampled Biggie), productions (in a first, Timbaland manning the boards on the eerie “Untouchable”), and block quotes (“I’m the L. Ron Hubbard of the cupboard”) here.

Yo La Tengo remain true to their Velvet Underground roots. [Oct 2006, p.105]

This set--six meticulously documented hours recorded before his first proper album--is a progress chart.

Abraham's broken-glass belloiw is often matched with folk-siren backup vocals that disorient more than they soothe. Multi-tracks thicken and slur the guitar riffs, heightening both the tension and complexity. [Nov 2008, p.102]

Goodness is a spiritually rich listen, but none of it would matter much if it weren’t such a goddamn great rock album.

Savage punk rock that shifts and shakes like the bleachers during a homecoming orgy. [Jan 2005, p.98]

Patrick Stickles screams and moans amid the swirling, lo-fi racket, and although he sounds a helluva lot like Conor Oberst, this is no Bright Eyes knockoff. The Airing of Grievances is more inviting, fraternal, and widely referential.

Wonderfully unsentimental, beautifully tuneful.

Finn infuses his windy tales of youthful debauchery with a mixture of detective-fiction luridness and first-club-show romanticism. [Nov 2006, p.100]

As Shepherd’s confidence grows in his compositions, he gives each element of the song enough time to stand on its own, without the bells and whistles of the Ensemble’s (slightly more) enormous orchestra.

It’s as good a model of modern folk music as has come along in some time.

He’s not really in a fun mood, and the music follows. The lushness has diminished, and the work evokes increasing comparisons to ‘70s singer-songwriters like Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, who hid their acidic commentary within sturdy pop structures.

Throughout the album, Newsom's language is more colorful than on Mender; at its best, it works as music even on the page. [Dec 2006, p.95]

Where Basement Jaxx's diversity used to serve a club-DJ flow, here they let it off the leash, with mixed results. [Dec 2003, p.126]

Lambert is still at her bubbliest playing a guntoting, wisecracking, catfighting gal next door who cusses like a sailor, or at least brags that she does, plotting revenge on lying boyfriends and town hypocrites--preferably at cowpunk tempo.

Almost every track on The Impossible Kid is indistinguishable from the next, blending together in a way that converts the man’s talent into his fatal flaw, due in part to the forgettable beats.

Despite the resourcefulness of Kronos’ contributions, though, Anderson is Landfall’s most crucial actor and its saving grace; the humility, naturalism, and humor of her recitations justify the scale of the project.

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 project is very human and certainly the band’s most dynamic effort to date. Never has Paramore left so much space in its productions or allowed Williams to sound so sparse in moments, like her tiny frame might finally shatter. Nor has the band ever played so deftly with sounds of comfort and alarm, like a clock radio slicing through the most blissful dream.

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

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.

It is his most fully realized album, but also the one that most strikingly situates Scott as secondary to his collaborators. ... For all the interesting things that can be found on Astroworld, it is still way too long and can sound so uniform that it loses your attention.

New Bermuda both expands their range and sees them coming further into their own.... Bermuda is ace metal.

One Beat's hooks require a few passes to take hold. [Sep 2002, p.127]

Though Kool Herc is just eight songs and 27 minutes long, it's plenty challenging and weighty.

I Don’t Live Here Anymore is The War on Drugs’ poppiest, most bombastic work yet.

That's the National's insidious brilliance: No other band makes dark and stormy seem like ideal weather.

Welcome to the Dirty North, y'all. [Feb 2005, p.88]

The result is artistic click bait, and its genius and connective power is that it doesn’t treat music fans as factions. This one is for everyone, all at once.

She ascends further into the pantheon of songwriters who consistently deliver despite unimaginable expectations. For all its mayhem, 2020 has unlocked the best work of her career.

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

The album feels epic in scope, imbuing the banality of everyday life with stunning tension and emotional weight in a way few producers can hope to touch.

Before Today still sounds like it was dubbed to cassette and left on the dash of a 1983 Datsun for an entire summer. Every aspect seems faded and warped, but that doesn't obscure Pink's savvy maneuvering.

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.

Dance Fever is a worthy addition to the band’s catalog, with enough moments to be plucked for what will surely be an invigorating series of live shows beginning in September. It’s a sly and polished effort, sustained by Welch’s fearlessness both in vocal technique and lyrical vulnerability. No modern artist commands such power in both moments of ethereal humanity and mountainous throttle.

It's a thoroughly satisfying album, but surprises are in short supply. [May 2002, p.120]

The album feels unprecedented within his catalog because it strikes a balance Thug has never quite pulled off on a single project: mixing a unified, album-wide sound with moments of aggressive experimentation and nagging hooks.

The songs are flat-out rollicking, like what Fugazi might come up with if their tour-van radio got stuck on the classic-rock station. [Feb 2003, p.98]

Aggressive and big-grinned, sophomore album Big Day in a Small Town sounds fantastic; it’s often a superb piece of recorded music, designed to move people and make them feel things.

Like all Baker’s work so far, Little Oblivions is an album that rewards close listening and multiple run-throughs — afternoons lost to foot-tapping despair and, hopefully, some catharsis as the wildly talented songwriter welcomes us back to her saddest show on Earth.

Holmes' Bow Down breaks from the elegant flow-noir of his previous platters by spinning luridly out of control. [12/2000, p.220]

Fantasy Empire equally splits its time between the physical and metaphysical. It belongs as much in a musty basement as it does in an art gallery.

Turn is a haunting, often painfully beautiful example of how songs that may seem dead and buried can sublimely rise from the grave.

What’s important is how Ambarchi uses his transmogrified tones to both stretch and ground his group’s highly intuitive songs, lending grainy texture to transcendental zone-outs and twinkling, ultraviolet color to propulsive toe-tappers.

That pairing of punk force and country grit is nothing new, but Lydia Loveless makes it her own through the strength of a blazing voice, a fully formed persona, and bluntly crafty songwriting.

Parquet Courts' over-the-top energy, speed, and succinctness makes the combination sound fresher than anything the original elements have managed in years.

Decades deep into a monumental career, you wouldn’t expect Redd Kross to hit a power-pop zenith. But they’ve done just that with their self-titled double album—all in their trademark flying colors.

There are interesting moments... but too often they're smothered in a formless buzz of guitar, samples, voilin, harmonica--you name it. [Jul 2006, p.87]

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.

Old Ramon is sinuous and unhurried, a beautiful downer of a folk rock record that has the lithe and shadowy promise of the ocean.

One of the best psych-rock records of our young century. [Sep 2004, p.117]

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

Her fifth album is indeed one of the most alt-friendly jazz cycles you’ve ever heard, pivoting constantly on tight, proggy arrangements that evoke St. Vincent, tUnE-yArDs, and Incubus in their odd-angled crunch more than anything on Blue Note.

Ghostface Killah's ninth album consoles his hardcore constituency: Forty-plus minutes of gritty, soul-sampling beats soundtracking bizarro street tales ("Starkology," "Ghetto"), with lyrical tough-guys Busta Rhymes, Redman, and more than half the Wu Tang Clan tagging along.

What keeps Murphy from being an insufferable know-it-all is how he folds deeper emotions into his references....Older, snottier, his edge remains.

Long on cryptic references (you mean you haven't read Curzio Malaparte's 1944 novel Kaputt?) and Euro-weary mood, the vintage electronic-pop ambience of Destroyer's ninth album recalls the days when MTV emphasized music.

Besides restoring the muscle lacking on the emaciated An Object, the opening trio on Snares presents No Age as everything they’ve been (gritty, propulsive, atmospheric, a motorcycle taking on a sandstorm head-on) and the immediately accessible rawk band they’ve never been.

Monumentally caustic but hypothetically a dance band, Sleigh Bells sculpt infectious double-dutch funk from an unlikely acid bath of distorted drum machines and nasal pigfuck guitars.

What could have been an assless art-groove experiment turns out to be a synth-pop idyll. [Feb 2003, p.99]

After ten years, Rancid's still-rock-solid kinship is evident in their lock-step chemistry. [Oct 2003, p.108]

Beam has given us his second straight masterwork: self-assured, spellbinding, and richly, refreshingly adult. [Apr 2004, p.89]

A collaboration that alternates from alienation and sadness to melodic tenderness, punkish rap bravado, and triumph in 23 minutes. It’s both embarrassing and gripping: never boring and often euphoric. ... It makes for a perfect version of a Kid Cudi album, with Cudi taking center stage under the guiding hand of Kanye’s stellar production.

Poised, cool, and impermeable, Trouble Will Find Me apotheosizes urban romance and its discontents, where conversations are monologues, parties are confessionals, and education and analysis are interchangeable.

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.

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.

It's Dillinger's willingness to constantly incorporate new sounds--even commercial ones-- that makes Ire Works an experimental-rock touchstone. [Dec 2007, p.126]

For an artist never exactly afraid of taking risks, Dust still finds new forms of experimentation, moving beyond dance toward something softer and more reflective. Halo juggles new elements with gorgeous sparseness that gives weight to each sonic addition.

Pinegrove could have ridden a self-assured record like this to widespread indie acclaim. Instead, it feels like an act of generosity, a record lovingly crafted and intimately written, full of sounds, observations, and emotional realizations that you didn’t know you wanted in 2016, but, in fact, needed desperately.

No Shape is Hadreas’ longest album yet, and even moreso than its predecessor, it feels like a complete conceptual project. Taken as a whole, it’s a real thicket, imbued with the innocence and horror of fairy tale.

Ultimately, what makes Excavation such an awesome and absorbing listen is precisely its indifference to the listener.

His deceptively fragile vocal style and skewed lyrical genius were already evident at age 22 in these 13 acoustic songs recorded over two nights at a Michigan Episcopal church.

Even more dense and brutal than Burma's early records. [Jun 2004, p.103]

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.

Fiction is less nervous than its predecessors but emotionally knottier. [May 2005, p.103]

AC are all about the sometimes blissful, often uncanny intermingling of song and space. [Nov 2005, p.98]

Yeezus ranks as more than a glorified placeholder in West's catalogue, but one can't help feeling that parenthood will compel his muse to even more Olympian levels of bombast and grandiosity.

It’s not quite as satisfying as Kaleidoscope Dream, but it expands that album’s palette, pushing Miguel into further depths without submerging him in the squalor.

By balancing on the tightrope between meme and icon, between relatable and aspirational, Ephorize emerges sounding remarkably human.

The tug-of-war between bristly unavailability and candid confession mirrors a musical duet between post-punk snarls and genial pop charms. There's no resolution, but the struggle is endlessly compelling.

Even at their most fervent, the characters of Hope Downs remain soaked in sun, able to convince themselves that one great night could be enough to set them straight again. At about 35 minutes, Hope Downs is a brief vacation, and so are many of its songs.

There is no more transportive band working in music. [Oct 2005, p.140]

Over ten songs detailing a young man's despair and self-doubt, he delivers a performance that's both deeply confident and convincingly vulnerable, replete with stark, piano-based meditations and fuzz-pedal-abetted fury.

Agalloch have never sounded so rich, so full.

Her voice is a bear hug in the literal sense; succumbing to it is like being carjacked by Patsy Cline.

When she depletes her stock of declarative phrases, Olsen has little to say about these mercurial emotional swings except that she's feeling them. Or unprepared to commit to them. Still, the good songs on Burn Your Fire for No Witness suggest Olsen is figuring out how to sound--how to resound, actually.

Invasion of Privacy is a cohesive piece of work that demands to be heard in full, from front to back, side to side, on the pole and on the stove.

The 10 tracks on Love Is Not Enough are more than just a physical workout: they’re cardio for the brain.

For the most part, they don’t disappoint.

His voice emerges from the din only occasionally, embodying the sound of ANIMA itself: half-man, half-machine, totally immersed in the beat.

Sparkle Hard is the kind of quirky and realized record made by an artist with nothing to prove.

The best-sounding Decemberists record to date. [Nov 2006, p.103]