All that pep blots out the undercurrent of longing that made their best '80s songs complicated and bittersweet. [June 2001, p.155]

For all their sonic salad-tossing, Tortoise can't fade guitarist Jeff Parker, the band's secret weapon and the one dude whose instrument connects them explicitly to their college-radio roots. [May 2004, p.107]

[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]

A sweetly embittered geopolitical epic. [Dec 2004, p.124]

Diplo and Co. threw everything at the wall and turned around, pretending it stuck when all that’s really left is the splatter from undercooked leftovers.

John Agnello's knob-twiddling is spot-on. [Mar 2007, p.98]

Living Thing won't double as anyone's dance-party playlist. But it's an uneasy, bracingly honest soundtrack to life after fame.

A mature but still totally floor-ready return.

Sonic strategist Eno is clearly in "oblique" mode here.

Elson leans toward both bluegrass and chamber pop--the fiddle-laced "Cruel Summer" is worlds away from the twee, jewelry-box twinkle of "100 Years From Now." Her twangy, echoing soprano recalls Jenny Lewis and Loretta Lynn, aided craftily by husband/producer Jack White.

Even Klaxons' most ominously rambunctious tracks grind out plenty of bug-eyed dream-pop chants.

The moody effects and oblique lyrical affectations quickly wear thin. [May 2007, p.88]

Unbound by a verse-chorus-verse format, the songs meander unpredictably, like a milder Of Montreal, with polymorphous sex replaced by God and health problems.

This is Jonas’ complication: talking his way into, and then through, sexual minefields. The theme suits his peculiar pipes--the jutted-jaw pout, the texture he scratches into his more insistent notes--which, in turn, take the burden from the compositions.

Isolating his experimental tendencies to specific tracks leads to some uneven pacing on the album's second half. Otherwise, Green Language fully delivers, serving as a fascinating turn for an artist who earned his reputation by essentially bashing fans into submission with bass.

A tastefully matured Bauhaus produce enough fractured guitar and howling melodrama to wake the undead.

Dark, electroshocked eighth album from Brit rock's premier party people. [Jan 2003, p.99]

Hyacinths and Thistles is not even a 6th as good as Wasps' Nests.... these vocalists have two things in common: a cold demeanor and a predilection for high drama.

Compared to the band's clever early hits, the songwriting too often lapses into clunkiness.

The record's nuances are divulged in layers and folds, through a latticework of instrumentation and, shockingly, some uncommonly good songwriting by band members other than Stuart Murdoch.

Gossip lack the kind of anthems that demand a live document. [May 2008, p.100]

While 2005's Fear of a Black Tangent was a hilarious, merciless evisceration of rap hypocrisy from the bottom up, he's now trying to address the wider world. [Feb 2007, p.82]

After the proggy overindulgence of their previous two albums, these Texans gracefully balance the dynamic alt rock of 2002's Source Tags & Codes with their more recent multimovement epics.

The best parts of this boy-girl duo's second album sound like some obscure '50s act, the kind that ought to list "reverb" as a band member.

The band's aims are more modest now: have fun, get people to sing along, share a common feeling or two. Hurley achieves those goals with something approaching dignity.

The Fragile Army trades the cluttered arrangements... of their first two albums for tightly focused orchestral pop with big Technicolor hooks. [Jul 2007, p.102]

Ravishing yet famished for attention, this overachiever would be bloody irritating if she didn't demonstrate a savvy command of pop hooks.

EVOL, along with the Purple Reign mixtape, doesn’t provide that instant hit that Future’s world-class 2015 was so full of. Instead it crawls into your brain and makes itself at home; you’ll find yourself going back to it over and over without even realizing.

The follow-up proves Tunstall is no fluke.... but it also maks clear that Tunstall's glaring faults--dull lyrics filled with pedestrian phrases--aren't fleeting, either. [Oct 2007, p.112]

Ultimately, even in the record's clunkier moments, it's gratifying to hear Madonna leaning defiantly (and gleefully) into what many would consider to be the less savory elements of her personality.

Stuff this simple can turn into art that's fantastic or a fantastic disaster. Coachwhips walk the line masterfully. [Feb 2005, p.91]

The best bits are when the band’s own drummer Dale Crover picks up the bass for a third of the album’s 12 tracks.

This is Ross at his least cohesive and most clueless since his 2006 debut, Port of Miami.

10,000 Hz Legend offers heavier arrangements, starker contrasts between soft folky orchestrations and hard prog-rock noise, more guest stars, fewer pretty tunes, and several gigabytes of robo-speak. [Jul 2001, p.126]

A snappier comeback than 1998's Foundation. [Sep 2004, p.120]

Whiteman recombines mambo, Americana, and mesmerizing BSS-style rock with infectiously rambling results. [Mar 2007, p.88]

Add some beatboxing courtesy of Tom Waits (!), and you have an occasionally forced, yet boldly magnetic change of pace. [May 2008, p.94]

It wants to achieve what other singles artists (Demi Lovato, Justin Bieber) do with hits-and-filler records that boast enough of the former to justify the existence of the latter. Instead, Miike Snow’s got the filler but only half-failed attempts at hits.

While the similarly mystical/mewling Joanna Newsom seems adrift in fantasy, Tiny Vipers finds wonder in being rooted firmly to the terra.

Playing like 12 unmastered seven-inches varying wildly in style and volume levels, Nothing Fits vacillates between feral Wire putter, psych-addled Wipers soar, and bleary No Age blur.

Rather than give us a full album of "The Strokes Misremember the '80s," the band falls back repeatedly on self-imitation.

Showcases vocals more boldly than Melody A.M. [Aug 2005, p.98]

The self-deprecation still rings hollow, but the hooks never do. [Jul 2003, p.110]

Almost every musical style imaginable is crushed into this three-and-a-half minute, something-for-everyone product... But No Doubt's newfound introspection is a tad hard to swallow-

At just under a half-hour (a runtime probably inspired by the days when vinyl records could only contain about 40 minutes of music), Lysandre is a frustrating listen.

Judging from the spirited but wildly inconsistent material on this trilogy's first two entries, a little quality control would've helped, perhaps funneling the best of the three albums into one solid offering.

Featuring 10 tracks of gooey, dislocated goodness, its gravity-free atmospherics are just right for soundtracking summer moon treks, intergalactic windsurfing, and asteroid volleyball. Down to earth it is not: These deep but compact space jams can't get much higher.

The efficiency of his drollness has grown uncanny, in fact, and the creepiness of its perfection is part of the fun.

Green Day’s 13th studio album set sees them step outside of their comfort zone, experimenting with a range of new sounds and styles. However, this leads to mixed results.

The record is so one-note it makes its predecessor sound like an entire season at the London Philharmonic.

Innocence Reaches is lighter than last year’s appropriately titled Aureate Gloom, but it’s less fun than it thinks it is, and in pursuing a more “current,” electronic-inspired sound, it’s lost the psychedelic charms of a better post-peak Of Montreal album like, say, 2013’s lousy with sylvianbriar.

Despite a slew of tasty melodies... [it] feels a bit choked and cautious. [Oct 2006, p.102]

What gets stultifying over the course of 38 minutes can be invigorating in small, pep-talk size bursts.

Imperfect Harmonies plays as if Frank Zappa had lived to experience the glories of the Crystal Method, Ozzfest, George W. Bush, and Final Fantasy X.

Modeselektor sprinkle the Flying Lotus–style funk sparingly, melting their Teutonic cool just enough to reveal a previously missing musical link: soulfulness.

It's a winning rethink, salvaging the best bits of a musical style that's too easily missed. [Apr 2008, p.100]

Masters of the Burial lacks the character to be more than the sum of its lovely parts: fiddles, regret, and a pretty voice.

Unlike Beck during his purple-paisley "Midnite Vultures" phase, Damian Kulash employs a soul-freak falsetto that's sincerely accurate, and with the help of Lips producer David Fridmann, he and his power-pop pals master the Okie pranksters' baroque whirls.

The most booty-shaking, speaker-twinkling, glitz-intensive pop-soul record to come down the turnpike in years, out-dazzling even kindred efforts by Timberlake, Bruno Mars, and Miguel.

There are more tracks to like than not, even stretching all the way to the end of the record. If you want Starboy to be a good album, it can be that. It may require some personal editing. It also may require that you ignore what even the most sterilized tracks seem to be about.

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.

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.

Well, pray the restaurant and lounge crowd is ready for a scruffy fellow traveler who can sing about "Cocaine and bourbon / Pinball and pool" without prompting any check requests.

The DJ's fleet-fingered precision and explosive, intimidating drum-machine attacks are a distinct form of performance art, and one that's hard to fully appreciate through headphones alone; Remixes is simply no substitute for his live act. But these tracks are still a crucial part of his identity.

This Oakland quartet teams with Yo Ma Tengo producer Roger Moutenot to create a make-or-break manifesto that often trumps indie rock's big-leaguers. [Oct 2007, p.110]

On Pebble to a Pearl--an authoritative, refreshingly organic pop-funk manifesto featuring musicians who've played with Al Green and Stevie Wonder--the exhilaration of liberation literally screams from R&B workout 'Can't Please Everybody.'

Evil Urges is easily MMJ's most accomplished and ambitious record, masterfully sifting through genres.

There's a lot of Conor the Character Actor in these folk-rock set pieces. [Nov 2006, p.96]

Man From Another Time cuts a steady rolling groove that wears well, from the opening salvo of "Diddley Bo" (which turns the Bo Diddley backbeat sideways) to the closing cover of "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry."

His beat-poet spiel is more character-actorly than ever, but hyphenated-man is also more accessible than you'd think, thanks to Watt's skittery bass lines.

The band’s first studio album in eight years takes the Farfisa-surf luminescence of 2003’s must-own, career-spanning Anthology deeper into psychedelia, for good and ill.

Chopped gives a thrilling, real-time glimpse into one of indie's true adventurers creating her legacy on the fly.

Omaha-based multi-instrumentalist Joe Knapp spent three years making Someone Else's Déjà Vu, and the album is another reminder that lush studio-reliant soft and prog rock of the late '70s can still offer legitimate inspiration.

A mod-rock mix that's somewhere--no, everywhere--between Matchbox Twenty and 'So.' [Apr 2001, p.154]

Music this insistently okay should suffice as sonic Paxil, but there are less complicated ways to treat your depression. [Apr 2008, p.102]

It’s a consistent, methodical unsteadiness that hangs a song on a single blurred synth tone, a suspension bridge between two guitars acres apart in the mix, and then shoots it with bolts of electricity.

Between these boy-noise roils you can see how much the band want to be their generation's Yes. [Feb 2005, p.87]

Adeptly recorded both through the board and from the audience, Remember is a microcosm of the band's career--an ambitious mess.

In terms of maturity and effort, each of these six reverb-soaked romps is as much of a leap forward from last year's King of the Beach as that record was from Nathan Williams' homemade 2009 debut.

[Hannon] deserves to be recognized as the unsung genius of symphonic pop. [Nov 2006, p.97]

FUTURE is lively and engaging, with production and rapping that feels consciously animated.

Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons continue to smear psychedelic synth cheese and stereophonic airplane noises over chewy grooves that veer closer and closer to straight disco.

It's immersive and transgressive, if you care about this stuff.

They seem less confident introducing more distinctive elements into the flow on their debut, which features six original songs and five remixes.

Like the good postmodern thrashers they are, Gojira blend blast beats ('Adoration for None'), sludge stomp ('Yama's Messengers'), and death-and-doom riff spirals (take your pick) with unexpected quirks, like the solid minute of stick taps that open 'The Art of Dying' and the math rock of 'Toxic Garbage Island.'

A fond, funky farewell.

It’s understandable that Joanne finds Gaga performing authenticity, if only because it’s the strongest way to convey artistic evolution to the masses in 2016. The image here--the illusion, really--is as imperfect as it is meticulously rendered.

Van Weezer continues that trajectory with its hard-rock/metal ethos, but it seldom feels like anything beyond a novelty.

Cool people probably think this sort of utilitarian grab bag dumbs down Beck-like eclecticism. But maybe it didn't take such a genius to come up with it in the first place. [Jan 2001, p.109]

Sadly, Mayer's idea of a good time involves hiring jazz musicians to make himself sound like '80s James Taylor. [Dec 2003, p.128]

Like your favorite dive bar, it feels uncomfortably familiar. [Feb 2006, p.87]

Some halfhearted rhymes linger, but contagiously energetic political jams such as 'Cold War' make it easy to forget that it's been three years since anyone heard of Le Tigre. [Sep 2007, p.136]

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.

Black Dice are the perpetually esoteric older Crumb brother Charles: inscrutable, agoraphobic, undeniably brilliant but just as undeniably demented. All descriptions apply to their fifth album, with each track bursting at the seams with warped sounds.

Eagerly filling the recent vacuum of great U.K. guitar bands, this London foursome draws on the Jesus & Mary Chain tradition of sweet early '60s pop'n'roll married to sour punk noise.

There are no real highlights among these soggy minimalist jams. [Apr 2007, p.87]

Unlike much of the current post-Animal Collective psychedelia, there's a palpable, full-bodied force and galloping beat behind the bliss.

The Watson Twins' songwriting isn't quite as memorable as their singing; too many of the tunes fade into open-mic background fare.