Tanglewood roars back to life with a massive band, a detailed sound, and a voice that sounds ravaged but right. [Oct 2005, p.142]

Doom's playing it safe. [Oct 2005, p.133]

This time they come dangerously close to conventional rock. [Nov 2005, p.101]

Here, he just wrecks shit... occasionally stopping for moments of necessary reflection. [Sep 2005, p.109]

Though these faux-naif hipsters genuinely worship the wizard of Ozzfest, they don't have the chops to do much about it. [Nov 2005, p.101]

Elizondo's zippy production effectively pushes Apple's tendency to plod. [Nov 2005, p.96]

A multifaceted, densely layered sound. [Oct 2005, p.138]

Sounds exactly like what you'd expect. [Oct 2005, p.132]

In spite of all their stony sonic exploration, they never let Z turn into Zzzz. [Oct 2005, p.133]

This album is closer to 1998's whitechocolatespaceegg: mature and complicated. [Oct 2005, p.136]

If there's a method to this madness, you definitely won't find it here. [Nov 2005, p.101]

At times, it seems like mid-level fame yields too many tour-based gripes for Slug. [Nov 2005, p.103]

Plays like a poppy salvo against [Broken Social Scene's] cerebral forays. [Oct 2005, p.138]

Each track follows the Rage Against The Machine model: Make music for the masses without diluting it for the bosses. [Nov 2005, p.101]

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

Unsurprisingly buoyant. [Oct 2005, p.137]

Grandaddy's Moogy, moody music still sounds like ELO as HAL-9000. [Oct 2005, p.137]

[A] pensive disc. [Oct 2005, p.137]

What passed for refreshing last year is merely rote here. [Dec 2005, p.105]

Listening to this disc sorta gives new meaning to the phrase virgin sacrifice. [Oct 2005, p.142]

Banhart brings the peace and love, but not the understanding. [Sep 2005, p.104]

They blaze with scene-satiric brilliance. [Sep 2005, p.109]

They make each shimmer of postnatal whimsy seem like an eternal gulag of the spotless mind. [Sep 2005, p.109]

Odditorium... is a chance to repair their cred, and insofar as they have any, they do all right. [Sep 2005, p.102]

A little swing moves these songs along in otherwise unobscured directions. [Nov 2005, p.101]

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

People from New York trying to sound like people from England trying to imagine what Neil Young would sound like if he were in Coldplay. [Oct 2005, p.137]

Their fatalist slow jams get more rickety as the minutes pass, but they're prettiest when they break down. [Sep 2005, p.109]

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

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

Howl is not exactly the group's Nebraska--BRMC dabble in too much "White Album" Beatlemania for that--but it's a general extension of that record. [Sep 2005, p.101]

There's a nifty kind of egolessness about the NPs: They're team players in a way that few other bands are right now. [Aug 2005, p.93]

[He] veers awkwardly into slickly arranged, radio-friendly verse-chorus-verse. [Sep 2005, p.109]

Vanderslice is tortured and diffuse even by Death Cab standards. [Sep 2005, p.109]

Their swirl of guitars and organ is even more densely alluring, but the arrangements let in some welcome light. [Oct 2005, p.137]

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

Repulsion is like The Wild Bunch seen from the outskirts of Edinburgh, a European reflection of the stylized American West. [Aug 2005, p.99]

Amid the so-so modern rock is one of his most sublimely sincere songs, "(Shine Your) Light Love Hope." [Aug 2005, p.103]

Alternately goofy, sweet, and weird. [Aug 2005, p.97]

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

Behind all the ridonkulous disses and boasts, Missy sounds a bit unsure of herself. [Jul 2005, p.97]

Sounds as informed by middle-American community theater, church choirs, and John Adams' American operas as any canonical "folk rock" it may resemble. [Jul 2005, p.102]

Sound[s] like Prince cutting the ass out of Squarepusher's pants. [Aug 2005, p.103]

Songs like the predictably ribald "Porno Bitches" are little more than by-the-numbers, behind-the-music tracks. [Jul 2005, p.104]

A lovely, eerie album that plays like a digital memory of a lo-fi lullaby. [Aug 2005, p.103]

A deliriously twerked, end-of-days house party. [Jul 2005, p.104]

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

Drift[s] off into heavily EQ'ed cymbals and pastel-gray synth-string washes. [Jun 2005, p.108]

While Transplants' self-titled debut caught the trio at that moment when the third-beer buzz kicks in... the new record seems to have picked up several pints and bong hits later, when shit starts to get grisly. [Aug 2005, p.96]

[A] cosmos-goosing masterwork. [Jul 2005, p.104]

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]

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

By ratcheting up their guitars and still singing about everyday themes, Coldplay are recasting their nerdy-student Britpop as Important Rock Music without sacrificing the homespun vibe that allowed Martin's fans to believe that he wrote a song for each one of them and called it "Yellow." [Jun 2005, p.99]

The Peas give fun a bad name. [Jul 2005, p.104]

Like an art film that ignores narrative, there are moments on Get Behind Me Satan when the motion seems stationary. [Jun 2005, p.101]

If this reunion... isn't a revelation, it still has its thrills. [Aug 2005, p.103]

Leanness and vitality have replaced the cokey bloat of their last few studio trips. [Jun 2005, p.103]

Sometimes Kieran Hebden's electronic music is dawn-over-the-Buddhist-shrine gorgeous. [Jun 2005, p.108]

Danger Mouse sets a consistent tone that wryly chafes against Albarn's paranoia. [Jun 2005, p.105]

Deep cuts like "Man or Animal" are as hot as anything this side of Led Zeppelin II. [Jul 2005, p.95]

For good and ill, this jumble couldn't come from anyone but Malkmus. [Jun 2005, p.104]

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]

Even when the music flags, Common's remarkably hungry raps push it along. [Jun 2005, p.102]

Rev's overbaked symphonics and space-case triumphalism have become completely indistinguishable from the Flaming Lips. [Jun 2005, p.108]

Tankian remains the sort of agitprop trickster whom partisans on both side so fthe aisle are wise to distrust. [Jul 2005, p.101]

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

There's an air of formal exercise here.... But if you can ride with the cliches, you won't fault the execution. [Jul 2005, p.102]

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]

Uneven, overly reverential. [May 2005, p.110]

What it sounds like to be sucked into doomed romanticism rather than aspire to it. [Jun 2005, p.108]

Amid the hasty scribbles and marooned, half-finished concepts, there are lots of seeds and stems. [Jul 2005, p.101]

Wedged into Tigers' delicate array of Byrdsian pop, "Jerk It Out" will either feel like the album's solitary moment of ecstasy (couch potatoes, we're talking about you!) or an annoying distraction in the midst of a solidly assembled set.

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]

His third album mostly shelves the wit and sui generis style-clash. [Jun 2005, p.108]

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

Spastically twee, painfully saccharine. [Jun 2005, p.108]

Finds these mysterious lads already advancing into their suave Roxy Music phase. [May 2005, p.102]

Infusing their music with real personality and humor, sexiness and humility, they've neatly transcended the air-quote graveyard. [Apr 2005, p.105]

Basically the same thing--improved. [May 2005, p.101]

It's his most varied record, but it also sounds for the first time like he's tryinig to make a "Beck album." [Apr 2005, p.97]

Will likely be the best political album this year. [Mar 2005, p.88]

He's great with the hook-meoldy algebra, not so hot on figuring out what to say beyond "Love, blah, blah, blah, la, la, la." [Apr 2005, p.108]

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

They're better at evoking turbulence than talking about it--efforts to cop '80s-pop vocals are overshadowed by the cascade and rumble of the instrumental long-players. [Apr 2005, p.102]

Herren has the good collaborative instincts of Handsome Boy Modeling School, but none of their seedy, crowd-pleasing shtick. [Apr 2005, p.108]

An eclectic, rippin' record whose only shortcoming is its commitment to artistic quality. [Apr 2005, p.99]

Packed with sparse, whirring, and danceable noise-rock refinements. [Apr 2005, p.108]

His mildewy folk rock is dourly impenetrable. [Apr 2005, p.108]

To divide Hella's mind is to hack their talent in half. [May 2005, p.105]

Where 2001's Discovery coyly gene-spliced cock rock and New York garage, Human merely cuts and pastes. [Apr 2005, p.105]

Frontman Ricky Wilson is an average singer but an extraordinary melodist. [May 2005, p.102]

Offers modest formal thrills without much depth beneath its glimmering surfaces. [Apr 2005, p.107]

MacKaye and Farina share a wobbly spirit that wears well. [May 2005, p.110]

Romantic defeatism can be charming if you infuse it with enough daydreaming, art-school blues. [Mar 2005, p.92]

Delicate Casio-toned anthems. [Mar 2005, p.91]

This time around he's tryin' too hard to be everything to everybody. [Apr 2005, p.97]

Like Coldplay killing time with the Happy Mondays at Manchester's Hacienda club. [Mar 2005, p.92]

Frances explores an explosive groove Comatorium only implied. [Mar 2005, p.83]