He's one of the four or five best MCs breathing. [Aug 2004, p.103]

A richly rewarding passage through the last five decades of American music history. [Aug 2005, p.99]

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

Like running full-tilt through a fun house with smoke machines, tinsel-covered ceilings and a super-size disco ball. [Aug 2004, p.108]

A strangely enervated Sonic Youth record, one that exchanges Murray Street's golden-years vigor for a sad sense of duty. [Jul 2004, p.108]

Her songs are feeling like Jason Mraz's leftovers. [Jul 2004, p.110]

Good records from the Descendents and Bad Religion in one year? Joe Strummer's ghost must be keeping close watch. [Jul 2004, p.110]

Lets you better appreciate his knack for weaving glorious pop songs out of change-ups and mixed signals. [Jul 2004, p.109]

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]

This is a troubling record. There are some stellar moments, but it's mostly just troubling. [Jul 2004, p.105]

If you're going to crossbreed Built To Spill and the Flaming Lips, then you might as well have fun doing it. [Jul 2004, p.110]

Unfortunately, the elements that clicked so well on "Giuliani" prove an awkward fit on !!!'s sophomore full-length. [Jul 2004, p.111]

She tries to be jokey, warm, even friendly on occasion--but she also sounds awkward. [Jul 2004, p.105]

Even more '80s than its predecessor. [Jul 2004, p.105]

The monster-chomp guitars and semiauto percussion are still in effect, but somebody spilled a little Pantene in the Pantera. [Jul 2004, p.108]

Sonically, Morissette has hit a peak. [Jun 2004, p.109]

Cryptic and cutting. [Aug 2004, p.108]

A Kleenex-grabbing, chain-smoking, staring-out-the-window, in-bed-for-days breakup record. [Jun 2004, p.106]

Tical 0... takes that voice and plugs it into more than a dozen tried-and-true rap templates. [Jun 2004, p.104]

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

The live guitars and drums--and vocals more emo than robo--give off an irresistible warmth. [Aug 2004, p.108]

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]

Merritt's wordplay has never been slicker. [Jun 2004, p.105]

The Jane's Addiction album Jane's Addiction should have made last year. [Jun 2004, p.108]

Evokes Bjork as a Latina wallflower, sketching gossamer balladry with acoustic guitar and oddball synths. [Jun 2004, p.108]

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

Beautifully arranged and produced yet feels like something on display behind milky glass. [Jul 2004, p.112]

At 57, Smith can still find the ecstatic in the everyday, and she's no longer adrift in the mandolin wind. [May 2004, p.109]

But if the rote button-pushing gets bleak, the beats and battle rhymes are state-of-the-art. [Jun 2004, p.103]

The toughest record ever made by a former mainstream country artist.... If all the songs don't rival her finest work, the arrangements pull them up. [May 2004, p.105]

Without French accents or anime babes, this kind of thing just feels incomplete. [Jul 2004, p.110]

Inches compiles them all, from the high-voltage shriekathon "Blackouts on Thursday" to "Hold on to Your Genre," where a churning bass line meets shimmery guitar worthy of a new-wave Edge. [Jun 2004, p.108]

A bruisingly great collection of demented 1988-style boom-bap. [May 2004, p.107]

Mellow rhymes and chunky beats. [Aug 2004, p.108]

This stuff may be lo-fi, but in Anderson's case, the hissy fits. [Jul 2004, p.112]

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]

Evidence and Iriscience remain so humorlessly hard they could guard Buckingham Palace. [May 2004, p.108]

Half expansive, burnished radio-rock, half swampy Delta hoodoo-hollerin' that reeks of Brock's Southern sojourn. [May 2004, p.103]

All texture and no text. [May 2004, p.108]

[Has a] swirling spy-movie ambience. [Jun 2004, p.108]

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

In their eagerness to show off the range of their toolbox, they stumble. [May 2004, p.101]

Morbid.... The beats are never as heavy as the subject matter. [May 2004, p.108]

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

Suggests a gullier Cocteau Twins. [May 2004, p.108]

Like Elliott Smith after ten years of Sunday school. [May 2004, p.108]

The added dissonant improvisation replaces the Blade Runner futurism of his hip-hop beats with a chilling Taxi Driver dread. [Apr 2004, p.94]

The only friction here is between Lord's kewpie chirp and Nick Saloman's guardedly bitter lyrics. [Apr 2004, p.94]

A perfect album, except perfect is the wrong word for a band so dedicated to kitchen-sink oddness. [Mar 2004, p.96]

80 minutes of dank, chopped-up percussion and blitzed hard-drive scree. [Apr 2004, p.94]

A Death Cab For Cutie album you can listen to while ironing your cape. [Apr 2004, p.94]

The Von Bondies' calling card is the urgency of [Jason] Stollsteimer's voice as it sands down the shop-worn chord progressions. [Mar 2004, p.92]

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

Lerche gets his Burt Bacharach on, flavoring coffee-shop ballads with minor-key chicory. [Apr 2004, p.94]

[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]

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]

Ultimately, Guilt Show feels about as transitional as its predecessor; Pryor has stripped the cuteness from his songwriting but hasn't figured out how to make his dispatches from adulthood resonate the way his teenland stuff used to. [Apr 2004, p.91]

An over-the-top homage to sex whose emotional age equals its bloated number of tracks: 15. [Mar 2004, p.93]

Unlistenable. [Mar 2004, p.96]

Jammed with cheesy effects, weak orchestration, and paper-thin vocals, this is a mix that nobody would dream of Californicating to. [Apr 2004, p.94]

Over the course of 24 tracks, we get taut grooves set on Al Green cruise control, lots of havin'-fun-in-the-studio byplay, and the occasional spritz of rude fuzz-box gutiar to give all the gold-leaf detailing some shape. [combined review of both discs; Mar 2004, p.97]

Over the course of 24 tracks, we get taut grooves set on Al Green cruise control, lots of havin'-fun-in-the-studio byplay, and the occasional spritz of rude fuzz-box gutiar to give all the gold-leaf detailing some shape. [combined review of both discs; Mar 2004, p.97]

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

The record could use more songs like "David," where her bratty valedictorian wit is balanced with a sense of real emotional stakes. [Apr 2004, p.93]

Grohl wrote the riffs, and he hammers like a god, letting his hero singers write the lyrics and man the bellows. [Mar 2004, p.91]

A jaw-dropping act of artistic will and a fiery, proper follow-up to 1994's Live Through This. [Mar 2004, p.89]

Suddenly, these longtime collaborators seem like a mismatch worthy of Blind Date. [Mar 2004, p.95]

Like a Postal Service for hippies living off the grid. [May 2004, p.108]

While the novelty factor alone makes it worth the download time, it works as a cohesive album long after the initial shock wears off. [Apr 2004, p.91]

These tracks lack the energy to power a glow stick. [Mar 2004, p.96]

Talkie Walkie 's detachment is still, well, pretty -- virgins might commit suicide to it, but most likely they'll just swoon.

Finds these thoughtful Brits exploring even more emotional territory. [Mar 2004, p.96]

The 'Sailor can often sound a little too elfin even by the standards of the early '70s orchestral folk rock they love. [Jan 2004, p.100]

Without much dissonance or funk in the mix, this falls just short of butter. [Mar 2004, p.96]

They channel experimental noise, acid-drenched riffs, and live-show spontaneity into a record of brilliantly crafted nuggets of lysergic rock that is easily their most consistent effort to date.

All over the map. [Feb 2004, p.104]

The tunes are sub-Weez, but the vibe is right. [Mar 2004, p.96]

Rutili still crafts a tuneful funeral dirge with the best of them. [Feb 2004, p.104]

An album sanded with sad humor and a return to old loves. [Mar 2004, p.96]

The flow is straight-up alien: chilled-out and frantic at the same time, slightly breathless. [Feb 2004, p.95]

[Their] big beats lack the sure-shot hooks of their 1997 debut. [Feb 2004, p.104]

Ambitious, uneven. [Feb 2004, p.96]

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

They're still pretty fly for old guys. [Jan 2004, p.97]

Sure to rule clubs and fashion runways from Milan to Monterrey. [Jan 2004, p.100]

Playfully sleazy, creatively reckless, and ridiculously, abstrusely, hyper-generously funky. [Jan 2004, p.95]

These hammerheads still sound like the touring company of Grunge-a-Mania. [Jan 2004, p.100]

While the vocals and arrangements are more ambitious and arguably better, there's less free play, less of the goofiness and kewpie-dancehall scatting that defined her. [Jan 2004, p.98]

If only this Baltimore art-rap exhibitionist were as consistently funny as his album titles. [Jan 2004, p.100]

A dark, emotionally intense record, best experienced on headphones. [Jan 2004, p.97]

A hectic sonic pileup. [Dec 2003, p.130]

Closer in spirit to Rancid's bighearted radio punk than to anything Pink has put her name on before--all scrappy power chords and wounded warmth. [Jan 2004, p.97]

Everything is underwritten or overwrought. [Feb 2004, p.104]

Everywhere the guitars are cranked, the sneakers set on stun. [Dec 2003, p.124]

Flails along the same path as 2001's casually brutal return to formlessness, Beat Em Up. [Dec 2003, p.123]

High grade West Coast guitar pop. [Dec 2003, p.131]

Payable on Death's heaviest tracks... easily outcrunch the competition. [Dec 2003, p.124]

Room's similarity to its predecessor ultimately bespeaks a purity of vision, not a dearth of new ideas. [Dec 2003, p.121]