Idlewild are compelling when they put Woomble's sad-sack lyrics front and center, but on aggressively average rockers like "You Held The World In Your Arms" and "Century After Century," the band's turgid squall swamps his words. [Jun 2003, p.103]

Pig Lib is both the loopiest music Malkmus has ever made and the most direct. [Apr 2003, p.104]

The best record they've made. [Apr 2003, p.107]

They sound like they're too busy tearing their limbs off and hitting one another over the head with them to think about what the songs actually mean. [Apr 2003, p.102]

This is music to play in dark, velvety, womblike bars; this is music to play while buying cigarettes; this is music for well-dressed poor people. [May 2003, p.109]

It's Dynamite's choice of subject matter that distinguishes her from other R&B divas-in-waiting. [May 2003, p.110]

Conjure[s] the glum glamour of prime Coldplay. [Apr 2003, p.107]

This quasi-funky, horn-section-assisted record demonstrates that as a jazz vocalist, Ani's a fine folk singer. [Apr 2003, p.107]

Harper's a master of no genre. [May 2003, p.111]

Musically, Everclear sound almost exactly the same as when they signed with Capitol in 1995: punk, profoundly polished. But the details Alexakis sprinkles into the mix keep things interesting. [Apr 2003, p.102]

Tonally challenged singing, spastic electro beats, and boldly nonlinear, ideologically sharp rhyming. [May 2003, p.116]

As big and slick a rock record as you're likely to hear all year. [Apr 2003, p.101]

As up-to-the-minute as the album sounds, Kim herself remains stuck in the past, eulogizing B.I.G. or strapping on the horny scorn she birthed so long ago. [May 2003, p.110]

Rich in minor-key melancholia, twangy reverb, and retro keyboards. [Apr 2003, p.108]

The Majesticons highlight commercial hip-hop's yawning credibility gap by amping up the bourgeois posturing to the point of absurdity. [Jun 2003, p.105]

The rare hip-hop debut that does justice to its buzz. [Apr 2003, p.104]

Stunning pop for pale after-party people. [March 2003, p.119]

What's most British about the Music is their tendency to try way too hard. [Apr 2003, p.108]

Only a snob could hate these 11 songs, which wear their bright, adrenalized grooves, lucid melodies, and arena-ready choruses the way the Hi-Fi boys wear their vintage Poison T-shirts: proudly and without a shred of irony. [Mar 2003, p.119]

Bright Yellow is the soundtrack for a small town, like New york, where everybody knows too much about everybody else. [May 2003, p.112]

The guest cast's presence never infringes on the album's overcast beauty. [March 2003, p.120]

100th Window is a masterpiece of haunted sonics. But the spirit of community that once warmed this band's angsty soul is missing. [March 2003, p.117]

Unfortunately, Coombes seems to have the glam era's fuzzy-brained approach to pop songwriting nailed a bit too well. [Apr 2003, p.106]

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]

O'Rourke mostly contributes electro-folk noodling for a laptop-friendly coffeehouse, but Tweedy's tunes are glum gold. [Jan 2003, p.98]

[Corgan's] the closest thing our generation has to John Fogerty--a control freak who actually knows what the fuck he's doing. [March 2003, p.118]

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

Rougher than Belle and Sebastian and lovelier than Mogwai, the Delgados craft orchestral maneuvers in the dark that leave bruises. [Feb 2003, p.98]

Nas' heart is in the right place but his mind is somewhere else entirely. [March 2003, p.119]

The storytelling here isn't as sharp as on Common's previous albums. [Feb 2003, p.100]

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

Snoop unleashed. [Feb 2003, p.100]

The Roots have never sounded this raw on record, this much like an actual band playing in an actual room. [Jan 2003, p.95]

System's repeated willingness to make so much noise in the service of getting nowhere reveals an enduring idealism. [Feb 2003, p.96]

While most of the music on Whip It On is somewhere in the vicinity of cool, the vocals sound like two people trying out for a Jesus and Mary Chain tribute band. [Jan 2003, p.101]

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

Expends a lot of energy hating the haters and growling at the gold diggers. [Jan 2003, p.99]

Kweli wins by spitting knotty verbiage over high-test beats. [Feb 2003, p.99]

They just want to rock you into peaceful submission, and they are successful about 70 percent of the time. [Dec 2002, p.135]

The best Pretenders record since 1994's Last of the Independents. [Dec 2002, p.141]

Like their last three records... [Riot Act] balances emotive bombast with a taut, sweaty hard-rock attack. [Dec 2002, p.137]

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

A poor man's Aimee Mann. [Jan 2003, p.99]

Size's fuzzy, string-laden bass bombs seem a tad sober. [Dec 2002, p.141]

Gough sounds like a guy celebrating his birthday in an airport cocktail bar. [Jan 2003, p.99]

Verbal sound bites once provided subtext for Godspeed's cinematic symphonies. But on Yanqui, those voices have fallen silent, and there's too much barren drift. [March 2003, p.120]

On (), the band steer their ghost ship into darker waters, erecting a vast, austere cathedral of sound, then sticking around to score a funeral mass inside. [Dec 2002, p.140]

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]

As an artistic statement, Stripped is all over the place--it's a move toward hip-hop, it's a move toward rock, it's ghetto, it's Disney. [Dec 2002, p.137]

One long indie/new-wave rave-up, all spring-loaded guitars, stabbing organs, and footloose drums. [Dec 2002, p.138]

His songwriting is sharper than you might expect. [Dec 2002, p.141]

A supremely dainty-assed achievement that jerks real tears. [Oct 2002, p.111]

The closet thing to Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes hip-hop has ever produced: a collection of songs from, and largely about, the past that bode well for the future and sound damn good today. [Dec 2002, p.140]

On Voyage to India, Arie is just another girl on the neosoul train. [Jan 2003, p.98]

Kicky enough for late-night drives, sultry enough for backseat prospecting, and versatile enough to sell anything, it may be the most user-friendly record of Underworld's career and a better follow-up to Play than Moby's own. [Oct 2002, p.120]

Believe sounds so dry and crisp it could have been recorded on a Dell laptop. [Oct 2002, p.113]

A guitar record equally suitable for a lost weekend or a good cry. [Sep 2002, p.125]

[Producer] Michael Lockwood lets her coast along over bland accompaniment. [Oct 2002, p.114]

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

She treats Americana like a wellspring of weirdness, not a retro refuge. [Sep 2002, p.134]

Storm is no Shaggy-style mall-reggae move; its beats and attitude are harder and more streetwise than Beenie's 2000 Art And Life. [Oct 2002, p.116]

The result is indie-rock as passive-aggressive blues implosion. [Sep 2002, p.128]

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

By turning indie-folk into nonstop neurotic cabaret, Oberst may have made the best album of his prodigious, prolific career. [Sep 2002, p.133]

The production smudges the songs into fuzzy watercolors, and Orton's twangy burr can't always cut through. [Sep 2002, p.128]

The Best tracks sweep ringing, acoustic-guitar verses into anthemic power-chord choruses. [Sep 2002, p.134]

Ultimately, the set is a little schizo, but it channels enough rap-rock frisson to make it more than just a between-albums snack. [Sep 2002, p.128]

The most eloquent artistic response yet to the World Trade Center tragedy. [Sep 2002, p.130]

It's a solid formula--trouble is, anything resembling emotional complexity gets blasted away by the heavy-metal howitzer of Don Gilmore's production. [Oct 2002, p.117]

The best album of Dave Matthews' career--the most coherent and graceful, the least wanky and aw-shucks messianic. [Aug 2002, p.107]

As always, the Crows are too indebted to the sounds of the past to truly signify in the present. [Aug 2002, p.114]

The good news is that they haven't completely lost their nerve; they still play their bombastic brat-rock like it's the apotheosis of Western pop culture. Sadly, this is also the bad news. [Aug 2002, p.113]

This time around, the band square their artier tendencies with their sweet tooth for classic psych-rock. [Aug 2002, p.110]

Nelly's caught between a rock and a hardass place--he's too edgy to comfortably collaborate with 'N Sync's Justin Timberlake but too corny to dig into the Neptunes' sleazily sinister beats on lead single "Hot In Herre." [Aug 2002, p.109]

Of course it's nothing new, but Guided by Voices' precision messes are their own reward. [Aug 2002, p.110]

Clef sounds more invested in his music when he's appropriating other people's songs. [Jul 2002, p.109]

It's the perfect summer record--if your summer begins with your dad running off with his secretary and your girlfriend dumping you for that asshole lifeguard at the water-slide park. [Jul 2002, p.107]

Ndegeocello still swings for the same musical fences she did in '93. Here, though, she puts more shots into the seats. [Mar 2002, p.129]

Silkworm's songs aim for a groove and grace almost completely foreign to their genre. They don't always get there, but when they do, the results are breathtaking. [July 2002, p.110]

A return to 1994's seduction strategies: pomade-greased riffs, subdermal bass, distorto samples, and free-associative rants about how Miami is cooler than Hollywood. [July 2002, p.112]

The lyrics chew as much as they bite, and the music -- ranging from twangy jazzisms to raucous blues rock -- lets Costello honor his roots while still showing off what he picked up at the conservatory. [May 2002, p.118]

Straining to prove something to the haters, the Ring flee from their strengths, trading enthusiastic bash-and-pop for slow songs as soggy as deep cuts from a Train album. [May 2002, p.115]

Unlike When I Was Born, which made similar pileups sound subversive, Handcream often feels mapless. [May 2002, p.122]

C'Mon, C'Mon makes such consensus-building sound like a virtue, imagining a world where the Dixie Chicks and Stevie Nicks and Emmylou Harris and Dr. Dre's bass player can all ride the same tour bus. [May 2002, p.118]

With riffs this sugarshit sharp, who needs ideas? [May 2002, p.124]

Rye Coalition send up a prayer for that emo addict who's done with Rainer Maria but keeps AC/DC in the closet. [Apr 2002, p.122]

When it all cooks properly, as on the sultry, sweaty "Number One," Jackson's retro pastiches generate steam heat. [May 2002, p.125]

She reinvents herself as a salacious digital temptress, crooning through soulful slow rollers. [Mar 2002, p.129]

There's plenty of that spacey/dirty sound on Loud, even when the tracks don't fit the trance template. [Apr 2002, p.122]

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

As broad as their discography is, though, In Search Of still feels radical. [Apr 2002, p.113]

Beneath the bleakness is a perky mix of deep house, dub, dance-oriented rock, and acid jazz pieced together from bits of live percussion, electric bass, flute, sax, and an overflowing grab bag of indie guitar. [March 2002, p.132]

Clinic remember that Britpop is supposed to be fun. [Mar 2002, p.127]

England's exoticism is offset by plenty of tough and tender ballads, and even the most stridently worldbeat numbers are joyous, well-made, and never patronizing. [Apr 2002, p.117]

The processed guitar-based tracks on Rug don't quite rollick or shimmer, but with Alanis it's the lyrics, not the music, that count. [Apr 2002, p.114]

It's the album's studied organic liveness that resonates the longest. [Mar 2002, p.137]

Strikes the perfect balance between the pop-savvy shuffle of Lyle Lovett and the lush loveliness of '80s Englishmen Prefab Sprout. [Mar 2002, p.134]

South's tunes tend to wobble in very slow circles, and Joel Cadbury has picked up soggy vocal habits from Coldplay's Chris Martin. [Mar 2002, p.127]