An inspiring “is this even rap anymore?” record.

The fidelity hasn't improved much from the Calgary foursome's basement-recorded debut, but Public Strain consolidates the clanging drones and subtly hooky flourishes that previously existed only as separate pieces.

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

Don't worry--eight albums into their reign, Slayer still sound like Slayer. [Sep 2001, p.158]

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

Armor is Bachmann's most vigorous post-Archers of Loaf full-length since 2003's Red Devil Dawn.

[He] gets back to the sweetly twisted folk rock that he does so well. [Nov 2006, p.100]

Flashing all the (slight) overreach of a much-anticipated debut album, After Robots still exuberantly delivers.

An immaculate 38-minute lullaby for the not-working class, replete with tape hiss and timpani, sweetly brooding vocals, and otherworldly Hobbit-core. [5/2001, p.147]

Ritter's wordplay can be dense, but his warm, inviting voice makes it a pleasure to unravel.

While EDM grapples with growing pains, beset by adult problems like drugs and money, Avicii has made an album with the kind of pure pop heart that's as likely to appeal to eight-year-olds as it is to amped-up ravers.

[BRMC] have never sounded more self-assured. [May 2007, p.84]

Lisbon, like 2008's You & Me, is a gorgeous journey into the elegiac, inspired by the music of Memphis' Sun Studios.

They've stepped up their ballad game, and the grooves, smartly percussive and Kanye-slick, are deeper than ever.

A near-perfect album by a band that seems, finally, to have found their identity. [Jun 2007, p.89]

Instead of reaching that precipice and seeming to over-stretch for some sort of tipping point into the mainstream, he's forged his own world, on his own terms, and invited like-minded artists to flourish there as well.

Among those still cranking out shambolic odes to the suburban bored, these reformed shitgazers rule.

The playing is deceptively forceful, and the songs cut surprisingly deep.

As a whole, Elephant in the Room lands somewhere between concept piece and exhibition, balancing an array of new and familiar styles. ... Seven years after his breakthrough, he remains one of the best writers in the game—but rather than a big fish in a small pond, he’s only showing room for growth.

The wordless howl of delight on the exuberant gospel stomper "Looking Up" is Everett's most compelling statement yet.

There are odd nods on Somewhere Else.... But her full-throated attack and guitarist Todd May's twang-snarled guitar, which splits the diff between Tom Petty's Heartbreakers and Johnny Thunders', also recall a less-remembered version of that decade.

Her street-smart squeak and plastic-fantastic perspective are undimmed, now buoyed by a heartfelt bene-ficence.

An exciting, impassioned, fuzzed-up, and smartly sticky album that plants a flag for some great forgotten sounds and practically screams promise for better glory days to come.

Sebenza, though, is less a showcase for younger SA talent than a genuine international collaboration of equals.

The details change, but the heaviness remains.

Though rife with standout tracks, GUMBO! is greater than the sum of its parts. Siifu’s ambitious range and impressive pool of features create an otherworldly listening experience, only bolstered by accessories like the poetry of Dungeon Family’s Big Rube.

The songs are more consistent, too, flashing a certain lyrical swagger, careening from terrific sex to celebratory violence to uncomfortable cultural realities.

Glasgow quartet Glasvegas are a product of this world--frontman James Allen is even a former semipro footballer--and their remarkable debut gives voice to its fears, frustrations, and heartaches without succumbing to its cliches.

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

It demands attentive listening, only because it can so easily slip into the delirious wonders of foreign realms.

These eight tracks are big, bold, dynamic, and show a particular mastery of modular synthesis.

After last year’s uninhabited Kurt Vile collaboration, she has a second album called Tell Me How You Really Feel that restores confidence in her tunes and the way her guitar lines snake through them. ... Settle into Tell Me’s crinkled smarts and Barnett remains as observant as Sometimes demonstrated.

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.

Collapse mostly sounds like a familiar friend -- reliable in all the best ways, but still capable of quietly insinuating surprises.

Even with all the name players involved, Albarn focuses the spotlight on the songs, which are terrific. [Jan 2007, p.92]

There’s a feeling of forward momentum to the entire album but we might not like where it’s headed.

Triplicate is not a shining hour for Dylan when put into the full context of his fifty-plus-year career. But nonetheless, his insuppressible spirit is baked into every moonstruck moment.

The sound is old-fashioned, but the fury is fresh.

Even though The Glowing Man offers a satisfying, substantial conclusion to the Swans discography, listeners shouldn’t expect a now-or-never, paradigm-shifting opus.

You’ve got to give it to perennial over-achievers: sometimes they even know how to make extra-credit assignments sound like A+ work.

More ambitious than on past efforts, Watson slips through quiet night spaces, and like Sendak's Max, puts on his wolf suit, making mischief of one kind, then another, until Wooden Arms flares with his vibrant energy.

The LP is the group’s most enjoyable, but also their most potent, all the more menacing for its unlikely grinning.

Continues their quest for idyllic listlessness, setting claustrophobic love-sucks songs to shy bedroom beats that are always passing (out) into ambient ether. [Sep 2000, p.189]

Three Futures is a slow burn, but Torres doesn’t require speed, not when she can hold our attention with something more akin to intense eye contact.

ken, Bejar’s sparest album in terms of lyrical density and length in some time, is an aggressive, well-chiseled shift.

For all the paradoxical production agendas in play, Mr. West’s guiding hand in constructing the album’s boldly going flow is everywhere in evidence. As glacially paced, mood-enhancing music, Pablo is a hypnotic slam-dunk.

Caressed by gentle guitars and synths, her elegantly serene voice and airy melodies impart a sense of stubborn, reassuring endurance in the face of soul-crushing melancholy.

In years past, Animal Collective have been cast as perpetual Peter Pans, forever stuck in childhood fantasias. But beneath the body-moving throbs and coruscating noises of Merriweather Post Pavilion, themes of domestic duty and devotion abound.

With songs and production this pumped, they’ll continue to make waves far outside their beloved home state.

Purple Mountains was produced and accompanied by Jarvis Taveniere and Jeremy Earle of Woods, with eight other musicians filling the gaps. The arrangements, some of the most gracious Berman’s ever had, hum and glow with foggy organs and soft golden horns. Their serenity is at odds with his desperation: This is a portrait of a shattered man.

Assembled as carefully as he once cut up a cappellas, it's a dance-music textbook.

It’s not easy to homogenize the opposing forces at play, but everything here feels like a genuine rumble through a mind scarred and inebriated by the reality of gang life and chasing the American dream while the room spins.

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.

As important as the production is, though, it’s still the songwriting that makes Pawn Shop stand out.

With five songs clocking in at more than seven minutes, often thanks to detours down E Street, it's a big-idea album that feels small and personable, even as it's kicking you in the shin.

They maintain a slow, directionless drift that weights their third record with the dread of what’s beyond the sky.

The dreamy project leaves the snide social critiques and radicalisms to the wayside for 36 minutes that feel of its own realm, where the dichotomies and bodily desire feel self-contained. The intimacy is never lost within the set’s high concept: For an album centered on lonesomeness, Aromanticism feels warm.

Thanks to its polyrhythms and rich instrumental textures, The Animal Spirits is as likely to appeal to fans of experimental rock music (especially electro-tribal searchers like Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance, Fuck Buttons, or Dan Deacon) as it is to those who regularly spend evenings at the club.

In her willingness to tread the line between the crushing flood of data and irrepressible pop hooks has created a record so undeniably of its time and place (that is, cyberspace) that it can’t be easily ignored.

Where Turn Into’s multilayered arrangements sometimes felt scrunched, Everybody Works blossoms.

Lovingly fastidious and packed with special effects.

“Outer Acid” remains uncanny in its mix of blissful keys and menacing acid squiggles and “Spy” diffuses some dubby harmonica into Heard’s atmospheres. “Inner Acid” returns to the squelchy acid house Heard made back in the ‘80s and the knocking beat and bells of “Nodyahed” suggest that he can still make a dancefloor quake.

Sitek's layered sonics have grown more immense... and almost none of these songs charts a predictable course. [Jun 2006, p.81]

There's still something small and handmade about the Thermals' music. [Sep 2006, p.112]

Lyrics referencing both Greek astronomy and the Old Testament, as well as guitar textures indebted more to Glenn Branca than Black Flag, reveal an art-rock ace up the band's tattered sleeve.

This latest effort shift boils down to two key foci: bolder, less guarded lyrical choices (much of the record deals with Paternoster's ongoing battle with chronic mono) and more strategic space for the frontwoman's legendary guitar solos.

Little Broken Hearts is exciting because it explores the darkest corners of betrayal, bad love, and jealousy with enough vitality to propel Jones out of the bloodless purgatory of brunch music.

Hval continues to cleverly connect, and explicitly comment on, matters of sex and politics on her third album.

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

Ween are still perved to the core.

Ironically, spitting over minimal head-knock beats from WHY? and Advance Base, Serengeti sounds reborn.

That it reads like it came from NAO’s diary points to her greatest achievement on Saturn: every song can shine as a standalone track, but they sound even better together.

Mazzy Star steadfastly stick to their dusty, psych-folk, dream-pop tableaux on Seasons of Your Day. Yet it feels nothing like a '90s hangover; in fact, the touches of organ and pedal steel that open the album hint at Beach House's hazy indie-pop.

Desire Lines sits with remarkable ease next to Camera Obscura albums released a decade ago.

[Frontman Miles] Kurosky finally has the audio toys to jazz up his Technicolor sandbox... [Oct 2001, p.134]

Like Confessions on a Dance Floor, Fundamental uses squelchy electro-disco grooves that smuggle sly pop-culture commentary. [Aug 2006, p.83]

There is almost always an underlying inorganic sound that’s either ominous, nauseous or both, and it’s the only thing that guarantees that none of the slower tracks will unknowingly be embraced in dentists’ waiting rooms next to classic soft rock. The faster songs are highly danceable, especially with these queasy keys.

On this debut, Lerner's gorgeous vocals, sunny melodies, and ultra-catchy choruses sound like a Fab Four fantasy trip as he logs extensive mileage in a rush of crisscrossing travelogue songs.

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

The way What a Time to Be Alive zooms by, there are songs you might blink and miss if McCaughan weren’t writing some of the most sharply worded lyrics of his career.

Synth-driven grooves that feel communal and cosmic at the same time.

It all looks backward unabashedly--fitting for a band formed 30-plus years ago--but no less resonant.

Every twinkling ambient moment is remarkably humane.

The band is smart, then, to play to their strengths on Something to Tell You: experiments at small scale.

Derulo’s latest, Everything Is 4, proves he’s a workhorse, with possibly even (gulp) a vision.

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

Medicine is a barrel of tailgating, beer-guzzling monkey bros; the band’s loosest and most dance-able record in a decade or more.

Holland swings far afield from folk and country on her third album, matching her hornlike voice to cool-jazz rhythms. [Jul 2006, p.84]

More hooks (and cowbell) make Smile the band's most accessible album, but Boris haven't softened. [May 2008, p.94]

Wonderfully unsentimental, beautifully tuneful.

That’s the beauty of Universalists: there’s no use trying to pin it down. What’s more, doing so discredits its core thesis: music is music, plain and simple. Gat manages to capture the ecstasy of his live performance, while expanding his production and experimental practice to a global, and—dare I say—universal palette.

Awesome the riffs may be, one might only want to hear them in small bursts lest they risk being worn out. Still, there’s enough variation to stave off sameness, and the band is smart enough to switch it up from track-to-track.

From yellowed headlines, nature-magazine clippings, marker scribblings, torn paper, even Kurt Cobain's visage, Antony extracts a poignancy that beautifully matches his music.

The album represents an impressive development upon what is already one of the most compelling sounds in rap.

Kelela proudly stands within the genre’s tradition. For the most part, she avoids making any grandstanding romantic or political statements, but Take Me Apart finds its purpose within the subdued complexities.

As addictive as ice-cream dots. [Jul 2006, p.88]

With so many legacy-artist posthumous sets, it’s hard to avoid a certain level of brain mush. The final stretches often feel like pointlessly processed outtakes of alternate takes of fake takes of imaginary takes. It’s like extracurricular archaeology, and it’s often not very fun. But even when you’re working up a sweat with your shovel, Funky Nothingness rewards the strain.