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]

Even as they feature orchestras, women's choirs, and Beach House singer Victoria Legrand on Veckatimest, the album is still an intimate, ascetic affair.

Longstreth's prickly surface belies a bright pop center: tart, sweet, and gushing all at once.

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.

Not since Grateful Dead's Europe '72 has there been a live double album in which intimacy and expansiveness, guitar mess and piano reflection commingle this sweetly. [Dec 2005, p.107]

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

Gruff stuff... A few rockers lighten the load, but not by much. [Sep 2004, p.120]

Every note fits. Every key has a keyhole. And King Push proper would be hard-pressed to beat this small wonder of great cameos (the always-undervalued Jill Scott, sampled Biggie), productions (in a first, Timbaland manning the boards on the eerie “Untouchable”), and block quotes (“I’m the L. Ron Hubbard of the cupboard”) here.

Yo La Tengo remain true to their Velvet Underground roots. [Oct 2006, p.105]

This set--six meticulously documented hours recorded before his first proper album--is a progress chart.

Abraham's broken-glass belloiw is often matched with folk-siren backup vocals that disorient more than they soothe. Multi-tracks thicken and slur the guitar riffs, heightening both the tension and complexity. [Nov 2008, p.102]

Goodness is a spiritually rich listen, but none of it would matter much if it weren’t such a goddamn great rock album.

Savage punk rock that shifts and shakes like the bleachers during a homecoming orgy. [Jan 2005, p.98]

Patrick Stickles screams and moans amid the swirling, lo-fi racket, and although he sounds a helluva lot like Conor Oberst, this is no Bright Eyes knockoff. The Airing of Grievances is more inviting, fraternal, and widely referential.

Wonderfully unsentimental, beautifully tuneful.

Finn infuses his windy tales of youthful debauchery with a mixture of detective-fiction luridness and first-club-show romanticism. [Nov 2006, p.100]

As Shepherd’s confidence grows in his compositions, he gives each element of the song enough time to stand on its own, without the bells and whistles of the Ensemble’s (slightly more) enormous orchestra.

It’s as good a model of modern folk music as has come along in some time.

He’s not really in a fun mood, and the music follows. The lushness has diminished, and the work evokes increasing comparisons to ‘70s singer-songwriters like Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, who hid their acidic commentary within sturdy pop structures.

Throughout the album, Newsom's language is more colorful than on Mender; at its best, it works as music even on the page. [Dec 2006, p.95]

Where Basement Jaxx's diversity used to serve a club-DJ flow, here they let it off the leash, with mixed results. [Dec 2003, p.126]

Lambert is still at her bubbliest playing a guntoting, wisecracking, catfighting gal next door who cusses like a sailor, or at least brags that she does, plotting revenge on lying boyfriends and town hypocrites--preferably at cowpunk tempo.

Almost every track on The Impossible Kid is indistinguishable from the next, blending together in a way that converts the man’s talent into his fatal flaw, due in part to the forgettable beats.

Despite the resourcefulness of Kronos’ contributions, though, Anderson is Landfall’s most crucial actor and its saving grace; the humility, naturalism, and humor of her recitations justify the scale of the project.

With Tomorrow's Harvest, the Sandisons' return feels natural. Rather than resort to hiring disco session musicians or citing Judith Butler to add a new kink to their sound, they've done something even rarer in the modern era: They’ve aged with grace.

The project is very human and certainly the band’s most dynamic effort to date. Never has Paramore left so much space in its productions or allowed Williams to sound so sparse in moments, like her tiny frame might finally shatter. Nor has the band ever played so deftly with sounds of comfort and alarm, like a clock radio slicing through the most blissful dream.

Clark's complex femininity, both self-possessed and keenly evolving, is what makes her music so powerful and fascinating.

From the blocky organ chunks that lead “I’m Angry” to the fuzzed-out almost-boogie of “Shark-Shark,” the diversity of POPtical Illusion teases its way out after subsequent listens.