The wonder of 22, A Million is how beautifully he melds the disparate forms--inside and outside, acoustic and digital, past and future, ground level and interstellar. It’s a stunning record, well worth the wait.

No Cities to Love spends much of its running time reminding us not what Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss can do but what other configurations of players can't.

That’s the trick of Middle of Nowhere: it never rushes to define what comes next. Instead, Musgraves lingers in the in-between, finding humor, heartbreak and a surprising amount of peace along the way.

Its sense of self-awareness, internal editing and transitional sonic wanderlust remains as compelling as ever.

Throughout, the musicians seem to be cooking in their own worlds, but their parts fortuitously interlock and tasty grooves frequently arise. There’s so much going on in How You Been, and it’s all interesting.

The swathe of great moments here is impressive. .... Indeed, Trixies might be the duo’s personal masterpiece.

Ellison has created one of his most concentrated and fascinating releases.

Tortoise are still on a creative roll, even if it’s a very slow, drawn-out one.

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]

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]

Gleefully impurist and highly addictive. [Sep 2004, p.122]

Here they fe-fi-fo-fum with the exacting crankiness of carny punks who've seen it all. [Mar 2006, p.95]

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

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]

[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]

Varied and vulnerable. [Jun 2003, p.109]

Almost lives up to the hype. [Mar 2005, p.92]

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

In shifting the lyrical focus away from one songwriter’s experience—exemplified by the previous hyper-emotional adrenaline rushes of “Drunk II” and “In Love Again”—some of the lovelorn charisma that made Mannequin Pussy so special has been lost. Nonetheless, the record’s disparate strands mostly hold together, a formidable document of their fire and fury—and one that’s needed more than ever.

It's no mere gimmick. [Oct 2004, p.111]

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

It's the album on which the Chems relax into a comfortable maturity, secure in their status as elder statesmen. [Feb 2005, p.87]

It's such a confident display that you barely notice the English-as-a-second-language lyrics. [Nov 2003, p.117]

The grimy, blues-black nuggets [PJ Harvey] pounds into armor for Faithfull are song-for-song stronger than Harvey's own 2004 album, Uh Huh Her.... But Cave's songs are a little too pitch-perfect. [Jan 2005, p.96]

Instead of updating psych garage folk, they allow its corpus to fester in skronky breakdowns, churning feedback, and... a wicked spirit-medium session. [Jan 2006, p.91]

He does have a sharp facility for steely Bakersfield guitar licks and cinematic countrypolitan strings and clever honkytonk wordplay and so many other elements that defined country in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. But he never feels out of time on $10 Cowboy.

These Brits deconstruct bombast via bombastic guitar riffs. [Jun 2005, p.108]

It's a busy, dazzling record, though more detours--like "Storm Returns," a dreamy guitar-and-beats collage--would help aerate things. [Aug 2003, p.118]