The duo's virtuosic picture of the 21st-century city feels so alive it might convince Escape From New York's Snake Plissken to return.

Ruess’ songs are a puzzle: They contain no memorable lines but the arrangements act as if they do.

FWA is slicker than most mixtapes--and on tracks like the opener, his flow remains a spectacle--but there’s also the pervading sense here that he’s playing it safe.

Bangerz is a precise album that flits between bombastic and turgid; it is not very fun.

His lonesome drawl may sound arresting when it's 3 a.m. and you're stumbling home from the bar, but maudlin tunes like 'You Don't Feel Like Home to Me' and 'Some Tragedy' need more than quietly strummed minor chords to sell their hard-luck laments. [Oct 2007, p.104]

Vast proves his lyrical bona fides on gems like "Horoscope," rasping, "She would use music to escape / Press play, close her eyes, and dreamscape." Unfortunately, OX 2010's middling beats aren't quite as inspiring.

With such sharp detail, Kaiser Chiefs have elevated themselves from a singles band to a group that's capable of both having a laugh and making a focused statement about life's less gleeful side. [Apr 2007, p.92]

Ruins mostly sticks to compelling, pretty surfaces and leaves the demons in the background.

At his most excitable ('No Direction'), yearning frontman Steve Schiltz aims for the stadium's back row, Bono-style, though the dogged pursuit of spiritual uplift generates more fatigue than enlightenment.

Old-school romantic Ville Valo croons as often as he screams, so that even when aiming for the stylistic median, a bit of local weirdness oozes forth to make Screamworks more interesting than it's designed to be.

Legendary Weapons attempts a reinvigoration by employing session band 
the Revelations to muster up grooves that recall the sort of '60s soul songs that RZA once loved to sample. It's a quaint idea, but the execution is too slick to mesh with the raps, and fails to evoke the Wu's murky pall.

Trent Reznor's dark symphonies of clank succeed when their bleakness is broken by moments of humanity or hilarity, both of which come from the Nine Inch Nails mastermind's serrated scream. But when Reznor's haunted-spaceship beats combine with the seductive coo of former West Indian Girl vocalist Mariqueen Mandig (his wife) on the trio's debut EP, the results too often suggest a plodding, Matrix-style soundtrack.

This isn't a great album, but it is a good one, in a year quietly blessed with a small crop of good records (Metric, Gossip) with dreamy synths and girls up front.

Bernard Butler, hipster rock's Jerry Bruckheimer, produced this impressive debut, a tsunami of galloping rhythms, lightning-charged guitar lines, and choruses that immediately infect your brain.

Justin Timberlake, Timbaland anf Timbo's partner Nate "Danja" Hills, provide a reasonably good return on investment. [Dec 2007, p.118]

Sliding away from his Marc Bolan fixation, Vandervelde sounds more like a subpar Lindsey Buckingham (there's even a cocaine lyric on 'Someone Like You'), offering shlocky '70s AM pop rock on drifting, overlong tunes like 'Need for Now.'

Only the electric "It Begins Tonight," righteous of riff and bonkers of solo, plays to his strengths; the rest is like watching Michael Jordan bat .235 in Birmingham.

There are no musical clangers, and occasionally the guitar work is more ambitious than it needs to be. Bryan’s voice, when it is low and slow, is more exciting than his bro-holler, but both are pleasure for pleasure’s sake--and pleasure is enough reason to listen to this collection.

A New Tide also contains some of the band's most straightforward material yet.

She remains singularly compelling and lovable as a celebrity, even if her records don't always match up to her outsized persona. Even at their worst, they only prove that the art is sometimes unworthy of the artist.

There are no such standout cuts here.

Holy Ghost is something of a wash... Winter Women, though, boasts some of [his] best material. [Sep 2006, p.111]

Flavorsome but oddly ordinary. [Aug 2006, p.77]

With Gwen Stefani sidelined by motherhood, Canada's Dragonette fills the No Doubt void by walking a similar line between girly electro pop and boyish new wave.

There’s not even anything very embarrassing about Black Laden Crown, the first Danzig album since 2010’s Deth Red Sabaoth--it’s just plain old boring.

This is a concept/protest record about Monsanto, and unless your blood boils as intensely about the issue as Young’s, the protest element of that is handled so clumsily that it sinks the album entirely.

By Act III, T.I. faces down T.I.P. in the mirror during a bizarre skit, yelling, "Why can't you just talk about what's wrong with you? Why can't you just let everything out?" The same could be said for the ambitious but uneven T.I. vs. T.I.P.

The latest from these Nebraska dance rockers doesn't instantly charm like the '80s flashbacks found on 2001's breakthrough, "Danse Macabre." But its fixation on the present pays off with repeated plays as clashing guitar and keyboard hooks hammer home the Faint's central theme--the chaos of a world in conflict.