This is the album Metallica lifers have been waiting for: an inspired return to the complex savagery of old. [Jul 2003, p.109]

What’s important is how Ambarchi uses his transmogrified tones to both stretch and ground his group’s highly intuitive songs, lending grainy texture to transcendental zone-outs and twinkling, ultraviolet color to propulsive toe-tappers.

His grinding blues buitar/aggro piano and her Bonham-bashing coalesce in a sound as heavy as his soul. [Apr 2006, p.91]

Scarily intimate and irresistibly beautiful. [Mar 2005, p.92]

Far from a diminishing return, Timeless is the sound of a master getting back into the groove and finding his muse burning bright as ever.

Like Elliott Smith after ten years of Sunday school. [May 2004, p.108]

A perfect album, except perfect is the wrong word for a band so dedicated to kitchen-sink oddness. [Mar 2004, p.96]

What it sounds like to be sucked into doomed romanticism rather than aspire to it. [Jun 2005, p.108]

This time, the band lug the still-smoking amps from their lightning-strike live show into the studio and let the noise chase the midnite vultures away.

AC are all about the sometimes blissful, often uncanny intermingling of song and space. [Nov 2005, p.98]

[A] cosmos-goosing masterwork. [Jul 2005, p.104]

With her remarkable voice—slippery, shadowy, haunted by the ghost of itself—and dolorous melodic sensibility, Gendron renders whatever she’s feeling (grief, awe, bittersweet joy) as a complex continuum. .... Utilizing a proper studio for the first time, with Dirty Three drummer Jim White and improvisational guitarist Marisa Anderson joining on several tracks, Gendron adds new layers of intuitive fluidity to her songs, while also carving out time just for herself and her fermented sorrow.

Lets you better appreciate his knack for weaving glorious pop songs out of change-ups and mixed signals. [Jul 2004, p.109]

She's become masterful at painting in the blues and grays of everyday emotion. [Feb 2005, p.92]

Whether Eleanor echoes her grandmother or provides a less mature counterpoint, her gravity melds with Sarantos' gusto for a dissonance that's never entirely discordant. [Nov 2005, p.100]

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

Is Dark Matter that different from immediate predecessors Backspacer, Lightning Bolt, and Gigaton? Not really. But is it somehow Pearl Jammier, in an ineffable sense? Yep—in fact, it’s something special.

In their third decade, Melt-Banana have, indisputably, made their most insane record and, arguably, their masterpiece.

It's not gallows humor, just the most natural thing in the world. [Oct 2003, p.113]

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]

There isn't a tune on No Cities Left, the Dears' gorgeous second album, that's not pitched at a minor state of emergency. [Jan 2005, p.99]

A fresh, literate blast of nuanced screamers and mid-tempo heart purging. [Aug 2003, p.119]

Sounds as informed by middle-American community theater, church choirs, and John Adams' American operas as any canonical "folk rock" it may resemble. [Jul 2005, p.102]

There's a nifty kind of egolessness about the NPs: They're team players in a way that few other bands are right now. [Aug 2005, p.93]

By record’s end, Garcia emerges in full command of this mercurial spirit world—a high priestess with a synth and a killer sixth sense.

Years of gradually opening up their minimalism have imbued Low with the wisdom to make every new layer count. [Feb 2005, p.91]

Finds these thoughtful Brits exploring even more emotional territory. [Mar 2004, p.96]

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