These arch Frenchmen make precision-tooled pop that somehow retains a sense of urgency and playfulness--an impressive balancing act consistently slam-dunked by effortlessly ingratiating choruses.

Blueprint reminds us that retro hip-hop is always better when it remembers laughter. [Dec 2003, p.128]

The guest cast's presence never infringes on the album's overcast beauty. [March 2003, p.120]

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

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]

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

Up-tempo and uplifting, this largely self-produced record blurs distinctions between accessibility and avant-gardism.

Dylan's voice does the same things it does for so many of his own songs: pries open unfamiliar seams of feeling inside phrases long abandoned to cliché. It helps that this may be the best-produced album of his career.

[A] sensational debut--she’s evolving into an artist serious pop listeners can commit to.

[Out My Feelings (In My Past)] is not the bright and exalted counterpoint you might expect--it’s still grim, but Boosie turns his focus outward.

With guitars that ring and roar and percussion that gushes and thunders, they finally turn theirlyrical perculiarities into a legitimate churn of ideas, rather than a posturing diversion. [Feb 2008, p.92]

Even though we’ve spent 10 songs becoming accustomed to Chloë’s milieu, Tillman upends that comfort on the 11th song. Ultimately, Chloë and the Next 20th Century signifies something larger. Father John Misty will always be interesting.

The vocals can still dilate your pupils, but her melodies (on "Ruler," "The Package Is Wrapped") deserve equal attention, as Stern bids to become one of the few finger-tappers who's also a songwriter.

Collins and Bejar, who sent ideas for Labyrinthitis back and forth Postal-Service-style from their respective homes in Galiano Island and Vancouver, craft compelling songs that deserve respect in their own right. They go beyond pure pastiche by tying everything together with arrangements and lyrics that are charming in equal measure.

It can feel both more possible, and yet further out of reach.

Like his peers and predecessors, he utilized vocals to elevate his shuddering half-time low-end above mere physical and intellectual impact--and into the listener’s emotional realm. One listen into Stott’s roomy fourth LP, Too Many Voices, and it’s clear that’s exactly what he’s going for.

Though it runs just 33 minutes, Tourist in this Town feels like a road trip movie, a scrapbook of mixed emotions compiled from postcard-sized travel diary entries.

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

Echoes is a profound listen that, despite its veneer of cynicism, oozes pain and crisis.

He’s not shaking those defining qualities on Light Verse. Instead, that distinctive voice is a foundation for towering songs, an album that grows and blooms with epic crescendos (“Yellow Jacket”), slow-burn earworm hooks (“Anyone’s Game”), and tongue-in-cheek, Shakespearean clown wisdom (“Nobody’s perfect or as dumb as their luck”).

A far more thoughtful album than the glossy and disconnected Magna Carta Holy Grail, it’s a 36-minute confessional that attempts to bring JAY-Z’s narrative full circle.

Despite Rooty's many delights, it feels like Basement Jaxx didn't really know how to top Remedy. [Aug 2001, p.127]

A series of six-minute tracks that set some sort of richly (or ripely?) spastic texture-beats against ethereal drone-shimmers. [Aug 2001, p.136]

In timbre and voice alike, the new LP is startlingly, richly fulsome, commingling the mysticism of Smithsonian Folkways LPs, IDM’s furrowed futurism, and the free-fall questing of Laurie Spiegel’s 1980 landmark, The Expanding Universe.

From beginning to end, LP4 is remarkably expansive. Not louder, necessarily – just deeper, messier and quite willing to tolerate discomfort. Middle age has never felt, or sounded, like a more beautiful bummer.

Slowdive has outdone itself on its fifth full-length, Everything Is Alive, which elevates its pre-breakup work in ways that feel nearly unimaginable. Indeed, Slowdive in 2023 is capable of writing both the hands-down most affecting song of its career (“Andalucia Plays”) as well as its most in-your-face (“The Slab”), while also incorporating modular synths as foundational elements in its creative process for the first time (they’re the first notes you hear on opener “Shanty”).

He's struggling to reconcile the unease of his past with the confusion of his present, but Doris proves that Earl's future is secure.

Ultimately, Fearless Movement bolsters Washington’s prowess as a jazz bandleader engaged in cultural and musical curation. Rather than transforming the actual language of composition or harmony or improvisation, he stacks his influences and relationships to form an ensemble sound that is monumental, and thoroughly his own. In or out of jazz, that means so much.