Love letters, brief smiles, a touch on the arm, friends, and pets abound; throughout, Russell poignantly captures and echoes life's ephemeral delights.

With Drive-By Truckers, singer-guitarist Jason Isbell learned to embrace some of those [Southern rock] cliches; on his gritty, vibrant second solo album, he begins to transcend them.

Her enthusiasm immediately leaps from the grooves, but this debut also reveals an emotional and musical range her neo-retro peers lack.

Dark, electroshocked eighth album from Brit rock's premier party people. [Jan 2003, p.99]

Kissing goodbye to the obsolete racial and gender roles that pop, hip-hop, or indie rock still demand, Youngblood and pals throw a thrillingly subversive victory party to lift the country out of eight years of anguish.

With help from frequent collaborators Paul White and Black Milk, UK electronic producer Evian Christ, and crate-digging maestro the Alchemist, Brown brings his persistent terrors to life.

In lesser hands, all this weight could feel leaden. But Miguel remains a craftsman, and leisure gets its due.

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.

A wildly inspired blend of tribal rhythms, wah-wah guitar, fatback bass lines, and the heated unnnhs and yeeowws that typify James Brown funk.

Parquet Courts' over-the-top energy, speed, and succinctness makes the combination sound fresher than anything the original elements have managed in years.

Robyn achieves the sort of pure pop perfection that her more mainstream records never did. [May 2008, p.108]

Even emo and chamber music get roped into Sidewalks' exclamatory gush, verifying that there truly is no sound these two won't use to support their almost religious commitment to spreading huge grins.

On WIXIW, everything is in its right place.

Quieter and more uniform in sound than the wilfully eclectic Let It Die, the new album emphasizes her sumptuous vocals and ear for a handsome melody. [May 2007, p.85]

The raw-throated, harmonically rich ballads transcend the occasionally schmaltzy production [June 2008, p.119]

This stream-of-consciousness head trip blends tricky, delicious melodies and slippery lyrics, yet never lapses into annoyingly smug artiness. [Mar 2007, p.88]

Neither Cocker's chewy structures nor his voice's subtle shadings are particularly well suited to Albini's you-are-there engineering. Fortunately, this collection of surging and reeling tunes is the former Pulp frontman's strongest since "Different Class."

Turn is a haunting, often painfully beautiful example of how songs that may seem dead and buried can sublimely rise from the grave.

Repackaging it all as a six-disc set (including remixes and alternate versions) is pretentious, extravagant, and romantic--U2, after all.

This debut is a different kind of soul music, as meditative as it is evocative.

Forging modern myth and cryptic missives into something as immediate and accessible as this is no small feat. Almost 25 years on, Ulver has crafted the best entry point for their catalog–a dramatic pop saga impossible to deny.

Where Cox's Atlas Sound output is scattered and eclectic, Microcastle, Deerhunter's third album, is focused and consistent.

This mysterious Swedish dream-pop band's music remains hazy--mucho echo, blurry harmonies, soft acoustic instrumentation buoyed by generous synth strings, and a bright white ambience suggesting both sunny Balearic beaches and blinding Scandinavian snowstorms. Yet its emotions are conversely vivid.

The combination of titanic chunk-chunk riffs, sleek lead guitar, and radio-ready harmonizing comes across as heroic. [Jun 2006, p.82]

The album is curated like a museum, preserving the best of their sound while polishing the crucial details. Spaceman continues to fine-tune his astral pop sound with shocking consistency throughout the familiar but delightfully hypnotic space rock album.

Phantogram drives straight through, with a clear purpose, no rest stops.

A couple of the drone bagatelles, though masterfully realized, break Gas’s signature hypnosis and could be mistaken for any number of Kompakt artists rather than being unmistakably his. But at best, Narkopop faithfully upgrades Gas’s murky fundamentals to HD.

One of the pleasures of Charlene is how we can now enjoy Tweet--years removed from the burden of carrying Aaliyah’s legacy--as a startlingly unique voice in her own right.