It’s a testament to the extraordinary breadth of Oh No, as Lanza metamorphosizes from an intriguing curiosity to a formidable contender in contemporary electronic music.

Paradise lands closer to technical brilliance than emotional resonance, but you can feel the band reaching.

Her lazily smoky voice has its bitterly harsh moments, but her coolly analytical self-awareness stings the most.

The Center Won’t Hold is a real-time examination of the fraying that takes its toll on peoples’ insides and outer shells during times both good and bad. Agitations about screen-borne life and unpleasant urges bounce off grander existential horrors; there’s no digging out of them, this record bellows, but thrashing around and attempting to find others to share the burdens will at least stave off malaise.

Yes, there are a lot of elements put together here. The thing is, this is not about juxtaposition. It’s about synthesis and transformation.

In trying to transcend dance music, he’s actually made its purest form: an album that’s a listening experience.

Thier major label debut is drenched in the same warm sonic haze and bizarro imagery as Flaming Lips, but any weirdness comes in the service of the songs. [Nov 2008, p.98]

The Ecstatic is easily his finest full-length since "Black on Both Sides," his 1999 solo debut.

The results are simultaneously raw and symphonic, always ascending higher while on the verge of total collapse.

The Whole Love feels more of a piece with 1999's Summerteeth, the caustic pop opus on which Tweedy sped away from alt-country (or y'allternative, No Depression, whatever) in a car far sleeker (and blacker) than the one Hank Williams supposedly died in.

He sounds as if he's just seen his own specter in the mirror, but no worries--records don't get much more alive than this.

Sparrow transcends its own tastefulness, and odds are excellent you’ll find it gorgeous.

The result is Help Us Stranger, the group’s richest batch of songs to date.

The world that Worlds conjures is fantastical and defiantly cheery.

Plenty of bands try to re-create Bob Dylan's mid-'60s apex, but Celebration, Florida sounds like it's conjuring Dylan's mid-'70s Rolling Thunder Revue period.

It's indie rock as hearty and art-free as oatmeal, before the line separating it from the mainstream dissolved, before it became so...eclectic.

Superchunk clearly trust their music to hold up under all the heaviness of life's big questions, and trust us to hold up, too.

All signs pointed to Shiny and Oh So Bright (full title: Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun.) as an authoritative step back on track.

[A] striking return to form. [Aug 2006, p.82]

A distinctively dark, insinuating aesthetic of measured instrumentation and abstract lyrics. Rather than sinking all its resources in squalls of feedback and distortion, the band diversifies its portfolio by adding canny production tricks and keyboard noodling to its impressive resumé of guitar innovations.

His remix of Azzido Da Bass's "Dooms Night" was the big hit, but really, it could have been any of these unpretentious but hardly brain-dead tracks. [1/2001, p.119]

Like Gigi herself, it is a work of perpetual self-invention, an extended state of becoming. Have pity on the inquisitory birds, because it's impossible to look away.

The 21 songs here are no more or less inscrutable than the hundreds of tunes Pollard has penned since he last played with this band, but they gel in ways that so many of those didn't, reveling in their limitations rather than trying to overcome them. It's the difference between the White Stripes and the Raconteurs.

A primer on British folk-revival icon Shirley Collins is the disc's most sparkling moment. [May 2008, p.103]

“Direct Address” fails to make sticking mantras of “Honesty is like a kiss on the lips” or “I don’t believe in first sight” or “I fall in love with everyone I see,” but there’s plenty of promise here that she’ll move past them, and it’s sometimes fulfilled.

A record that’s more reflective and human than you’d ever expect from a band of literal cartoons.

With likeminded ensembles like Brooklyn’s colorful psych jammers NYMPH and Switzerland’s Eastern-flavored, Voodoo-inspired collective Goat transmitting dreamscapes from the beyond while exuding familial, Zen master vibes, Yoshimi’s OOIOO has joined that spiritual fray with this Gamelan-inspired trance inducer.

Joined by the similarly un-categorizable Swedish reedman Mats Gustafsson, Live at the South Bank is an onslaught of sound.