Despite the absence of percussion, it moves as steadily as a mountain stream, a reminder of the pulse connecting club music with a much vaster world beyond. Now, more than ever, we need the long view glimpsed through Pink's rose-tinted rave goggles.

Her crack band of Dap-Kings have enlivened everyone from Kanye to Amy Winehouse, but their most natural habitat is in Jones' Aretha-like tales of sex, independence, and the good Lord himself.

Funky like Fred Schneider and Barney Fife killin' it at karaoke. [Sep 2003, p.115]

The record could use more songs like "David," where her bratty valedictorian wit is balanced with a sense of real emotional stakes. [Apr 2004, p.93]

As with Watermelon, Chicken, the album drags; still, it's a compelling ride. [Oct 2003, p.110]

Kweli wins by spitting knotty verbiage over high-test beats. [Feb 2003, p.99]

The rubbed-rawness of Uh Huh Her might seem like backpedaling. But the best tracks use the pleasure principles of Stories to update her old approach. [Jun 2004, p.101]

Here they fe-fi-fo-fum with the exacting crankiness of carny punks who've seen it all. [Mar 2006, p.95]

Is a Woman finds Lambchop turning into America's Tindersticks, replacing songcraft with baroque digressions. [Mar 2002, p.134]

Mostly there are ballads--exquisitely poised, expertly arranged ones so dialed into their feminine inspirations that Milosh and Hannibal virtually merge with the objects of their affection.

The music is propulsive and upbeat, but executed with the almost blasé confidence of people who sound like they have nothing to prove.

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

The work on PC Music Vol. 2 is more mature, less obnoxious, and much more deserving of the early hype PC Music received.

It's a given that Gutter, like the ex-Pulp sideman's five previous shimmering, sepia-toned solo albums, has moments of heartbreaking beauty. Too bad those moments are outnumbered by a reliance on secondhand lyrical conceits (songbirds, shipwrecks) and drifting arrangements.

Powered by rattling drums, simmering organ, and Stuart Staples' resonant baritone, the first half of Tindersticks' latest is a can't-miss proposition....Too bad the disc's second half descends into a morass of half-finished, melancholic curios that mostly go nowhere lowly.

A decade-plus of refining this particular sound has led to the purposeful pop of Okovi, her sixth album. Danilova’s vocal performance momentarily recalls darker and more secretive Sia songs.

Yet with its detours into slick synth pop, weepy roots rock, and big Broadway music, the sprawling Genre proves that emo needn't be boxed in by stylistic dogma. [Dec 2007, p.120]

The songs could use more steam, but Crows reveals yet another color in Moorer's palette.

The rhythm section no longer plays the shadows either, blurting out Black Flag–circa-'81 bluster as a deceptively simple assist for their leader's colorful wheedle and strident wail.

Like the sugar in hot sauce, all the additional soulful and jazzy flavors - pale blue chords, sax-y loops, mellow piano comping - just bring out the stinging attack of the beats more fiercely.

On her Dum Dum debut, assisted by Blondie and Go-Go's producer Richard Gottehrer, she cages contagious odes to husband-Crocodiles singer Brandon Welchez (as well as anxious ruminations on losing him) in metallic distortion.

If you gauge artistic success by innovation, you can just filter the best of Culture, a very decent group of Migos songs, into a playlist. But if you appreciate Migos and the sound they ushered into contemporary rap as being one of the genre’s most basic, essential natural resources, it will be easier to let the whole album--a drama of perseverance--ride out.

These parts slide and slip through and around one another, creating a shifting matrix that consumes your attention for as long as the band wants to play.

The distinct pleasures of Forever Sounds remain those of all five preceding Wussy albums--a crack songwriting duo detailing adult life’s ambiguities with vivid language amid a terrific rhythm section’s unapologetic alt-slop. They’ve retained their love of six-string grandeur even while continuing to plumb the depths of victories that aren’t so much hollow as qualified.

One Life Stand finds the boys settling down and growing a tad soft in the middle.

Juicing fragile melodies with weeping George Harrison guitar, frontman Luke Steele is pretty even-keeled for a spaced-out pop maestro. [Nov 2003, p.117]

As dark and sweet as baking chocolate and as ambitious as the Mars rover. [Apr 2004, p.94]

Some tracks accordingly veer toward the solipsistic—”Exodus” pushes the newfound Arthur Russell-meets-Tim Buckley vibe a little past the point of viability. But even at his most bleakly compressed, McMahon can still produce a striking melody.