Everything here, though, feels strangely organic and effortlessly joyful.

Another nuanced collection of mid-tempo '70s-pop-referencing tunes that document the lives of folks who manage only fleeting moments of happiness between protracted stretches of frustration.

Drawing from a syllabus of 100 essential country tunes compiled by dad Johnny in the 1970s, Rosanne Cash delivers the most enjoyable history lesson imaginable.

Braxton's clever, found-sound loops are missed, but the remaining members' rampant ideas and inexorable groove keep Battles engrossing.

Open Mike Eagle’s momentum has raised anticipation for his fifth collaborative full-length (and ninth album altogether), Hella Personal Film Festival, this time made with British producer and vocalist Paul White. But he doesn’t quite scale up his political and personal concerns. Instead, he gives us more modest delights.

He finally gives his dark, dense instrumentals room to breathe on his fifth album. [Sep 2007, p.136]

Though Moz's vocal range has narrowed with age, he still delivers brilliantly titled odes to depression and hanging out on his own.

Preoccupations works with a richer emotional palette.

It's so London-specific that it almost requires an England-to-English translation for us Yanks. [Feb 2006, p.92]

While her sound is still dominated by typical darkwave elements--doomy synths and the pishy patter of minimal drum machines--the rest is unexpectedly warm, illuminated by her indomitable voice.

West's third album is memerizing and alienating, like all the purest forms of pop culture. [Nov 2007, p.114]

The best bummer-country band of this sucky century. [Dec 2005, p.107]

No Time for Dreaming wails in a world of "Heartaches and Pain" (see the memorable closing track), but Bradley's despair is never less than stirring.

The tunes barely let up until the Mann-led "Hummingbird" and "Honesty Is No Excuse" more than halfway through, and even then the usual boring singer/songwriter-isms become a nice resting place from the otherwise inescapable hooks.

The sweetness of Strawberry Jam is savvily balanced by the sour, or at least the edgy. [Oct 2007, p.98]

The Twilight Sad walk a fine line between drippy sentimentality and rough-edged realism. [May 2007, p.91]

The swollen, baroque-pop arrangements... may ruffle the band's more delicate followers. But the songs are always smart, and it's the music-librarian's humor that helps keep things from slipping into the maudlin. [Nov 2003, p.109]

There’s something whimsical about the new record that’s hard to pinpoint. The disparity between the lyrics and the sounds is a little disorienting at first, but progresses into something remarkably natural, and invigorating.

Black Mountain refine their position as the psychedelic hard-rock/goof-folk revivalists that you can actually stand for an entire album.

Here Be Monsters sounds like a fleshed-out band, graced with Mekons-derived musical trademarks.

Friedberger has always been a storyteller, but these tracks are rife with the kinds of details that breathe life into fiction, like white socks on a girl roller-skating down Market Street ("When I Knew"), and characters with names like Reggie and Peter ("I'll Never Be Happy Again").

It’s not only Vegyn’s curation of shifting instrumental sound, from jazzy and transcendental to glitchy and trip-hop symphonic, that showcases his dexterity. At the album’s centerfold, three tracks (“Everything Is the Same,” “The Path Less Traveled,” and “Makeshift Tourniquet”) repeat the album’s title in three different tones: one a scratchy, insidiously inhuman voice, the next a distant human echo that feels like a fading memory, and the last that’s closely spoken like a self-reminding mantra. Its meaning morphs and settles like a redemptive exhale and inhale.

Vedder has never been shy about naming his influences, and here they form a buoyant cloud lifting the enterprise up among the stars.

On the good side, there’s the spacey disco-funk of “Palace of the Governors” and “Begin Countdown.” Describing Deerhoof songs frequently forces you to invent delirious fictional bands to compare them to; the latter of these two sounds like the Meters as covered by an ensemble of Teletubbies. On a handful of songs that litter the album’s second half, however–”Sea Moves,” “Singalong Junk,” “Kokoye”--the band searches at its borders for a new sound to bring back and doesn’t find anything very interesting.

The MC trio rhyme with distinct cadences tuned like instruments, while engineer Earl Blaize compiles keyboards, drums, and software blips into an Afro-surrealist space opera.

Singer Christopher Owens remains unchanged: Choked on teen melodrama and blessed with a documentarian's keen eye, he's the rare indie rocker with a tender hooligan's heart.

Merritt's wordplay has never been slicker. [Jun 2004, p.105]

Clinic remember that Britpop is supposed to be fun. [Mar 2002, p.127]