Baldi and Co. take the best bits from Albini's tutelage, apply them to lo-fi pop-punk structures and infuse all of it with tightly wound angst.

If nothing else, the music is aggressively okay (there's coiled-spring potential in the crackling, anxious "White Teeth Teens"). But its overall unspecialness undercuts Pure Heroine's devotion to playing both sides of Lorde's "only 16" coin.

The Young-ian guitar stutter remains intact. [Mar 2005, p.92]

With Light and With Love sounds bigger, though, more accessible, conceived with an ear toward top-down, tear-out-of-town FM anthems of summers past.

The nakedness of Crutchfield’s music is the source of both its confidence and its vulnerability.

If there’s a quibble with II, it’s that like most doubles, it would be more effective as a single disc.

The Most Lamentable Tragedy can be a harrowing listen, but it’s also laced with jokes and music that’s fun and invigorating.

Two Tongues is some of the most powerfully original music either camp has released, with the intimate production raising the goose-bump factor of Conley's and Bemis' earnest, if wildly contrasting, vocal styles.

Her deranged aura aside, the second full-length from this New York group is a brainy and brawny hybrid.

File it [“NVRLND”], and the rest of 2016 Atomized, with the band’s impressive collection of non-album treasures.

With a squeaky Neil Young falsetto, backed by shambly wah-wah guitar and mop-bucket percussion, Earl chirps blithely inscrutable lyrics through a strand of airy, bedroom-psych pearls.

Abyss weighs unnecessarily heavy at times--the obvious premise and barely-there smack drum of “Simple Death” doesn’t hold up against the other songs’ more nuanced examinations of the macabre subjects--but Wolfe makes a convincing case to follow her into the underworld.

This LP sounds too close to unfocused jamming. [Apr 2007, p.95]

In making a record about growing up, Lopatin’s come out on the other side in one mutated piece.

On the leaner, extraordinarily concise Magma, you hear Gojira becoming even more fully realized.

With pedal steel by Buddy Cage (Dylan's Blood on the Tracks), ominous percussion by Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, and Buckner's usual subtle craftsmanship, he creates wasted-night rhapsodies that demand you lean in close--however warily.

From the deep bellowing bass of Nat Baldwin to the horizon-racing ride cymbal of Brian McOmber, Mount Wittenberg Orca allows Bjork's singular diction to dovetail with the Dirty Projectors' quirky male-female vocalizing, floating weightlessly like a thousand ecstatic whooshes.

While eloquently arranged, Flowers’ uniform anguish makes for an uncomfortable listen, even more so than its sonically daring predecessor, 2020’s Petals For Armor. ... Hopefully, the creation of this album — easily her purest songwriter project so far – also provided some peace.

Accelerate will be rightfully championed as the defibrillator that shocked a once-great band back to its senses.

Ferreira is finally fully reveling in the swirling cacophony that is her sound and her life.

Nouns evolves gradually, with 'Teen Creeps,' 'Sleeper Hold,' and 'Cappo' adding Superchunky pop riffs to their relentless punk vigor. [May 2008, p.109]

Astro Coast can stand up to online scrutiny--it's girls that keep Surfer Blood's reverbed indie rock jumping out of its skin.

The old comedy adage goes that if it bends, it's funny, but if it breaks, it's not. Tell that to Drive-By Truckers, who break everything in sight yet still strike tragicomic gold every time. The Big To-Do, their eighth full-length, features another cast of walking-dead survivors struggling with their vices in a Faulknerian landscape of rocked-up desperation.

While their newfound alt-rock dalliances tend to blur together in the middle for some urgent-sounding tracks marked by temper-tantrum vocals ("What goes around, comes back around," promises "We're Taking This"), they finish strong, never quite denying their metal instincts

Not everything works, and the second side maybe gets bathed in one too many foggy organ dirges, but I, Gemini is like the chorus subject in weirdo-pop single of the year “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms”: Never invincible, but never predictable.

On his fourth album, Luomo (a.k.a. Sasu Ripatti, the Finnish electronic minimalist who also records as Vladislav Delay) stays true to the course he began with 2000's "Vocalcity."

Her minimal songs--just one guitar and sporadic drums--unfold laboriously, as though forcing themselves from Niblett's clenched mouth and hands.

Adam Freeland--the nu­skool breaks vet who broke through in 2003 with "We Want Your Soul"--dons a suit jacket and hires guns (Brody Dalle, the Pixies’ Joey Santiago, Tommy Lee) for the carefully concocted, pleasantly thumping Cope.