More coherent, conceptual, and organic than their eponymous British Invasion-influenced debut. [Dec 2001, p.154]

The album is stunningly crafted; their influences (Joy Division's mystic menace, Siouxsie Sioux's gothic howls) are proudly worn on blackened sleeves, but rather than dance around such matters, they dance with them.

Ices' lush melodies and dreamy voice will convert skeptics and mesmerize supporters of Kate Bush and Joanna Newsom.

QOTSA may be rock at the edge of the abyss, but Heart On vaults right over, taking flight on an updraft of woozy audacity and shuddering riffs.

The result is the trio's startlingly impressive debut: astute, melodic evocations of plinky new wave and the Cocteau Twins' smeary dreams that achieve a timeless emotional response. [Nov 2008, p.89]

Like Animal Collective, Youth Lagoon craft modernist pop so perfectly of its time that we're hardly aware of how much time has passed.

mostly Nine Types of Light feels like the liquefying of a band, ten years and four albums deep, into the soft tenderness of pre-middle-age satisfaction. Like, maybe family life sounds pretty good right about now--and it fits them well.

Taking a cue from Shelby Lynne, the Watsons consult vintage Southern styles for inspiration, incorporating touches of country and plenty of hot-blooded soul.

She simply delves deeper and gives what few artists can deliver: a self-contained world of warmth, crystalline detail, and intimacy that lies far beyond a Twitter feed.

On his 11th album, this musician's musician once again finds a coterie of like minds--Fugazi's Guy Picciotto, members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor--to help turn chronic disquiet into disturbingly palpable dread-folk.

The music is melancholic, urgent, enveloping. After more than a decade, her tightly controlled croon has lost none of its flinching effect to communicate shock and smoldering rage. Aside from sparking urgency and indignation, it evokes feelings the other side could use: humility, and shame.

Hyde and Smith prove they still have the Midas touch.

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.

"Turn the dial on my words," she suggests, and the band's glorious noise obliges time and again.

This 53-year-old minor folk vet’s drawl doesn’t obscure his flow, making it all the easier to follow his tales in real-time, inhabiting a husband cleaning his deer rifle or the bent-backed Deaver who watched as “Uncle Sam took away the neighbors’ land.”

We Were Promised Jetpacks' second album tightens the craggy fuzz of their first, revealing twisty post-punk songs with chewy pop centers.

Haunting. [Dec 2006, p.98]

As a work of scholarly revisionism, Purple Snow is peerless. How and why the Twin Cities helped transform Prince Nelson into the Artist remains a mystery. But this is a charming addition to the Paisley Park family.

This is their longest album and has the highest stakes, and succeeds.

It's synthesized, as expected, but not in a new wave way. Organs breathe a heavy, gloomy sigh through 13 tracks... It's beautiful and I'm sold.

Rainbow is a document of Kesha coming into her own, blossoming into the artist she’s always truly wanted to become.

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

So assured of its luxuriance that it clocks in at a trim 46 minutes, blackSUMMERS’night nonetheless leaves one sated. This distillation is purest Maxwell.

The title of the Roots' ninth studio full-length suggests a more fulfilled mood (Obama victory, gig as America's favorite late-night house band), at least compared to the screw-faced abyss of their last two records.

The band sounds better than ever, too, mounting a muscular four-way attack that captures the immediacy of their frenetic synchronicity better than any non-live album of theirs to date.

Packed with more than enough ideas to constitute what’s still ostensibly a “debut album,” OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES pushes new limits of bombast only to settle into the same sort of razor-sharp, high-concept pop that’s worked for SOPHIE since the beginning.

Deeper than anything she's delivered before, Aaliyah's a hard record; almost never does a song roll over and beg to be loved. This makes the yielding moments all the sweeter. [Aug 2001, p.130]

A kind, weird club crunker, Ecstasy references included. [Jul 2001, p.128]