The biggest, boldest, and best moments on their second album nod flamboyantly to influences never before evident -- Erasure ("Ambling Alp") and Haircut 100 (the tropical "O.N.E."), among others -- but somehow they're seamlessly integrated with trippier old jams.

Continues their quest for idyllic listlessness, setting claustrophobic love-sucks songs to shy bedroom beats that are always passing (out) into ambient ether. [Sep 2000, p.189]

This inspired, two-disc, 29-track set is one part musical grandstand like Prince's Sign O' the Times, one part marital saga like Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love. [5/2001, p.139]

Singer/songwriter Shawn Christensen's yelping Oingo-Boingo-ish voice gets grating fast. [Nov 2003, p.117]

On Destroyer's eight album, Bejar lives up to his stratospheric self-regard. [Apr 2008, p.94]

Her third self-produced, self-released record in less than two years, is checkered with sweet-and-salty Americana, despite Lynne's tendency to wander precariously close to Jordache-commercial territory

The Slip is primo death funk, with Reznor seething seductively about skies fading to black over grinding soundscapes that perfectly split the difference between computer-music clarity and live-band grit.

It's also in those nature-obsessed lyrics, delivered in tones so dulcet and hypnotic that the inclination to don a robe and commune with Vespertine-era Bjork is overwhelming.

She fills the space with more intellectual depth than she’s shown before, incorporating T.S. Eliot’s apropos poem “Burnt Norton” as a space-age interlude. Ignoring the most offensively nonsensical of her lyrics (“Baby you’re so ghetto / You’re looking to score”), such a relatively monochrome album spans a breadth of cultural markers.

While Brock's pop instincts have never been more refined, his jitteriness has never run more rampant. [Apr 2007, p.85]

Few can both formulate hooks on the ecstatic level of 'One More Time' and then tweak them into noisy oblivion. [Dec 2007, p.119]

Only a third of the album works. Obscure, seemingly unfinished, and nattering, this is Tune-Yards’ weakest album to date at a moment when Garbus, distrusting her music’s ability to explain itself, doesn’t need the slings and arrows.

Connecting blue-haired symphony subscribers to indie-rock bedheads, the twentysomething New York composer is all over the place with his second disc. [Aug 2008, p.106]

Ultimately, the curiosity of the song selection helps Best Troubador feel like a more thoughtful and earnest tribute. Sometimes the two men’s disparate sensibilities find an appealing point of overlap.

Nobody gets credited for "echo" on this San Francisco quartet's remarkably mature second album, but that's an oversight. Play It Strange is suffused with a deep, widescreen ambience that assumes an almost physical presence.

She’s flipped the script on us, and in doing so has created her most cohesive work--and maybe even her happiest ending yet.

II, like the record that preceded it, is still a seasick and unyielding document of brutalist experimentation. But because the trio is willing to explore different avenues, there’s more corners to get lost in.

Holland swings far afield from folk and country on her third album, matching her hornlike voice to cool-jazz rhythms. [Jul 2006, p.84]

On his first solo studio album, the granny-spectacled guitar god unplugs for a set of gentle acoustic ditties.

Fans of TVOTR's early density and difficulty might get dismayed at their gradual transformation into the thinking stoner's Coldplay. But it's impossible to listen to Seeds' luxurious fuzz and think that this is a band who mean to be anything but fat and in love.

Smith sounds less joyful than usual, unable to reconcile religious faith with everyday hope. [Jun 2006, p.79]

Time to Go Home breaks new personal and political ground for contemporary goth-influenced music as Chastity Belt trades cliche nihilism for proactively feminist post-punk.

It just might be a masterpiece all over again. [Nov 2007, p.118]

Late Nights: Europe is a dirty, delectable paean to the mischief that takes place after three in the morning.

Startling turns of phrase are just another of this stunning album's grim charms. [Nov 2006, p.103]

It's a little creepy hearing such adolescent voices hooked to Miami booty bass. [Aug 2003, p.116]

It's somewhere between the album we've been waiting for Eno to release since 'My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts' and the album we wish Phish would stop releasing altogether. [Apr 2001, p.154]

Gough's dewy little tunes are mere scribblings in the margins of alt-folk's dog-eared hook-book, while his too-cool-to-care singing is drip-dry dreary. [12/2000, p.232]