Noel Gallagher wrote two more tunes here, both excellent. Unfortunately, age has softened his heart, and he cedes the album's other half to his bandmates (including lead-singing brother Liam), who offer subpar material.

Along with four new Pretenders, she's crafted a statement that's stripped bare and dangerous, just like Hynde herself, who abandons much of her haughty cool to expose some long-concealed wounds as painful as the ones that Janis Joplin unfurled on "Pearl."

They're still tilling the same murky patch, but they're pulling up prettier weeds each time out. [5/2001, p.147]

Their follow-up finds a better balance, albeit one that teeters toward a straight party groove. [Oct 2006, p.104]

If the least they do is keep revealing new shades of the familiar, it's worth sticking around and seeing this band through.

Nixing the sappy bits that dampened his debut, he rewrites the hooks from your parents' favorite Bon Jovi/Belinda Carlisle hits into earnest proclamations of teenage eccentricity, then waves his jazz hands in naysayers' faces.

Bloodflowers smartly pulls up the weeds and cleans a bed for mid-life flowers akin to Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man or Dylan's Time Out of Mind, though it doesn't reach the creative heights of those albums.

There are pleasures to be found on SremmLife 2 once you adjust your expectations and realize that it’s not a “No Flex Zone” sequel. Instead, it charts a different but still familiar path: Every youth explosion is eventually tempered by the grind and hard-won rewards of grown-man work.

The album’s escapism is alarmingly potent, to the point where it verges into the downright delusional, but its lack of self-consciousness is--somewhat ironically--the thing that keeps it in check.

She's not Katy Perry, not yet Carrie Underwood. But look out.

A masterful blend of electronic genres. [Oct 2006, p.102]

Cliche or not, Drive-By Truckers’ leftovers really are better than most bands’ main course.

The sound isn’t funereal, but exultant, the slashing and stoned pinnacle of everything the trio had built to over the course of their decade of existence.

The duo's effortless ability to plunder electronic genres without losing their identity makes Attack consistently fresh. [Oct 2007, p.111]

Nearly every song on their second collaboration--but particularly the brooding 'Salvation' and sweetly melancholy 'Trouble'--reveals gorgeous comfort in the juxtaposition.

God's Father is, in that sense, the most fulfilling Lil B release yet.

Lyrically, he's back to his old tricks--shitting on haters, shouting out himself, somehow rhyming "orange" and having "diamonds like kablooie."

Fortunately, his muse digs punk and trash--these 16 basement screams are the B-sides of rock history.

Occasionally, Boeckner and Perry replicate the 
lo-fi bustle of city life too well, achieving only a dense, dirty muddle

His finest album since American Music Club split. [June 2001, p.145]

The ten songs that make up the surprise new Mr. Misunderstood are a step back from the arena-scaled grandeur Church has been trading in for the past several years. Many of the songs feel like scaled-down counterparts to some of the best tracks on The Outsiders.

All Delighted People documents his struggle between fealty to the here-and-now and preparing for the hereafter; accordingly, it's unwieldy, schizophrenic, and frequently devastating.

The lack of a hefty, definable, or easily digestible pop overhaul here means that Little Red probably won’t hit America as hard as even its predecessor did. But it does feel like the natural progression of an artist whose narrative is so wholly and convincingly embedded in club life.

The miserable bastard can still write melodies that make the medicine go down, and ultimately, that's his redemption.

A big improvement over 2007's ho-hum "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon," it's also the most consistently satisfying full-length he's made.

Blissed-out and surreal, featuring queasy slides between loud and soft, it's a work of patient design and bloody fantasy. Brutal beauty abounds, but for the first time, Deftones are imitating rather than exploring.

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.

Very little here could be accused of being twee; Folds sounds invigorated to have a rock band behind him again, making him play harder, sing harder, be harder.