Hot Mess is flush with other stupid-smart highlights, including 'Pete Wentz Is the Only Reason We’re Famous.'

Both "Smokin' and Drinkin'," featuring Little Big Town, and the rowdy "Somethin' Bad," her and Carrie Underwood's retort to bro-country, feel forced. These are small missteps on an otherwise solid outing.

A disco-swept dreamland. [Aug 2006, p.83]

Their seventh studio album bucks and chugs, balancing the quartet's original alt-country impetus with Rhett Miller's love of power pop. [June 2008, p.116]

On their sixth album, these ever-evolving German indie rockers stick with the electronic-tinged direction of 2003’s Neon Golden, but with a little less emotional heft.

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.

It's hard to think of another post-hardcore lifer whose return to active duty is so high-five worthy.

Fiasco approaches his second album as if it's his last chance to get all his conflicted ideas out into the open.

On Being Funny in a Foreign Language, the lyrics remain flippant. The instrumentals are gone. On the following 10 tracks, you can feel Antonoff taking over to guide the band’s more straightforward pop songs. ... It’s the 2022 Antonoff playlist it was crafted to be. It’ll make a lot of people happy. It sounds like it made the band happy too.

Producer Parallel Thought supports the storytelling (and saves the duo from dissolving into navel-gazing) with sharp loops.

Start Here does a great job of cataloging the highs and lows of early milestones: first kisses, first breakups, leaving home for the first time.

Project is prime second-tier Polly, opening melodic and textural doors unlike much else you’ll hear in 2016, and it amounts to a lean, compulsively listenable 41 minutes that makes a conscientious effort to do something larger with her gifts.

Grohl and his pals never set out to write the gospel on modern rock--they only sought to preach it, hammering it into our heads by way of biting hooks and anthemic melodies. There’s more than enough red meat to go around on Concrete and Gold, the band’s ninth album.

Inni--a double live album (plus live DVD)--is a master class in geologically paced, ethereally pretty buildups.

Like the film from which it borrows its title, Lady From Shanghai is an artfully awkward study in malaise.

The title of Clinic's sixth album cheekily nods to the surgical-masked Brits' current, revamped sound--a softer spin on indie pop with their usual gritty agitation almost completely scrubbed away.

Calling Headlights "nice" sounds like a backhanded compkliment, but Some racing wears the tag proudly: it's charming, but never boring [Mar 2008, p.102]

The album's rockers are a serviceable change of pace--especially 'Little Foot,' which channels early, Farfisa-laced Elvis Costello--but it's Mandell's torch songs that ignite.

Beans' avalanche of verbiage can obscure his nuances, but a cast of collaborators--disco evangelist In Flagranti, electro-hop eccentric Tobacco, psychedelic beat guru Four Tet, even Interpol's Sam Fogarino--burnish his rhyme schemes into high-tech funk.

A guitar record equally suitable for a lost weekend or a good cry. [Sep 2002, p.125]

Think Africa ’70 minus the choruses and sax solos. If that doesn’t sound heretical to you, the groove awaits.

The results are fairly stunning. [Nov 2007, p.125]

The first half of this double EP was recorded with a 19-piece Oaxacan band, who pull the songs away from Condon's reflexive melancholy; but next to their pomp, his sparse bedroom electronics on Holland (under the name Realpeople) feel a tad thin.

Eve has moved her Ruff Ryders to the back half, scored some marquee-value collaborators, and found two guys who can mimic Swizz Beatz well enough to fill the spaces around Mr. Beatz's four tracks without too many seams showing. [5/2001, p.141]

The aptly titled Wake Up the Nation hardly feels like a nostalgia trip; in the taut, two-minute boogie-punk number "Fast Car/Slow Traffic," Weller could be describing himself in relation to his heritage-rock peers.

Once you've heard the undoctored edition of Bert Jansch's heartbreaking "Needle of Death," a harrowing tale of self-destruction by heroin predating Young's own "The Needle and the Damage Done," the noisier approach feels like needless gimmickry that diminishes, rather than enhances, one of his strongest sets in a long time.

Unfortunately, timelessness does not always equate with flawlessness.... it is all a little too pristine and sanitized for someone's protection...

The Florida band is now content to catch Pixies-ish waves of gentler mutilation and ride them 
to college-rock bliss.