For their second album as a duo, longtime collaborator John Parish gave Harvey finished songs to write lyrics for, and his sometimes brittle, sometimes thundering guitar work provides the skeleton for an array of fleshly narrators.

If it sounds about as much fun as, say, watching CNBC, rest assured, dude's got a tighter flow than Larry Kudlow.

With Bazan's husky baritone, Strange Negotiations suggests an Americana vet like John Hiatt more than an indie lifer. But the change serves him well on "Eating Paper," which works simple wonders with a chunky guitar riff and a steady cowbell, just as the Lord intended.

Just as his piercing voice and languid tunes echo Neil Young's rustic side, a Neil-like tough-mindedness runs through Green's stark meditations, which confront despair head on.

There's not much emotional nuance in Ray LaMontagne's fourth album, which maintains a brokenhearted downer elegance, similar to Neil Young at his most somber and sepia-toned, sung in a beautiful wail that Van Morrison might envy.

It’s far more interesting and hard-hitting, with bizarre hooks where you least expect.... Taken as a whole, The Powers That B (what a title, right?) suffers from the typical overlong-yet-undercooked double-album dilemma that makes it hard to imagine playing either side in a year that isn’t 2015.

Given Holy Ghost’s two-pronged creation (unlike Lukens, Ewald wrote his contributions before Modern Baseball hit the studio), it’s impressive that the finished product sounds as cohesive as it does. That certainly speaks to the guys’ artistic connection and overall friendship. The union might be even cleaner, though, if the songwriting had been more of a collaboration rather than two separate auteurs’ A-side/B-side project.

Peanut Butter is far more self-aware, and that leads to music with greater resonance and variety.

This dense, complex document is an impressive display of vitality by the Athens, Georgia–based Elephant 6 collective, as Will Cullen Hart of the late Olivia Tremor Control weds that band’s bizarre breakdowns with Apples in Stereo’s earnest tunefulness.

No myths to sell, just the idea of a working rock band reclaiming what's left of a center-right boomer rock coalition. Hynoptic Eye gets my vote.

This horribly named duo's towering pop songs are buried so deep in reverberating juju that it's sometimes hard to follow them.

Seldom do aural hallucinations feel this triumphant--or this real. [Jul 2007, p.92]

100th Window is a masterpiece of haunted sonics. But the spirit of community that once warmed this band's angsty soul is missing. [March 2003, p.117]

This Gift flags halfway through when an odd excursion into retro-'60s twaddle gums up the works. [Feb 2008, p.97]

the monster of folk's slow-jamming, white-suited funk would seem fresher and riskier (at least in this godless era) if Matthew E. White, another Southerner with that old-time religion/romance on his mind, hadn't carved out similar turf on last year's equally ambitious and somewhat superior Big Inner.

These Los Angelenos deliver a brash follow-up to 2006's platinum-selling "15." Spewing filthy oaths and sweet promises, sometimes in the same line, frontman Josh Todd does his best to give misogyny a good name.

The band's freak-out, slacker glam jams return, but it's Earley's comparatively focused alt-country side that impresses.

Built to Spill used to grab for structure, dividing albums between compact songs and epic gushers; now the songs themselves throb like big guitar solos. [Aug 2001, p.137]

When it all cooks properly, as on the sultry, sweaty "Number One," Jackson's retro pastiches generate steam heat. [May 2002, p.125]

No one song sticks out so prominently this time around, but that’s just because Star Wars works so well as a cohesive whole.

What we have is an album that’s mostly pretty good. It’s certainly an improvement over Tha Carter IV--likely his least memorable album ever--but it’s also not a record that is going to reignite a second peak from Wayne, if that was the hope.

While Jonathan Meiburg’s uneasy high quaver has always generated the kind of simmering intensity that made Jeff Buckley so gripping and unnerving, canny tonal shifts give his introspective songs a bristling, heightened urgency.

These arch Frenchmen make precision-tooled pop that somehow retains a sense of urgency and playfulness--an impressive balancing act consistently slam-dunked by effortlessly ingratiating choruses.

Blessed feels more like a country-blues toast to the pissed-off side of interpersonal relations, set to coproducer Don Was' sturdy barroom roots rock. And Williams calls 'em like she feels 'em.

The Kooks... boast an ingenious pop-rock sound. [Nov 2006, p.102]

The overall dark, diaphanous sound here almost oversells the title, but it's impossible not to get lost in 
the drift.

As before, the least substantial choruses often repeat the longest, but it's a shortcoming offset by archly charming verses flaunting byzantine puns and rhymes that prove the Maels are as ambitiously eccentric as ever.

Extraordinarily irrational and willfully convoluted, Jhelli Beam is avant-rap as quantum physics. Hopefully, his choir gets it.