Misfires aside, it’s tough to dispute that although Born in the Echoes may not be a great album, it is generally a competent one.

Spastically twee, painfully saccharine. [Jun 2005, p.108]

Repurposing tired metal tropes for ecstatic sensory trips, these songs are steel-tipped pointillist portraits of vitality itself.

It's no Super Taranta!, but Hutz's minor-key odes to erotic revolution and cosmic evolution still pack a heady, sweaty punch.

While Decemberunderground sounds terrific, at times Havok's dear-diary lyrics are so awkward they're almost laughable. [Jul 2006, p.81]

"I want us thinking outside the box," Shakira tells a lover on her third English-language studio disc. And musically, at least, she succeeds throughout the wildly eclectic She Wolf.

Far and away Deftones' most daring and impassioned work to date.

As a memorable exploration of the intersection between hip-hop and the blues, it ain't much.

It's a small, controlled, uncommonly focused album, by an artist well into the kind of middle age that prizes refinement and brevity.

All told, it's an endearing bag of tricks.

Utopia contains several solid entries into Byrne’s pop songwriting canon, but few revelations. Whimsical and surprisingly optimistic, it finds him following several different impulses at once.

The sunny brutalism of Rancid's East Bay ska-thrash has lost nary a step and their ethical-emotional rigor is as sweet as it is pure.

Like Coldplay killing time with the Happy Mondays at Manchester's Hacienda club. [Mar 2005, p.92]

Gradually, he surfaces along with the band's worldly identity, but the sentiments behind the histrionic symphonics often remain obscured, and the band's desperation lacks focus.

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.

Atmosphere's least frantic, most playful album. [Nov 2003, p.114]

Their songs excavate new depths of frivolity. [Aug 2003, p.119]

Without French accents or anime babes, this kind of thing just feels incomplete. [Jul 2004, p.110]

But it's like the guitars have had their teeth fixed and bleached, like a extremely loud Colgate commercial.

The writing still can be vividly evocative, but the uninspired, folky arrangements make her words too easy to ignore.

Tidy and concise, clocking in at 43 minutes, it favors the diminutive gesture to the cloying, hammy affectation that derailed so much of his prior discography.

Though Crosswords’ lackadaisical pleasantness is by no means offensive, there’s no compelling reason for this EP to exist.

The feeling is more of what comes when the drugs wear off: there’s a hint of euphoria, but moreover, it’s a sparse and sometimes desperate reflection on working through anxiety, somewhere between the realms of T-Pain and Tame Impala. As a result, this might be the best BMSR record yet.

Revealing more to outsiders than, say, that entire Nirvana box set, it revels in the seemingly defunct L.A. pop greats' status as old-school virtuosos who turned the new school on.

That astounding guitar mastery is still evident, but Dreaming seems more interested in evoking deeper moods than showing off. [Mar 2008, p.104]

Like "Tiger," Cardinology is long on midtempo country-rock shuffles that sound comfortable with their own familiarity; Adams isn't straining to reinvent the Great Art of American Songwriting, and that allows you to focus on what he and the cardinals are actually playing, as opposed to what they're thinking about playing.

Junior could be just the thing for still-mourning Sleater-Kinney fans or anyone who likes their licks righteous and their indignation more so.

Seedy, feel-bad music. Half-dead, sometimes gorgeous, and willfully dumb beyond repair. Call it alienation porn. Sound awful? Well, it is kind of awful--and rivetingly so.