Everyone from Lady Gaga to Muse chips in here with perhaps the strongest, most flavorful batch of tunes to reach an AI vet, and Lambert's polymorphous vocal skills unite dancefloor strut and hard-rock pomp in a convincing glam package.

Shards of Come With Me suggest Crow has more to offer the metal gods than the intermittently awesome sludgefests served up here.

The album isn’t perfect. The pensive closer “Childhood” is too precious in its “where did the time go” wonderings. Lead single “Edging” is a mediocre punk number even Green Day might have left behind, and “When We Were Young” is undercooked and appears to battle its own time signature. But it’s still the band’s best work in 20 years, and rocket fuel for this new chapter and whatever follows.

It lands in the same general ballpark as 2003's new-wave homage Rock N Roll, loose-limbed and manic, with Adams indulging his riff-rock-and-holler side.

Like a lot of young artists who've been flash-fried by the Internet, these guys also aren't so much great as they are getting better, using public interest to spur themselves on. Bossalinis is cleaner and more varied than their mixtapes, but this album is also long.

Less an electronica CD than a dub album without any original sources--and it's all the freer for it. [Oct 2001, p.128]

Often lives up to its title, but they ought to find a kind way to break it off with the horn section. [Jul 2003, p.110]

Its sound is bright, slick, and micromanaged.

Their more subdued follow-up doesn't dirty things up much, but it does give some character to the quartet's airtight groovemaking.

Tortoise have erased virtually all of their music’s familiar signifiers, opting now for stylistic mashes that fall into anonymity as often as they reach new, exciting places.

God Forgives is a comedown--sporadically introspective, occasionally rousing, and sort of without purpose.

Rather than trying to replicate their off-the-cuff studio performances onstage, Gordon and Nace treat the songs as rough outlines for further improvisation, to be colored in as the musicians please.

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

He seems plenty happy to hone coulda-been Nirvana licks to perfection on Afraid of Heights, which, despite being an album of all-new material, still feels like the Incesticide of his canon.

Now even Gary Powell’s drums can’t give these sodden valentines the right kick.... The best Anthems recall a time when Doherty and Barât could still tickle each other.

Steadfastly chirping crescendos, whinnying breakbeat stampedes, and the odd evocative vocal.

All texture and no text. [May 2004, p.108]

Admire feels oddly reined in, a transitional record by a band not yet willing to completely let go of the past.

Rafter-reaching wuss rock that might appeal to those who find Snow Patrol a little too heavy. [Mar 2007, p.86]

Red of Tooth and Claw, like 2006's grumpier "In Bocca Al Lupo," runs low on contemporary touchstones or appeal. Keep this on your great-grandparents' Victrola, though, for a rainy afternoon of rootsy escapism.

Endless Now was recorded in the same upstate church where Dinosaur Jr. made 1993's Where You Been, and it sounds like a happy refugee from that alt-rock era, all battering drums and youthful, melodic confusion.

The gentler E distances himself from his lycanthropic alter ego, searching for Ms. Right backed by a familiar arsenal of winsome melodies and elegant string arrangements.

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.

The songs here may be marginally less interesting than his best, but it's comforting to know that he can ratchet down the passion without losing it entirely. [Nov 2006, p.98]

Guru is as bluntly eloquent as ever. [Sep 2003, p.115]

A fresh, literate blast of nuanced screamers and mid-tempo heart purging. [Aug 2003, p.119]

II feels like the dance-music equivalent of a compost heap: warm, organic, funky, but a tad squishy.

The Bronx native's tenth LP is consumed by legacy: his lengthy career, his harrowing life, and his craft.