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

All that pep blots out the undercurrent of longing that made their best '80s songs complicated and bittersweet. [June 2001, p.155]

A kind, weird club crunker, Ecstasy references included. [Jul 2001, p.128]

Exciter is basically a vehicle for Martin Gore's increasingly formulaic songs... [June 2001, p.155]

From the beginning, Franti has favored a retro, flow-through groove, and here hsi funk adds a decidedly disco flavor. [Jul 2001, p.135]

A series of six-minute tracks that set some sort of richly (or ripely?) spastic texture-beats against ethereal drone-shimmers. [Aug 2001, p.136]

Unlike U2, whose left turns have felt like oblique strategies in the band's pompous struggle to redeem rock, R.E.M.'s stylistic shifts tend to feel like survival skills. Vaguely psychedelic, filled with hazy shades of woo or whatever, much of Reveal moves with the graceful drag of 1985's Fables of the Reconstruction, yet with more ebb and flux. [June 2001, p.143]

Their most mature record to date.

Survivor is relentlessly inventive in its recombinations. [Jul 2001, p.126]

An immaculate 38-minute lullaby for the not-working class, replete with tape hiss and timpani, sweetly brooding vocals, and otherworldly Hobbit-core. [5/2001, p.147]

This record isn't as masterful as the last, partially because they're trying out new things, many of which -- horns, vocals, ska(!) -- are old things. [Jul 2001, p.134]

Rounding off the edges of its tried and true punk-rock grind with the melodic and rhythmic tropes of '60s psychedelia, Unwound has perfectly re-imagined a sound that most art-students wouldn't even spit on the first time around.

The ideal major-label debut for the age of modern-rock insecurity -- think Everclear minus the arrogance. [5/2001, p.141]

This inspired, two-disc, 29-track set is one part musical grandstand like Prince's Sign O' the Times, one part marital saga like Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love. [5/2001, p.139]

Old Ramon is sinuous and unhurried, a beautiful downer of a folk rock record that has the lithe and shadowy promise of the ocean.

A gentle, finely-wrought memory of an album, The Negatives won't change lives, but it will charm and occasionally haunt them.

Isolation Drills' anthems are shamelessly charming, even bashfully moving. [June 2001, p.153]

They elaborate on the love/disappointment/death themes of Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" while merging the sensibilities of the Velvet Underground and Vitamin C. [June 2001, p.153]

Matmos have captured with discomforting vividness the sheer surrealism of the modern vanity industry, the medieval tortures people gladly endure in pursuit of physical perfection.

It feels like a concept album -- in this case, the story of how wine-flow disco circumnavigated intellectual pretensions on all sides en route to a temporary utopia that may finally believe in nothing but the boogie but still has the infinite on its mind every minute. [June 2001, p.145]

...melds Billy Joel and James Taylor... [Apr 2001, p.161]

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 songs remain wonderfully the same - simple guitar lines seething like itchy scabs, scathing lyrics scribbled with trembling, coffee stained hands, memories of kissing with nicotine lips.

And if you've ever wondered what might happen if Jean Michel Jarre polluted the folk tradition of a Blue Ridge town, or you want to hear references to British pantomime, Bruce Haack, and Karen Finley within ten minutes-or if you're Japanese-this is probably your album of the year.

And while 'Sleepwalking' can't help but sink into the somnambulism its title promises, R&C also get ambitious, abandoning lathery fantasia for something a little earthier. [Apr 2001, p.163]

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

A mod-rock mix that's somewhere--no, everywhere--between Matchbox Twenty and 'So.' [Apr 2001, p.154]

It's somewhere between the album we've been waiting for Eno to release since 'My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts' and the album we wish Phish would stop releasing altogether. [Apr 2001, p.154]