For all his skillful sampling and solid lyrics, Blueprint hasn't broken any new ground with 1988, which just underscores the troubling tendency of underground art forms to become more like the mainstream as they age.

Shine A Light is metallic, screamo-ing, ear-bursting, confused and chopping. And man, it's great.

The Coxon-less Blur is a less focused Blur, but Albarn, James and Rowntree can still pull moments of sterling derision from beneath the fog.

For a band only three albums into their career, they're showing inordinate amounts of brilliance.

The Sunset Tree feels like Darnielle's most personal record to date, and it's certainly his most immediately accessible, musically speaking.

It's also pleasing to see that Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner want to expand their sound beyond the clicks, pops, squelches, hisses and squiggles that have become their trademark.

Homesongs is his minor key playground, filled with masterpieces in the making. All you have to do to enjoy them is slow... down...

Hayden has released an album of magnificent proportions.

An overblown, overhyped dreamy swirl of sound that can't commit itself to being anything.

This music sounds a lot like something Edward Scissorhands might compose if he could just play the damn piano.

I can respect the need to innovate in hip-hop, but variety here comes at a cost -- there's no coherent or consistent melodic through-line.

Fans who still have a great deal of admiration for eighties Wire will probably be most pleasantly surprised by Read and Burn 02.

A rewarding, re-listenable collection of solid rockers and ballads.

If you take your pleasure from the sheer palpability of the music -- the way it walks icy fingers up and down your spine, and paints pictures in the air, so real you could step into them -- Blacklisted will enjoy a long, happy stay in your CD player.

A mature, elegant effort, full of richness and depth.

Absolutely essential!... It’s a coming-out party on the level of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless.

Woman King's songs are decidedly textured, rich with rhythm and reason, myth and melody.

Stephen Malkmus' solo debut is as mature, focused, and charming as it is rambunctious.

Overall, the album is more centered and collaborative and celebratory than anything Banhart has done before.

With a musical attack this meticulous and charged, I know I'd enjoy The Ex even if I was their target...

This is the album that should put Dressy Bessy on the big map.

8,000,000 Stories is not a perfect album, but it's an all-around crowd pleaser that doesn't stoop to the lowest common denominator.

Recorded with an ear for detail but guided by a loose hand, this is the most open, welcoming Cat Power album yet.

Less cohesively engaging than March on Electric Children, Burn, Piano Island, Burn is, by turns, spasmodically inviting and gratingly repulsive to all but the most patient of noisemongers.

The Great Destroyer is a marvel of layered beauty -- the sort of album that makes you call in sick to work so you can spend a day with headphones clamped to your head, charting its every elegant nuance.

As gentle, elegant end-of-the-summer albums go, Frozen Orange scores top marks. As a David Kilgour record, it's more subjective; some listeners will love the polish, while others will consider it surplus to requirements.

Oooh! takes everything The Mekons have achieved 'til now and makes it rock in truly celebratory style.

Time and time again throughout Panda Park, 90 Day Men prove themselves a rare breed -- a band capable of embracing tradition without becoming overburdened by it.

Menomena is a wickedly creative band.

According to the liner notes, Dilate took more than two years to record, beating the twenty-month-plus gestation period for 1999's Set and Setting. Fortunately, it works in our favor; they've used the time to experiment a bit, perhaps in an effort to garner fans beyond the nascent (but artistically stagnant) stoner rock genre.

You can pinpoint a little Beach Boys here, some Nick Drake there and a bit of Sunshine Fix in-between, but the Fruit Bats sound like the Fruit Bats.

Coast... sounds more logical, deliberate and downright organic than its predecessor. It's simply a more accomplished recording; because the band had enough time in the studio, they were able to fine-tune the sound to their satisfaction, creating an album that moves them forward on every front.

Unlike so many of their Gang of Four-worshipping peers, Bloc Party are that rare band that can actually transcend their influences and press clippings, crushing the fervor surrounding their arrival in a hail of splintered guitars and sumptuous despondency.

There is no shortage of understated brilliance on Love Songs for Patriots.

The Mars Volta have not only revived prog-rock as a viable commodity; they've injected it with an electric vigor that the lumbering dinosaur hasn't witnessed in ages.

Electric Version does little to alter the successful New Pornographers formula. It's a longer, louder and (most importantly) more assured album than its predecessor, but if you liked Mass Romantic, you won't be disappointed. And if you disliked Mass Romantic, you may have a difficult time telling the two albums apart.

While Point may be less viscerally invasive than any of its recorded counterparts, it remains a beautifully orchestrated exercise in modern pop construction.

On The Facts of Life, [Luke] Haines and musical co-conspirator cum multi-instrumentalist John Moore construct a vast sonic wonderland in which [Sarah] Nixey’s starry-eyed vocals are given free reign.

The sounds that pour forth from the teamwork of David Eugene Edwards, Jean-Yves Tola and co. echo another time so completely, that at times you might think these sounds were recovered, rather than newly created.

Painstakingly crafted, casually baroque music for people who get off a little bit on feeling blue.

They've truly hit their stride on Universal Audio.

In the best possible way, the album is a painful listening experience, forcing the listener into immediate and excruciating catharsis: you look into the eyes of a cold stranger, and see nothing but ugliness and painful regret.

Revealing itself slowly, like the mythic tales acknowledged by the album's title, Folklore is certainly Sixteen Horsepower's most stunning and accomplished work yet, and an easy nominee for one of 2002's best.

There's a definite demand for FLA's art, and on Epitaph, they're at the top of their game.

Whereas the band once seemed to dawdle and wander aimlessly through beds of noise, this new tight formation sees hooks, standard song structures and recognizable melodies.

It's intelligent and novel and manages to avoid sounding clichéd -- a bona fide feat these in these postmodern days

Fans of their debut will probably be glad to learn that their boisterous sound has changed very little, but many of the best moments are still the quieter ones, which serve as respites from the surrounding chaos.

HaHa Sound is a good example what a talented band can do in an era of infinite possibilities.

Primal and raw and powerful, the Gossip's third full-length is straight-from-the-gut punk desperation tinged with the hope of gospel salvation.

The downside here will be fairly obvious to anyone familiar with Thirlwell's previous output. While Flow's integration of big band jazz and other "external" musical styles is some of Thirlwell's most accomplished work to date -- creditable not only to better technology, but to the growth of his already respectable skills as a conventional composer -- its thematic elements remain the same.

Rather than detract from the funkified weirdness, the guest spots from the Adult Swim crew actually add to the craziness.

Picaresque is dense and complicated, but only rarely threatens to tip under its own weight.

It is completely different from either Akron/Family's or Angels of Light's work from earlier this year, and in Akron's case, represents a startling pace of artistic development.

It's complex, deeply melodic, carefully arranged and (for the most part) very satisfying.

Buy Turn On the Bright Lights. It's great. You'll enjoy it. But don't mistake the next best thing for the Next Big Thing. Interpol still have a lot of proving to do.

Despite its handful of flaws, Systems/Layers is rife with ideas, and delivers its message, however encoded, with elegance and ingenuity.

If Kurt Cobain had been popular in high school, Ronald Reagan had funneled billions of dollars into improving America's inner cities and the Chemical Brothers had found fulfilling positions in video rental management, all albums might sound like 604.

Vocalists Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan connect with their audience with the breathy ease of scenester storytellers, sketching out their tales in economical but well-chosen strokes, and the tunes behind them, invariably elegant, are often deceptively cheeerful.

I hope that These are the Vistas doesn't go down in history as "that record where the jazz guys played Nirvana", because it is much more than that.

Sounds like it's coming from bluesmasters who've lived twice as long and seen three times as much.

The Milk Of Human Kindness grabs at elements of its predecessors, but they're often the wrong ones.

Double Figure is as instantly memorable, not to mention listenable an IDM record as you are likely to hear this year.

Can Our Love... is a minimalistic jewel, a soul wonder and an anomaly in a pop world.

Annie has delivered a solid pop record that does a lot of things well, but -- and this is the important thing -- that's what we should expect from all of our pop records.... Anniemal isn't a high-water mark; it's a benchmark.

Tanglewood Numbers' hummable songs and often-arresting lyrics are impressive, but Berman would be nowhere without a little help from his many friends.

A dance record for people who never leave their apartments, a rock record for the rave set, Less Than Human is the sound of people high on energy and sweat.

The band refuses to stick to simple, repetitive rhythms; the guitars regularly squeal with feedback, humming with distortion as they lay down thick 'n' meaty power chords.

Rarely has the indulgence of rock ‘n roll dreams sounded this concise.

A winning combination of hip-hop beats, horns, strings and cinematic soundscapes, the album is spiced with precise scratching and effectively abrupt changes in direction.

Mercury Rev's unique talent lies in their ability to take a page from nearly every book and mold it into their own nuanced brand of music.

Heart is an exceptional sophomore effort, bursting at the seams with pop content, but the prism through which it travels bends it, taints it and humanizes it in ways that are at once soul-clenching and unpretentious.

Blending the real and the imagined, live performance and tape manipulation, traditional instruments and skewed found sounds, Akron/Family carves an eccentrically lovely niche for itself in the ever-expanding psych-folk landscape.

An album of didactic power and limitless ambition.

This is a wonderful album, full of heart, skill and intelligence, and sure to be recognized as a classic.

Rarely has such a painfully awkward adolescence led to such B-boy-ish eloquence, but as he always has, Wolf makes fronting his own band look effortless.

A short but vibrant live album... Tigers captures the boisterous good cheer of Case's live show, proving once and for all that there's more to her music than dead bodies, wounded relationships and creepy, palpable stillness.

It all adds up to a noble, well-produced and strongly-realized debut for a woman who obviously has more on her mind than becoming a pop star and cruising her neighborhood in a Bentley.

While I'm thoroughly satisfied with the maturity and elegance of Silence is Sexy, I can't help but wish they'd push the sonic envelope a bit more aggressively and try to add a bit more discomfort to the listening process.

The relentless sweetness may be off-putting to some... but it'll be difficult for all but the most jaded listeners to avoid being charmed by Of Montreal's appealing melodies and whimsical innocence-recaptured lyrics.

Year of Meteors isn't the sound of ground being broken; it's an artist growing ever more confident, but never overly comfortable, in her style.

An excellent and memorable album.

Musically rich throughout, Everything and Nothing is a spotlight for Sylvian's stylish, Brian Ferry-inspired baritone, his fascination with eastern culture and spirituality and the beautiful orchestrations of songs like "God's Monkey", "I Surrender" and "Some Kind of Fool".

Dangerous Magical Noise is rock and roll at its pure, shaggy best. If you're tired of that, you're tired of life.

They now trade in a world of startlingly bleak, matte-black liquid-crystal experimental pop perfection pitched somewhere between John Cage's frightening austerity and the bittersweet squall of Swell Maps. Art-pop doesn't get any more accessible than this.

As good as Loss was (and make no mistake, it was very, very good), Us improves on it in virtually every way.

A discernibly West Coast-influenced affair, it's an album of anecdotal moments set to a glorious country-rock backdrop: graciously sun-kissed melodies, vocal harmonies, neat arrangements and refreshing, varied instrumentation.

Most [tracks] work quite well with the multifaceted rhythms and constantly evolving beats that make each of the tracks here a true expression of creativity.

Naturally, this much theatrical -- but never facetious -- pomp and prettiness can be heavy, but it's never overbearing. Surprisingly, given the album's gravitas, it's relatively easy to enjoy in a single sitting. And another after that.

Pig Lib is the kind of album you think about even when it's not on, that slowly develops for you and creates synapses and connections that maybe Malkmus never intended.

Totally brilliant, mind-meltingly good, and as different from Secret Wars as possible, except that both of these albums could change your life.

The Australian band's trademark winsome optimism, clever heartbreak and bittersweet cuteness are in classic form here, only lusher and more layered.

It lacks the freewheeling, go-for-broke gusto of its predecessors.

The band should be proud of Yanqui U.X.O. -- it proves that they're not hopelessly married to the fine-print details of their formula, and that they can still wring fresh ideas from familiar territory.

Every track on Hate surpasses the high standards set by its predecessor. Go buy it right now.

True to its title, The Slow Wonder is a much more relaxed and toned-down, yet no less complete listen than Electric Version or Mass Romantic.

Though the covers on American III will attract the majority of listener attention, Cash’s own material steals the show.

Pawn Shoppe Heart is the most electrifying album to have trawled its way out of the Detroit gutter in ages, effortlessly showing up [The White Stripes'] White Blood Cells in the process.

Other People has a serene, thoughtful loveliness that builds with every listen.