While Educated Guess may not be her best album to date (a near impossible-to-achieve expectation for an artist 21 albums in), it marks yet another transformation of her talents.

While the lack of further experimentation in the songwriting becomes tiresome after a while, overall the band seems comfortable and happy to be playing together again.

The band sounds richer, fuller and more confident. Sometimes they also sound a little too slick for their own good -- a nagging concern with "Disappear", among others -- but the studio glitz is matched by artistic maturity.

Those of you who choose to get in on the ground floor of this superlative venture they call Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By will not be disappointed.

Never, Never, Land not only escapes the expectations and pitfalls that dogged Psyence Fiction, but succeeds on a new set of strengths.

The 90 degree turns between tracks are endearing, like a cool mix-tape -- not cause for head scratching and folded arms.

Statistics... come off like an emo version of Coldplay.

If you've ever enjoyed an Arling & Cameron record, reveled in overtaxing your speakers with Big Beats or enjoyed the more anthemic, production-intensive side of hip-hop, Super Sound is for you. Not every record in your collection needs to be a ground-breaking, classification-defining, intellectual agenda-toting classic.

Whereas Walking With Thee was a wonderful relief in the indie/retro-rock world, pushing the band's internal parameters and the idea of what pop music should sound like, Winchester Cathedral feels more like a roadblock, or at least a pit stop, rather than a step forward in Clinic's previously innovative evolution.

Pole is the sound of a restless musical talent and intellect seeking out like-minded collaborators, expanding their horizons, and producing an otherwise impossible synthesis.

Fulfilled/Complete has a raw, compelling urgency.

IATWTC do '80s-influenced dance music the way '80s dance music artists wish they could have.

There are too many ambitious singer/songwriter albums out there to easily justify any water-treading.

Like Hot Hot Heat with a less annoying singer, The Fever offer a glimpse of everything that's good about dance-punk.

The technical skill and creativity at work here are enough reason to give DJ Me DJ You more than a passing listen, even if the songs don't make your head bob up and down and your feet tap.

It's certainly a lot more wide-ranging and engaging than its predecessor.

It's encouraging to see Murphy, twenty-odd years into his career, moving so confidently in new directions rather than rehashing old glories.

Not all Kinski fans will need, or even want, this disc, and the group seems to understand that.

It's a refinement of James' existing art form rather than an exploration of startlingly new concepts

A curious beast -- dark, confused, displaced and often hopeless.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that White People should never have happened... but Paul and Dan would do well to move on while they're still ahead.

The Sleepy Strange offers seven mid-tempo rock songs, most with the inevitable country leanings that a pedal steel creates. These pieces lack anything even remotely resembling a sense of direction or urgency; Japancakes' songs don't travel from Point A to Point B so much as wander up and down the street in front of Point A and dig odd little things out of the lawn. Some listeners will love it, while devotees of single-minded purpose will positively hate it.

Love and Hate sounds fantastic, alternately steeped in warm, old school funk and terse, bubbly electroclash.

While it has a few rough patches, the Hartnoll brothers' latest effort proves that they're still at the top of the electronic music heap.

A mostly "hit" but occasionally "miss" effort that showcases both the band's maturation and its residual shortcomings.

This is Lanois's most accomplished solo recording in a decade, and in its finest moments it even eclipses For the Beauty of Wynona in terms of sheer goosebump-inducing musical soliloquy.

They won't matter in a year, or even six-months...but for the time being, Ima Robot are an utterly entrancing and joyously frivolous antidote to those pre-winter blues.

A sensitive, fully mature contribution to the pop music lexicon, it proves that, like the rare child actor who actually works well into adulthood, The Cardigans have weathered a difficult transition.