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.