Perhaps the producers have toned themselves down a bit just so Aesop can rock harder. Maybe they don’t want to steal his thunder. Whatever their motivation, the beats feel somewhat restrained, lethargic and lazy. But they are perfectly suited to Aesop’s limpid down-tempo rhymes.

The Furnaces’ brand of sonic mayhem may not be for everyone, but there are rewards for those who dare take the plunge.

The songs here are full of life, moving freely, focused without being bare and controlled without being uptight.

You could of course, if you like, rip the best tracks from each album and burn them together into some kind of RIAA-baiting SuperLoveBoxxx CDR that creams all opposition with its x-ray vision, amazing strength and ability to leap multiple genres in a single bound, but that would be missing the point.

In a year that’s produced first-rate albums by OutKast and Lucinda Williams, Bubba, a self-proclaimed redneck from rural Georgia who most people pegged as a probable one-hit wonder three years ago, has beaten the odds and made both the hip-hop and country album of the year.

The sad fact is that this rarely makes good on the promise of 2000’s masterful Mama’s Gun.

Seeing as this is only their third album, they can still get away with redundancy as long as it’s head-bobbing, genial and oh-so-cute. And it is.

It’s a good voice, but it’s not a good album.

This is a dismal failure.

It’s solid, but it has no power over me.

Though this album may not change the minds of the numerous naysayers, it does show an interesting development in the group’s all-around craftsmanship.

Disappointing, but still a worthy purchase.

“British Sea Power’s Classic”? Not quite. Not yet. But we can see the high-tide mark.

My Morning Jacket has come into its own here, transcending underground fetishizing to become the kind of band that can make jaws drop and tears fall anywhere it damn well pleases.

Hocus Pocus is comprised mostly of fleeting moments of brilliance where it all just coalesces for a moment, and then returns to its MOR state of undeveloped garbage.

Review 1: He may well be repeating himself... but Spiritualized are still a force.</A> <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1300" TARGET="_blank">Review 2: With Amazing Grace, Pierce has achieved a perfect balance between his traditional blues-rock leanings and his appetite for studio excess. [Score is an average of both reviews: 79 and 90]

Underneath the surface of these grand productions lies hidden undercurrents of malice, disgust and social commentary- all things that would seem to be at odds with a beautifully constructed pop song.

This is North London collection-plate-pub music of a very high calibre.

Ultimately your reaction to the first album will define your reaction here. I can foresee a long cult career for Andrew W.K., devoted acolytes swearing he is the best thing ever, and everybody else ignoring him because they don&#146;t know how to do anything else.

Pretty Girls Make Graves fall slightly short of their ambitions and capabilities, producing songs that are good, even very good, but less than what they&#146;ve proved themselves to be capable of.

With about twenty killer lines or couplets per song, unexpected hooks coming from everywhere and one of the most ingenious track sequences of the year, it’s not really so hard to imagine what The Wrens have been doing all this time.

The album is not quite a match for The Facts of Life, then, but a more than adequate follow-up.

Like a leather whip encased in a spun sugar cage, it is simultaneously deeply sexy yet innocent. And it&#146;s that push-pull tension that keeps this album yanked together tighter than a PVC miniskirt.

With its charming and imaginative love poems as lyrics, Heart is a true love album that hits all the warm and fuzzy spots directly.

Dressy Bessy is their most forward, cohesive, and just downright pleasant release yet.

It is a wonderful album that explores separation and endings and life&#146;s journeys &#150; and their inevitable end - in Zevon&#146;s inimitable style.

What happens in The Neptunes Present... Clones is that Pharrell, Chad and co. say &#147;look what we can do&#148;, and then proceed to show us that they can do nearly everything.

In essence, the group has adopted the smartest possible approach on Tour de France Soundtracks by simply making quintessential Kraftwerk music of a kind stylistically consistent with the music of its past but with subtle enhancements that suggest a connection to the present.

Strongly, boringly decent.

Haha Sound&#146;s music is always competent, and often worthy of Broadcast&#146;s debut album, but it&#146;s disconcerting to see a band repeat a simple formula with such devotion.

This is a pretty uninspired piece of work.

All the songs sound almost exactly the same. I don&#146;t care! It doesn&#146;t matter! Just dance!

It&#146;s not the most subtle or nuanced album, you can&#146;t really dance to it, and it&#146;s not particular clever. What it is: brutal, full of hooks, rock solid and fucking loud.

As eccentric as it is beautiful.

It's good in its own right, but perhaps you're better off listening to it in isolation from the rest of their canon. It's not quite there, but it is definitely a good record.

Even if the album sounds more restrained, there is nothing holding back the quality of the material.

One long sugar rush.

Such are The Clientele&#146;s gifts that its hard to believe The Violet Hour is only their debut album; few bands with more impressive vintages and prolific back-catalogues have managed to make records as touching, cohesive and deeply seeped in their own character as The Clientele have here.

Played start-to-finish, New York Noise begins to cohere into a joyously multi-hued mass, where hip-hop is a natural cousin of atonal noise, where minimalism becomes the perfect complement to funk, and where not even the skronked-out mess of DNA or the melodramatic ultra-seriousness of Glenn Branca can get in the way of a good party.

Unlike cLOUDDEAD, every track on Oaklandazulasylum is, at least musically, accessible and inviting.

A disjointed mess- brilliant songs gone so awry that I find myself no longer excited by the prospect of listening to the album through, but disappointed.

Hotel Paper treads the line between rushed brilliance and rushed dross.

There’s a glistening veneer of contented happiness coating the record, as if some adult-oriented radio programmer gleefully shat on it, but the tragedy is that Phair is wholly complicit in this utter waste of talent.

Blemish is not sadness or happiness; it is strange observation and relapse.

I Am the Fun Blame Monster is totally vibrant, totally groovy, and once again, totally awesome.

It&#146;s not a real consistent journey, because of the eclectic styles, but the masterful sequencing makes it flow smoothly from track to track.

Promise Of Love is chock-full of pretty, melancholic music. In other words money well spent.

This record is still an example of mediocrity.

The highlights would be far better suited to lesser status on a great album, and turning away from the impressive vocal performances of Rock Action to fully retreat into vocoders and hushed mumbling is a step backwards. [Note: Score listed is an average of two separate reviews, scoring 91 and 72.]

The record is sprawling and beautiful, a genuine pop masterpiece through and through.

Beckett references numerous stylistic signposts across the multifaceted recording&#146;s thirteen tracks--Merzbow, Chain Reaction, Fennesz, Techno, Pole--but manages to personalize his music too by infusing its cool, abstract minimalism with a sensual warmth and melodic pop sensibility.

Musically there&#146;s not enough variation to keep things interesting throughout.</A>[Note: Score listed is an average of two separate reviews: a <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/musicreviews/grandaddy-sumday2.shtml" TARGET="_blank">61</A> and an <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/musicreviews/grandaddy-sumday1.shtml" TARGET="_blank">85</A>]

While it&#146;s unrealistic to expect another Kid A-like transformation, by pulling all those familiar elements together, Hail to the Thief sounds, well, a little familiar.</A> [Note: Score listed is an average of two separate reviews: a <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/musicreviews/radiohead-hail_to_the_thief2.shtml" TARGET="_blank">68</A> and a <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/musicreviews/radiohead-hail_to_the_thief1.shtml" TARGET="_blank">90</A>.]

You can actually hear the moment when the album turns sour.

It could have been much more, but for what it is -- a blissful summer excursion -- L' Avventura is delicately delightful.

The most wildly inventive, exploratory, unafraid, surprising, nonsensical, and flat out funkiest single I&#146;ve heard all year.

Despite the ubiquitous lackluster second half, and some weak tracks scattered throughout, the opening triple-threat supersedes them.

Nastasia&#146;s pen has sharpened greatly since The Blackened Air. No more does she scratch out mental images and feelings into terse songs, but builds upon those images and experiences -- placing the listener in her worn, ragged shoes -- instead of in our Gucci&#146;s, 20 feet away, behind a chained link fence.

Soul Journey might sound downbeat and lonesome, wistful and dusty, but this is gospel music compared to what went before.

But overall as much as the listener should be prepared to hate this record and its pretensions towards anticipating pop trends, it isn&#146;t necessarily a failure.

It suffers from a lack of identity.

You Forgot It In People is a tremendously accomplished album, magnificently achieving its goal of creating bonafide pop music and doing so with admirable style.

Clearly, Gold Chains has a lot to say and a lot to prove, and possesses the means to do so. What this requires is some focus.

Zoo Psychology is a phenomenal 20-minute experience, if only for its sheer insanity. The songs aren&#146;t consistently strong enough for it to be remembered too long down the road, but it does make for a thrilling listen.

What really makes Hawley stand out from just about every other contemporary solo artist is his modernization of the classic, silky pop sound and his adjustment of it to fit into today’s world.

Fire&#146;s not something we&#146;ll remember for long, but it is a surprisingly good album, with highlights that simply need to be heard.

From Every Sphere is frequently let down by Harcourt&#146;s mediocre songwriting.

Do you have any idea how dull it is listening to someone being calm and content?

Anyone that expects the pulsating You Guys Kill Me would be better off sitting this one out, but Elliot has pulled off a tricky feat here: stripping down his sound to more orthodox "rock" instrumentation, without losing his edge.

Being Ridden is not a great album, because these kinds rarely are. Kidwell&#146;s vision is born of confusion and disarray, so it&#146;s only natural that his art would follow suit.

Slideling eschews all of McCulloch's recognizable quirks and endearing pretensions, replacing them with slick generic &#147;mature&#148; songs and arrangements that make Coldplay sound adventurous.

You may not get to sing along, but this is not ambient music; it is immersive and involving.

One of the best and most refreshing albums released in a long time.

The main, fundamental problem with this album is that as good as the melodies are, it really does fall flat in trying to get you to feel anything.

Little new or exciting is added to the mix that can&#146;t be found in different forms on their previous two albums. Instead, the album works as a consolidation of strengths from earlier works.

Perhaps the greatest expansion in Herren's sound is the range of emotion conveyed in One Word Extinguisher.

A dull compromise of artistic intent and marketability.

True, Think Tank is flawed. There are many, many things wrong with this album.... But the record&#146;s peaks are extraordinary.

Capable punk rock with a slightly skuzzy, yet unmistakably pop edge.

This album is an incredible disappointment- right when Wire was beginning to build up momentum; there&#146;s not even enough new material here to fill a third EP, and the recontextualizing of the Read & Burn songs hardly makes it more worthwhile.

She doesn’t attempt to emulate the pedantic attention to detail of Kevin Shields, largely avoiding the dreamlike wooziness of Loveless, but rather builds on the cathartic emotional impact that feedback and noise can lend to melancholic melodies.

The entropic quality of the &#145;yellow&#146; Pole has undergone a &#145;rehab&#146; of sorts, resulting in a cleaner and reinvigorated sound.

The slight progression of the group here is discernible with a better understanding of balancing the musical peaks and troughs.

A fantastic revelation.

For once, Madonna has stumbled not because she reached too far, but because she didn't reach far enough.

It's a mixed bag, to be sure, but even Autechre's clich&#233;s are more interesting than nearly everything else you'll hear this year.

Like many comedy albums, it delivers initial laughs, with few surprises for continual listening.

The problem with this kind of record is not that it&#146;s hard to find fault with, but that it&#146;s hard to get excited about.

Summer Sun, while constantly very good, is never creative, inspiring or great. [Editor's Note: Score listed is an average of three separate reviews/scores by this publication: 56, 60, 68]

Up In Flames is a record in love with music made by a music lover, futurepsychenoisebeatpop that reaffirms how much fun music can and ought to be.

Thickfreakness is an unrelentingly dour record - perhaps this music was best left in the past.

To the casual observer there's really no need to get this album if you already own Is This It or Turn On The Bright Lights.

From its opening bars of stop/start low end, to the motivational tape samples, to the aforementioned multi-tracking, Elephant just screams and begs to be viewed as a departure from the Stripes’ well-known approach. The problem is that in between all this commotion lie the same vintage jams that the group has trafficked in for years.

The Kills' sludgy punk-blues doesn't contain many pop melodies or catchy choruses.

More than anything in his career, Escapology is literally riddled with confession and confusion.

Luckily, his affable spunk grounds much of the exploration, yet, at some point, the line between circumstance and good songwriting becomes suspiciously blurred.

This album is flat boring musically and sonically.

Us has a dynamism and vastness that makes Loss cower in its shadow.