The relentlessness of the pillaging becomes one of the album’s virtues—each song wildly varies from the next, revealing thirty-five minutes of noise and pop that extends far beyond the surface into a slowly decaying singalong monster.

It has one pace, and that pace is “mature”.

This is not a ‘return to form’—how could it ever be? A band of this age have some many peaks and troughs in form as to render that kind of phraseology practically meaningless. Just as Porcupine should, just as Ocean Rain should, Siberia too should be taken in isolation.

Made in Brooklyn is mostly filler and little meat.

Were the album as sleek and steely as “Makes Me Wonder,” we would be crowning and mitering Maroon 5 as master purveyors of white-boy funk.

A highly enjoyable album... one that’s louder than the Liars, more fun than the (new) Strokes, and ten times more dynamic than the Arctic Monkeys.

Review 1: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1476&PHPSESSID=cae64c01fc4f0115d70d2aaefcf8ddcc" TARGET="_blank">It's as lost and macilent and alluring and eager to please and disturbingly empty-eyed as she is.</A> [Score=67] Review 2: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1477" TARGET="_blank">Ultimately, In the Zone suffers greatly from Britney's uneasy transition from teen tart to sexually powerful woman.</A> [Score=47]

It’s enormous, senseless, superficial, selfish, and cocky past the point of absurdity, but it’s never wrong.

Paul and Dan, knowing that the Dating Game skits sandwiching the album were just a poor shadow of the 3 Feet High And Rising game show, had to up the Wacky Factor within the songs themselves. “More guests! More cray-zee guests!"

It would be difficult to convince yourself that The Sun is anything but meandering and listless.

The Cost is bleached of any sort of lifeblood, stumbling out of the gate and moping towards the finish line.

Digital Ash offers enough swelling, androgynous moments to approach its hype, or at least keep up with its release partner.

Theirs is an unwelcome indie lyricism that lives in a vacuum, devoid of guttural expression and left to vacant, bumper-worthy slogans.

It’s an easy and mostly enjoyable listen.

A quiet, thoughtful, but never uninteresting album.

The second half of the album falls into a malaise as tempos slow and arrangements become more orthodox, placing Bloc Party closer to Coldplay than one would have thought possible two years ago.

Approaching this album, I was skeptical. I was convinced it would be one of those albums with three good songs (the singles) and a load of filler. But it’s actually a solid, quality album with a smattering of great tunes and loads of shuffly beats that will make you lose control of your feet.

Unfortunately, Now is the Time! short-circuits early, leaving us with an empty gimmick and a few good synth-zapped riffs.

Revolverlution illustrates that they can adapt to varying song forms, that they are open to technology and that they are still able to craft gripping hip-hop. Unfortunately, they have also kept up with the hip-hop nation by making an album that doesn&#146;t contain enough decent material to justify its near-ridiculous length.

I’m definitely recommending Unplugged--with reservations, but it’s still a recommendation--but damn, I just wish the fun Keys seems to have on stage would translate more clearly to record.

Uncovering the strands that make up Black Mountain’s debut album helps describe what the album sounds like. What it doesn’t help describe is how well the pastiche is constructed and how enjoyable the proceedings are.

Remember that concept album Tori Amos did that was supposed to reclaim all those male-oriented anthems from their blowhard XY carriers? Smith paints over Amos’ tedious version and executes the idea so much better, without even bragging that she’s doing it.

Precious, effete and insubstantial.

Friends: believe me when I say that the combination between the two disparate elements&#150;unbearably goofy synth-pop and sub-par commentary on various parties&#146; political shortcomings&#150;is indeed a deadly one.

I don&#146;t see it as a release you can draw much from through repeated listening, but it&#146;s a brave and powerful trip nonetheless.

The realisation is obvious: a happy, contented, motherly Tori Amos is as irrelevant, sterile, and airbrushed as her face is on the cover of this album. Tori: it’s over.

La Bella Mafia is one of the top hip-hop albums of 2003, so far.

Where the Donnas offer confident exhortations and definitive declarations, Kiss And Tell is dribbling with foggy contemplation and emotional explanation.

While lyrics have never been Mellencamp’s strongest suit, they’ve never been as clumsy and crotchety as this.

A record that's so deathly serious that each of it's ten songs could be associated with its very own biblical plague.

Much like Aaliyah’s sophomore effort One In A Million a decade ago, Ciara: The Evolution is the sound of a babydiva starting to really find her voice.

While little here strays far from the sound Death Cab has been tweaking for the past five years, it still makes for an intriguing listen for even casual fans of the group, and has its share of genuinely stunning moments.

Under My Skin is a far more balanced album than Let Go, allowing Avril to stretch out a bit more and not suffer the troughs that typified any song that happened to follow a Matrix penned track.

The vast majority of this release just doesn’t stick together coherently and suffers because of it.

Like Trans Am’s late-90s material, this album is enjoyable without being astonishing.

In a time when The Darkness is successfully parodying cock-rock, members of Velvet Revolver are still earnestly carrying the torch. Whether you think that&#146;s noble or laughable will probably determine your opinion of this album.

At 11 tracks, it doesn’t exactly famish the vaults, and its instrumental-heavy tracklist prohibits it from being a good newbie recommendation.

Planet Earth marks a slight improvement on that one ["3121"], which is progress of a sort, but incremental advances like this almost guarantee that the marketing hoo-hah will get more attention anyway.

It wouldn’t be so bad if The Stills didn’t kill the majority of the newly minted loose-limbed percussion and flighty major key romps ("The Mountain")--with drivel choruses and intermediate tricks (flooding the speakers with a porridge of every conceivable instrument).

Greedy Baby doesn’t make sense sans visuals, and even with them it makes… little sense.

Wu diehards will see it as a 35-minute core of classic Method Man, while critics should view it as a 60-minute behemoth that's a marked improvement over Tical O and Judgment Day, but still padded with pointless skits and Charmin-soft rap & bullshit.

At first listen, N.B. sounds creepy. But ignore the lyrics, surrender yourself to the joys of pop songwriting and N.B. seems to approach perfection.

Beans has yet to learn, however, that we’re paying the price of admission to hear him wrap his tongue around the mic, not screw around with his drum machine.

It doesn’t always work, and the record has a scattered second half that undercuts the sonic unity of the first, but the best moments here are as starkly affecting as any of Garnier’s past work.

A lot of these songs blur together and become indistinguishable.

If music is best judged by its immediate effect on the listener, this record succeeds and cannot be forgotten. In this case, that's not a good thing.

Even with Kozelek's laudable work on this outing I feel that something more robust could have emerged had the roots been original.

The biggest problem might be Rice’s vocal technique. On O, he had a tendency to endearingly strain for notes he couldn’t reach. Now, it sounds like he’s purposefully written songs to allow him to overextend his thin voice.

Past a handful of listens this becomes quickly uninspired.

There is an immediacy and zest to the Rakes’ latest effort that is commendable, but it’s not that memorable.

I&#146;m making a mix CD for someone and it&#146;s an incredibly difficult one because she&#146;s into crap like Ben Harper and Lemon Jelly, and I can&#146;t even impress her with a Travis promo CD because they&#146;re &#145;too boring&#146; even for her!

Though you really can&#146;t forget any of the work he&#146;s done in the past decade or so with his former band, Jason Loewenstein has really pulled off a gem of a record that momentarily loses you in his own music.

The first disc actually suggests the band is capable of making a live album worth your time even if you didn't like Bring It On and Liquid Skin, but its welcome is worn out and its charms are fatally undercut by the turgid, unnecessary second disc.

Wholly forgettable.

While the "darker follow-up to the breakthrough album" angle was an unavoidable cliché for Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday does their part by giving the more aggressive workouts a stronger sense of purpose.

Kill Them With Kindness might be a rewarding listen, for example, for a Stars fan, but then again it might be better to stick with the more familiar originals.

For all its tasteful craft, aesthetic unity and knowing winks to its makers’ history, it’s simply not very interesting

I wish I could critique them for something other than their obvious debt to Spoon. Sadly, that’s the most distinguished characteristic behind the studied, boardroom-designed pop of Robbers on High Street.

The Exchange Session’s second volume retreads the same path that Hebden and Reid took earlier, but they truly go places this time around.

Oh No is, if anything, even better than their debut, which now feels like it was trying a bit too hard. Everything feels more natural this time, slightly less polished but still as forceful and hooky.

Goodbye contains both the best and the worst of Schnauss’ output until now.

No matter how many literary allusions or whimsically witty turns of phrase he packs into a verse, The Believer lacks the balance and blood of his previous work.

It’s the sound of two very talented musicians getting their proverbial creative ya-ya’s out, temporarily sullying their good name to lay ground for something potentially even more exciting.

Velocity is one massive dose of extremely fuzzed-out pop.

Whatever Sam’s Town’s scant merits, the album reminds artists to be more careful about their role models—and to avoid Bono’s phone calls.

<A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1752&PHPSESSID=962ece01ecbce6b79b9bf797952f15ee" TARGET="_blank">It's a much stronger record than you might expect from something that will probably wind up being, in retrospect, a transitional album.</A> [Review 1, score=80] <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1753" TARGET="_blank">It's just too much; too much noise, too much concept, too much deep NJ woods isolation, and too many witches' tales.</A> [Review 2, score=50]

Don’t Believe The Truth is simply Oasis being Oasis with maximum efficiency. Which is to say that if you’re a committed acolyte of the church of Oasis, you’ll love it.

Prefuse 73 sounds freer, and yet more deliberately formal--most of the songs break down like classic hip-hop does, two-thirds of the way toward the end.

His beefs have become so infinitesimal that he&#146;s started to unconsciously parody our LiveJournal culture, a minor event or misunderstanding generating reams of dialogue, running commentary and painstaking minutiae. In short, he&#146;s no more compelling than one of those non-famous drama queens in your life you already find insufferable, just another loser who blows up non-events, and it&#146;s transformed the long-running Eminem Show into the most myopic, hand-wringing, self-reflexive stuck-in-the-mud soap opera of our time.

All at Once is still challenging, but it’s a challenge without much reward.

If The Blueprint proved that coming back is easy, The Blueprint 2 proves it&#146;s difficult to stay on top.

It’s easily the strongest album that she’s made in this millennium, but suffers from the fact that her vocals have deteriorated.

My December isn’t the kind of earth-shattering fuck-you accomplishment that would make this story too good to be true. However, it’s not nearly as bereft of good songs and great moments as some folks would have you believe either.

It’s a shame that Stone and Saadiq fall for the name-dropping approach to making records; inserted like ad-breaks, the guests are easily the worst thing on the album, giving a strong whiff of one of those horrible kitchen-sink-and-rolodex stinkers in the middle of a really very good, if conservative, soul record.

Perhaps it’s too easy to blame Fridmann for these new distractions, but I can’t imagine Ounsworth and the band leaping ahead this way without him. Here’s to hoping that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah move backward more lithely than they progress.

Maybe their edge was lost in the lukewarm production. Maybe it was lost in Barney’s lyrics, which are as utterly meaningless as they have been for years now. Maybe it was just lost altogether.

Tamborello’s incorporated the extended song structures of minimal into his newer constructs without the genre’s scope for subtle detailing and nuanced alteration.

Cale faces a problem that neither recent Tom Waits nor Leonard Cohen have overcome: he can't sing anymore.

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.

A directionless mess that never makes an obvious commercial ploy, never reveals any new ideas and never implies any forethought or central intelligence, yet somehow demands attention throughout, revealing new layers and engaging moments with every listen.

Mediocre to its very last note, it reminds you that mediocrity is indeed far worse than simply awful.

An uneven record that came out a few years too late.

Athlete&#146;s sound is a wondrous discovery for young teens just getting into &#147;chart indie&#148; or jocks who feel open minded for listening to something a little more complicated than Oasis. For anyone else really, Vehicles & Animals only offers up a smorgasboard of odd, inventive pop music that&#146;s only odd and inventive enough to try and sound less like everything else.

Version has its share of undeniable clunkers, but its successes are so immediate and so animated that no reasonable listener could possibly begrudge Ronson for forcing them to rely on their track-skip button.

The Sunday girl may be entering her autumn years, but she&#146;s still an absolute treasure.

While Sennett is often compared to Elliott Smith, at least vocally, there’s far more Badly Drawn Boy in his persona; his voice warbles meekly about waking up with the sun, eating butter, and smiling oceans, even while the egotism lingers.

It’s the most consistently entertaining and lasting of R. Kelly’s albums yet.

His career for the last decade is basically that of a chicken with its head lopped off, running around the coop unawares whilst coughing up a never-ending stream of blood. If you couldn’t guess, Eat Me, Drink Me is where the fowl finally falls over and collapses in a pile of its fellow poultry’s fecal matter.

If he cut the middle out and made it an EP, Kenny Chesney’s Be As You Are would be a classic.

This is the band’s most listless, amelodic effort to date.

You can see the Angel/Heaven/Cocaine lyrics coming a mile off and the predictable bass that punctuates them soon becomes just as banal.

All Years Leaving collects plenty of derivative (but enjoyable) music with a few bright moments of originality.

Keane have talked up Under the Iron Sea as being bleaker, more raw than their debut album. It is about the things they have seen over the last two years, the problems, the horrors, the sin. But Keane have not been uncovering the carcases of napalmed babies for the last two years. They’ve been playing music.

This record is dull, predictable aural soup, and dullness in music should be punishable by death.

Admittedly, though it’s clunky and overwrought, the real problem isn’t that the story is tedious or that Olga’s voice is awful--it’s actually weirdly thrilling--it’s that the album simply doesn’t feel as well executed as the premise promises.

Great ideas abound--it’s just that they stumble on their face.

Live From Rome is fairly lyrically sound. In this case, “lyrically sound” should be taken with exactly two grains of salt. One grain would represent the ranting political nature of the content.... Grain #2 simply exclaims, “Dude! Rhyme!”

If you can get past all the arch pretension, When the Deer Wore Blue rewards you with plenty of tunes.