Rotten Apple... doesn’t try to address Banks’ shortcomings, it just buries them under tectonic plates of NYC sturm und drang and more of Banks guffawing end rhymes.

Musically the record comes off as simply a rote (if spirited) rendition of the best records from Rainer Maria or 764-Hero, which certainly isn’t saying much.

Hello Love is certainly the most hinged of their three releases, in that it sounds the cleanest—the most streamlined both instrumentally and lyrically. Too bad what it’s saying is, more often than not, familiar to the point of being trite.

It’s not that this album had to be catchy. But when an uninventive melody is rehashed ten times to the point that you wonder whether literal keys and strings are missing from the band’s instruments, what you get is a diffusion line of a product that wasn’t even selling well in the first place.

Close listening is rewarding--the boys have a knack for crafting intricate songs that lean heavily on texture and subtle interplay--but perhaps a bit too gentle.

More than with either Mutations or Sea Change, you can hear Godrich’s rich instrumental layering beneath the rhythms.... Still, at fifteen tracks and over an hour, perhaps Beck needed a stiff editor more than the comfort of a familiar producer.

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.

THS’s move toward a purer aping of classic rock is mostly welcome and largely successful; the fallout is the loss of the band’s snaky, blunt riffing, their wit dissipating into a pool of honest rocking.

This collection actually betters the previous one in terms of diversity, but unfortunately it also gives you the sense that you’ve heard it all before.

The Dears are now less idiosyncratic but have successfully made the kind of straightforwardly satisfying album that you'd expect from a band on their second decade.

Tempting as it may be to assume that beefing up their sound would have automatically made the Decemberists markedly better, the truth is that these strides may have at least partially come at the expense of the things that always made the band so singularly compelling.

Unfortunately, the magic of [the] first three songs is never captured again.

With Friendly Fire, we get a number of concepts and stabs at self-aware dynamics, but we mostly just see the over-privileged slacker.

The majority of Nastasia’s guitar-and-piano bit parts are full bodied and masterful, overshadowing many big-footed leading ladies’ recent folk releases.

For Hero: For Fool is a complete work from artists working at the top of their game.

As beguiling as much of Under the Skin is, these songs would benefit from the Mac’s supple, still-underrated rhythm section.

Beach House’s debut is consistently candlelit, worn at its lacy edges, and at once vertiginous and embracing, somehow residing both at the hearth and on an icy precipice.

His seemingly harmless overarching theme of matters extraterrestrial stitched through each of the album’s tracks somehow compromises their effectiveness.

There’s precious little to get, well, excited about here.

The Lemonheads is full of, for better or worse, comfort music. It radiates a blunted nostalgic glow that seeps through the frequent musical languor.

Whether the songs are merely half-developed or the sugar-sheen production simply washes them of any potential grit, it seems apparent that the dreaded second album curse hath struck again.

Unlike its Fridmann-produced predecessor Dreamt For Light Years employs a stripped-down approach more akin to its debut.

Knives is a quietly simmering LP.

Human Animal comes off as a less directly brutal assault than its predecessor. It sounds a hell of a lot better cranked to ten, though, its contours more explicit, the sounds sharpened to a steely point.

Release Therapy may not be the mature Ludacris record it purports itself to be, but that isn’t to say it doesn’t have some jaw-dropping confessional moments.

As an introductory My Morning Jacket mixtape, Okonokos is top-shelf.

The songs here are superb, the arrangements and production nearly perfect, and Jackson’s singing is the best of his career.

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

When Dunckel moves away from pop immediacy, the results are often puzzling.

Rather than winning over new converts, AWOO’s main achievement might be to delineate, skilfully but inescapably, the outer boundaries of its creators’ artistic reach.

Ben Kweller may not sum up Kweller, but it’s a worthy personal statement from a popster whose chops keep getting better.

It’s been years since he sounded this responsive and attentive.

Fiasco is actually an absolutely dazzling emcee and a genuinely nuanced personality, and both of these things are incredibly rare in hip-hop in 2006.

TV on the Radio have crafted a work of immense, cataclysmic, almost overwhelming power and righteous fire.

It seems to prove a cardinal rule about art and ambition; if you paint in too many colors, you end up with mud brown. The Mars Volta could fill up whole galleries with canvases this color, and with Amputechture, have constructed another monochromatic monument to wild, uninhibited excess.

The transition from tracks to songs forces the group to rein in a style that needs to be no-holds-barred. When Basement Jaxx uses this restraint to their advantage... it’s easy to buy the direction they taken. When it doesn’t, Crazy Itch Radio just makes the group appear dense.

Where Last Exit was indebted to the clubbier side of dance pop--with its tendency to wind songs around Dark’s close-clipped beats--So This Is Goodbye is a post-aught pop record first and foremost, an elegant, spacious collection of flash-frozen R&B and soft disco laments.

He calmly circles the same career themes with the same warmed-over, palatable guitar weavings: girls are scary, girls are sad, getting older is weird, home is nice.

Pieces of the People We Love is a great funky dance record with guitars, and not much more. Luckily, it doesn’t need to be.

No dispute: Usher, Beyonce, Christina, Britney were just keeping the seat warm: The King’s back on his throne.

Mostly though, it’s status quo.

Into the Blue Again is more stylistically cohesive than his previous works, but the songs are ossified and interchangeable; while the one-man band aesthetic of Album Leaf implies meticulous approach to craft, there's an assembly line feel that makes you feel like he cranks out a tune in ten minutes and spends the rest of the week tweaking EQ.

Always a wee bit more clever than anyone gave them credit for, the Keys are now a pretty good Zeppelin knockoff for the indie crowd, and little more.

It’s a natural inclination for LeMaster to experiment, but it makes the songs often difficult and unengaging, giving off the impression that they’re half-formed.

Buckner’s interest here is in a wallowing mouthful of atmosphere—dominant drums, throbbing guitar, and a fair amount of piano. This has always been the case, but the compositions are seamlessly edited and cleanly brought from instrument to recording.

An album of many highlights but not much visceral or emotional impact.

The growing sense that Molina released this record last year--and will probably release it again next year--is frustrating.

The songs are breezy to the point of vapidity.

The language barrier and discord makes the record incomprehensible, but nearly everything is still as intoxicating and entertaining as hell.

Electric Six make junk music for junk times, and they’d be nigh-unbearable if they weren’t so much fun.

Beyoncé has a presence, a character which is totally unique to her, and B’Day’s utterly imbued with it.

A masterful record.

Gala Mill realizes rock polemicist Joe Carducci’s ideal of real-time give-and-take as fully as many of the SST releases he touts in his 1990 book Rock and the Pop Narcotic.

It’s an intriguing and thoughtful and occasionally lively record, but it’s not the rollicking, randy good time some folks would lead you to believe.

With Game Theory, the Roots have finally delivered on nearly every once-broken promise.

It’s a trad, tried, and tested sound that they truck around town, exemplified by guest appearances by Conor Deasy of The Thrills and, a little more inexplicably, Maroon 5’s bass player. It’s the middle ground bewteen these two groups which The Tyde occupy.

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.

They make two kinds of albums. File Riot City Blues under "Shite."

There’s an attention to detail and storytelling nous built up by those previous concept albums that makes further listening and exploration of Happy Hollow that much more rewarding.

Idlewild fails in the same places as Speakerboxxx/The Love Below: both feature some stunningly flat crooning and poor pop revisions straight from the mind, body, and soul of Andre Benjamin.

The solipsism and trite accounts of benders from the first album are still there, but the music has gone exceedingly soft.

Meaty and encompassing, Future Crayon rarely misses, even if it fails to measure up to the band’s sublime full-lengths.

You could spend an age listing and describing the musical wealth of Damaged... Better just to listen to it, soak it all in, than fail with words.

Get Lonely doesn’t have the full force of any albums in the Mountain Goats catalog.

A bit too predictable and lightweight.

An immediate and combative disc that blurries up a litany of angers over surprisingly versatile layers of pop-punk guitar thrusting, The Body, The Blood, The Machine is a focused tantrum, irresolute in its actual stances, but pissed and rambunctious enough to overcome its vagaries.

It’s abundantly clear that Ward is an indie-rock songwriter--a pretty good one sometimes--who doesn’t bring a whole lot else to the table.

In country music, it’s all about the chops--and Millan doesn’t have ‘em. Yet.

To the Races isn’t that bad. Bachmann’s just so much better.

While most of the tracks on The Shining lack the abstract ideas and flow of Donuts, it’s still an admirable record.

If an army of songwriters and million-dollar producers can make Paris Hilton listenable, even for only 38 minutes, then no one else with a major-label budget behind them has any excuse.

Bloated with ideas and parsimonious with tunes.

His music could be a good deal better than it is.

While sometimes Classics sees the group straying from their conceptual center, it’s never without Ratatat’s unmistakable identity and indelible gentle humor.

Genuine hooks are oddly scarce.

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.

It offers in personality and atmosphere what it lacks in originality.

A truly soulful pop album, at least for one disc, Back to Basics is one of 2006’s best when Linda Perry’s fingerprints aren’t present.

Ill-advised collaborations and uncharacteristic subject matter mar proceedings, particularly the record’s dragging second half.

With no foil to Barat’s grumpiness and bitterness, it’s therefore difficult to see anyone getting nearly excited enough to love Dirty Pretty Things as much as many loved The Libertines.

Avatar shows Comets capable of a level of sophistication and skill previously unconsidered.

Give Friedberger credit for diversity, craftsmanship, and the unprecedented ability to release a double album that actually feels composed of two separate entities. The rest of it? Too much, too fast.

The question with Christ Illusion, as with any post-Seasons album, is simple: could these songs make it into Slayer's live set? The answer is yes, and more than the usual one or two.

Made in Brooklyn is mostly filler and little meat.

Crucially, he shows all the sides of his personality, making this one of hip-hop’s most well-rounded albums of recent vintage.

By making a bad album that also tries so assiduously to distance themselves from the backpacker movement that they unintentionally pioneered, they may have cut off their most fervent and loyal supporters and the chance of gaining a mainstream audience.

There’s hardly an honest word on In My Mind; any sane listener’s bullshit meter should red-line after about fifteen minutes of it’s textured repulsiveness.

ABO keep the music tight and enclosed to match the lyrical mood, making Derdang Derdang a succinct, purposeful statement.

The first chunk of Putting the Days to Bed consists of the kind of big-chorused, proudly conventional pop songs summers are made of... Elsewhere Roderick's voice and lyrical acumen fail him.

With its laptop beats and closely mic’d intimacy, White Bread, Black Beer conforms to the dictates of a creator with endless time to play all the instruments and no one to please but himself, regrettably.

Underneath the big production, Steele writes some great melodies, and that’s the real reason that his sometimes dubious experimentations pay off.

The problem with Nightlife is that, with the exception of “Hotel Suicide,” nothing really stands out.

While their sound has become immensely creepier, it has also improbably become more beautiful.

Savane stands out both as Ali Farka Touré’s masterpiece, and as one of contemporary African music’s finest achievements to date.

Despite [some] fine moments, occasionally Van Occupanther can feel a little too slick and one-note.

Facelessly competent, they make self-important, self-consciously literate guitar rock past its sell-by date via a simple recipe: mix together some late-period Death Cab for Cutie, some OK Computer-era Radiohead, and add in a few Doves and some Decemberists.

Like everything this band's made, it's long, sloppy, and uneven, but at this point that's the idea: here are a bunch of people who kind of know each other sitting down with some guitars.

It’s hard to imagine The French Kicks making a great album, given their limited changes so far. That doesn’t change the fact that Two Thousand is a very good one.