For the most part Game sounds desperate, raw, and ravenously hungry.

A bit too predictable and lightweight.

What is remarkable is the way that they have made a recording that can remain entertaining and engaging, resist becoming background, even while leaving you with the nagging sense that it was about nothing but the act of musical reference itself.

The fact that the music, vocals and melodies are stunning is just icing on the cake - a cake that is crumbling before your eyes.

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

Frequently, he’s sharp and funny - full of self-knowledge and charm. Elsewhere, he’s so devastatingly sincere that it’s almost embarrassing to listen to.

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.

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.

Parts of Good Bad Not Evil have some fascinating sonic touches.

Astronomy sometimes sounds like a British invasion LP given the remaster and remix treatment: dance-ready, fit for a plush couch and extra-plush headspace, and oddly misfiled in time.

Even the "there's a great album hiding in here!" cliché doesn't really apply, since if you conducted ten trials of picking fourteen songs at random, you'd end up with ten albums of near equal mediocrity.

Falls a few yards short of essential listening.

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.

Little on Magic outright falters, which is why it's hard at first to explain how unappealing it is.

Review 1: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1416" TARGET="_blank">Ultimately, Closer doesn&#146;t disappoint and represents a legitimate fifth installment in the Plastikman series, in spite of the fact that it breaks little new ground beyond its predecessors.</A> [score=75]; Review 2: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1417" TARGET="_blank">Hawtin [is] firmly again in the leagues with the masters of the genre.</A> [score=81]

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.

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.

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

It’s hard to fault an album for being too much of a good thing, but there it is. Songs like “Goliath”, “Glass Walls” and “Linus” just blend together. By the end you no longer look forward to another swooping, disheartened melody, you want variety of any kind.

As always, McGraw’s music primarily falters when the songs themselves lack sufficient emotional content for even his considerable conjuring powers to salvage.... Luckily, there are still moments when songwriting prowess and vocal mastery meet halfway.

There are hooks aplenty, but they’re mushed into a production job that’s so caustically lacking in detail and depth, so over-inflated and etch-a-sketched in timbre, that it’s almost unlistenable on anything but the most rudimentary of laptop speakers.

Outwardly, We Are the Pipettes is fun, sweet, and attractive. If you hang around, it starts to feel brittle, frigid, bitchy, and weird.

Relentlessly benign.

It suffers from a lack of identity.

The variety and talent this album offers is enough to recommend it to almost any rap fan.

Witch manage to do a lot more in forty minutes with little more than a bunch of badass riffs and a decent rhythm section than most metal bands these days can do with seventy minutes.

All in all, The Needle Was Travelling is probably the most “human” post-rock record to come out of Berlin.

The Else is their best whole album since, because it’s also the most melodic.

Hyper-concept pseudo-narratives aside, Devin Dazzle is, in a word, shocking, where shocking = rocking and rocking = danceable and danceable = nuts and nuts = 80s kitsch-sex-funk-house-new-wave-punk-disco.

Lots of handclaps, woo woo backing vocals, and laughs amid funny observations about contemporary urban hipster life reveal an assured and charming debut.

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.

Some of the sonic twists and turns that Delays pull on You See Colours--the multi-tracked vocals, the airy guitars, the pulsing synths--are jaw-dropping.

If the album has a fault, its that LFO can occasionally be accused of complacency, and a handful of tracks here stray into bog-standard Warp generictronica, but it&#146;s a minor gripe considering the joys on offer elsewhere.

Saint Etienne have regained their touch.

The saddest part of all this useless audio-masturbation is that it completely masks the genuinely beautiful pop songs of which Anderson is so capable.

Though lacking in innovation, the final GBV album will please any longtime fan that prefers &#147;Game of Pricks&#148; to &#147;Chicken Blows&#148;. Pollard&#146;s songwriting finally feels consistent, fully realized and commanding.

On the older albums, the Rosebuds’ synthesizers could sound like reinforcements parachuted in to cover for inadequate guitars or weak songs, but no longer. The front-and-center synths of Night of the Furies sound like a band hitting its stride.

Overall, it’s a story of too many ideas.

A record that positively teems with gleeful personality.

In its no-frills pleasures, A Bigger Bang recalls Some Girls and Emotional Rescue, two great meaningless albums.

Dear’s third album proves a wealth of open-window micro pop fit for summer gusts and unexpected flints of lightning.

But for all of the good things that can be said about the first half of the record, the second half misses the very things that made both of the previous two records such conflicted masterpieces.

The effort that Cogleton and his band have put into God Bless Your Black Heart is impossible to ignore.

This record is worth having, but offers little more than a slow orbiting tour of familiar Boredoms territory.

Just about everything on Sky Blue Sky, even soft-shoe skiffles like the title track, will likely sound better live.

Summer succeeds largely because it forces Oldham’s songs into unfamiliar positions.

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

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.

Brightblack Morning Light is an album that knows no restraint, and its palpable excess are the perfect fit for its first-light sensations.

Its lack of focus often mutes its attempts to strike hard.

Knives is a quietly simmering LP.

[A] lean, effective debut.

In the act of making himself more accessible, Common’s verbal skills have slid into disrepair.

To be fair Free The Bees isn’t a bad record as such, it’s just that this backwards looking, past-is-best philosophy so often smacks of a distasteful and conservative obsession with authenticity and tradition, as if sounding like the past is more important than sounding like yourselves.

This is a rare example of music transcending lyrics in conveying the work&#146;s meaning.

Ultimately we can&#146;t get a bead on Brandy precisely because she hasn&#146;t yet figured it out herself.... Which is exactly what makes Afrodisiac such a fascinating exercise.

Their classic albums all had filler, but The Last Sucker has none. Each song is instantly identifiable. Riffs are huge, driving, and upfront. Songs maneuver crisply through choruses and bridges, avoiding the meandering that plagued previous efforts.

His lyrics may be doggedly unspecific, but ear-worming hooks and top-shelf instrumentation largely rectify that shortcoming.

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.

It’s not groundbreaking. It’s not a huge stylistic forward leap or a studio-stunt. It’s simply another of Eric Johnson and his band’s records of simple grandiosity.

This is a definite upswing from the steaming pile of crap that was Binaural, but not the return to form that older fans of the band may have been hoping for.

There is flatness where once there was majesty; there is garbage where once there was gold.

Like Blueberry Boat, this is a triumphant album of good bits.

The biggest flaw with Other People’s Lives is that the songs play to Davies’ weaknesses rather than his strengths, coupled with overproduction that veils any remaining virtue under a gauzy blanket of unnecessary studio witchcraft.

They sound laid back. They sound like they’re having a blast. They sound, well, loose.

Decemberunderground carries a distinct whiff of missed opportunities.

Thrills hits upon a unique and confident path that doesn’t seem forced or contrived.

If this is your first experience of the band, you might still find it fresh, but personally I’m beginning to feel radicalism fatigue.

Doves’ strength lies in their careful sculpting of the sonic and the emotional, and here they’ve restrained their palette and scope so much that the result is grey.

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.

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.

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.

Interesting, strong in places, but overlong and uneven.

Altogether, Ratatat is a great album, taking the sound Daft Punk constructed on Discovery and transforming it into a remarkably intricate, painstaking work of instrumental genius.

More than anything else, Past, Present and Future is a record that is important because it denotes progress and the promise of far greater things.

While their sounds are pleasant enough, where Lemon Jelly fall short most often is in their unimaginative arrangements.

With No Flashlight, Elvrum is shifting the focus of his music onto himself. It’s unclear whether this is the smartest move to make, in light of his obvious production mastery.

Descended Like Vultures snuggles down between Wolf Parade’s Apologies To The Queen Mary and Modest Mouse’s 2004 release, Good News For People Who Like Bad News as a competent, half-slapped together, half-methodic slice of evolved indie-rock.

The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living is an exercise in empty nothingness. But it’s not Bacchanalian coked-out excess nothingness, it's the joyless hollow-eyed actions of a man who is waiting for the next fix and doesn't care what bullshit has to come out of his lips in order to get paid.

All but a couple of tracks here are dipped in the melodramatically thick strings of the opener- and the sum result is that it&#146;s almost too much to take the whole LP in one sitting.

There is a clear passion and enthusiasm in Grohl&#146;s instrumentals and a potency and power in the performance of every singer.

The results are often wonderful.

The moments of "hey, that sounds a bit like ..." are few, but notable; and perhaps unavoidable with such a distinctive vocal presence. In any case, these are welcome echoes from the past, not a weary retracing of footsteps.

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.

Pink has fought the record companies for control of her career and won- and with the sage advice of producers and executives she has come out with one of the best pop albums of last year.

Power is one more entry into an increasingly strong catalogue of widely varied danceable punk rock and should do little to disappoint fans.

Purple Haze is such a twisted take on gangsta that it has to be heard to be believed.

Feathers can be at times hypnosis-inducing. The effect of this hypnosis is that many of the unique moments on the album feel like dream states you aren’t sure actually happened.

Pixel Revolt is the sound of a man trying to come to grips with the larger questions--the "why?" questions--and, if nothing else, the sheer attempt makes this an essential album for our troubled times.

Spirit If... may be the second-best record any of those associated with Broken Social Scene have issued--whether together, apart, or kind of both.

Ultimately, The Meanest of Times stumbles when the folksy frayed stitching is torn away, exposing nothing but atrophied punk muscle.

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

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.

I don’t like it. I don’t hate it. And that’s the truth exactly.

Man Mountain is a poor album. It feels forced (the worst kind of feel for this kind of music), it feels cheesy, and sadly it doesn&#146;t conjure many more feelings beside &#145;I think I know what they might have been going for with this&#133;&#146; Unfortunately they never get there, and it&#146;s a chore to hear them try.

The Evens’ self-titled debut does sound curiously like hardcoreless moments of The Argument polished and lengthened into full-fledged songs.

For something so obviously and deeply grounded in marketing, it’s still an outstandingly solid and enjoyable debut.

Just Like You shows and proves unquestionably that Cole’s capable of some seriously rich, powerful art.