If all you’re looking for is more Tobin material, then you’ve come to the right place. If you’re expecting anything more, you’d best look elsewhere.

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.

Bitter Tea is probably my favorite Fiery Furnaces album to date, but it isn’t without snags.

While Blue Album doesn’t break any moulds, match their best records from the mid 90s or (quite) end their career on a triumphant high, it will almost certainly find favour with old fans because it’s an undeniably good record, certainly their best since The Middle Of Nowhere and possibly even since In Sides.

New Young Pony Club claim they can give us what we want, but they haven’t got a clue what we need.

File under: very bad ideas.

Absolute Garbage makes a fine reminiscence, a gift from a party that was fun for its time but left a nasty hangover.

It can get very very dull.

A shame an NPR market supercilious of the mercenary likes of Sheryl Crow has forced her to record songs that Crow herself would consider models of autumnal acuity.

Hurricane Bar is totally contrived: too much “That Thing You Do” and not enough shot-from-below-the-hip bacchanalia to keep the fire stoked.

[It] continues with the middle-of-the-road, ambient pop approach that marked his last few efforts.

Vulcanized basslines, ice-burn synth washes, and helium-fused guitar lines again serve as his trademarks, and Nguyen has yet to shed his reliance on preset dub-lines to offset his lumpen beats. He may seem a bit more comfortable with English, but his lyrics have waned with his accent.

Hard Candy’s best moments... are fewer and further between than on previous albums.

Perhaps All City’s most pleasing triumph, for fans of Northern State’s earlier stuff, is that the colloquial character of the Hesta and co.’s voices is in no way diluted by the more polished music accompanying it.

This is probably the least fun of all his albums, but also among his most rewarding.

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

A richly executed and textural record—one of the best guitar-based albums of 2007 thus far.

Adding a set of young female characters to this drab mix only accentuates that a concept is needed to bolster the actual music.

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

Its artistic detours are even more jarring than those of Worlds Apart. The good news is that its quality is far less erratic. The bad news is the reason why: it's almost uniformly awful.

Rehashed Bob Mould still beats most of what’s out there, though, so the album has its strengths.

Honkytonk University is one missed opportunity after another.

Nothing’s Lost is a more stately affair, flaunting van Petegum’s growth as a producer without losing his child-like talent for awkward emulation.

His intention here was to create something unpolished and free of studio edits, acting as contrast to Shadows. His result, unfortunately, reeks of squandered potential.

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]

The album achieves a great deal of its success from the relaxed collaboration, but it does suffer from it, as well. Reid and Hebden interact so casually that they don't find the friction to really propel great improvisational music.

There’s nothing groundbreaking here, and this record could very well sound sickeningly syrupy come December, but Hal have found a way of reflecting the sun from a time when it wasn’t quite so poisonous.

So what if the Darkness are nothing but a bunch of playacting nancy boys. They have an outstanding penchant for hooks [and] write witty and possibly sometimes moving lyrics.