The songs... are as wonderful, as creative, as exquisitely saddening as ever.

It doesn’t matter how well you can thrash or shred if it doesn’t sound good, and rarely does a section of Bang Bang Rock and Roll sound as if it wasn’t well thought-out and created with the intent to entertain.

With “Crazy,” the duo hits its apex without really shrouding the rest of the album.

Smith’s abrupt changes in tempo, volume, and instrumentation are alternately inspiring and disorienting.

Just Like the Fambly Cat, even more than Grandaddy's past works, carries the weight of death.

Springtime is... the unveiling of a toothier sound that better reflects both Holland’s bloodiness and booziness.

It’s both business as usual and their most complex set of ideas to date.

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.

It’s almost as good as ['Hearts & Bones'], and likely to be as undervalued, but don’t worry: give it 20 years and its cadenced ruminations and instantly dated production will get some love from the usual suspects.

Eyes Open is composed of broad, obvious songs with broad, obvious hooks, aimed straight for the hearts of as many people as the band can manage. All of this would be bad, horrible even, if it didn't work. But it does.

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).

OK, it all gets a bit samey in the middle section. But Jake Kelly adds some nice instrumental flourishes, and Dawson once again proves winning and convincing as a simple troubadour who’s not a simpleton.

It's tightly focused, beautifully written, and totally without filler.

Daedelus does with electronic and Latin music here what he and others have already done with experimental hip-hop: boiling genre to an essence and re-imagining it with novel or illuminating instrumentation.

Mostly, the band sticks to their strengths, making music for a party that ended sometime in the 90s, with the occasional reggae inflection to differentiate it from previous albums.

There is very little on Operate that sounds like anywhere Gomez have been before.

We find Jewel going through the motions rather than providing us with a noteworthy movement and in the end these songs here are less artistic pronouncements and more the conclusion of a specific product line.

It's hard to imagine another album in 2006 doing a worse job of justifying its existence than Blood Money.

Song-for-song, they haven’t made an album this misstep-free since Vs.

"Progressive" doesn’t mean clocking in at over seven minutes no matter what. It doesn’t mean hitting every goddamn skin, tom-tom, and cowbell on your drum set. Being "Progressive" doesn’t justify an album cover that looks like a stoner stumbled upon a documentary on Mayan civilization. I’m not sure, but I think "Progressive" is about growth and change.

It’s not that Wolfmother are all that bad. It’s just that everything there is to say about them is best said by immediate reference to another band and Wolfmother always come up short in the comparison.

The poetry is too good, the gloom too cached in symbolism and fine melodies to feel trite or melodramatic.

Their previous efforts have now paid off, culminating in a condensed treatise of confusion, longing, and maturation.

It's an album that has far more potential for emotional resonance than musical discovery. The arrangements contain few surprises, and the handful of simple acoustic performances quietly outshine the more elaborate productions.

While it's admirable that The Secret Machines are trying to solidify their niche as the go-to guys for soundtracking laser light shows (or at least My Morning Jacket for indoor kids), Ten Silver Drops is a sideways moonwalk that won't get them any further away from the planetarium circuit.

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.

The Boss’ most lively release since Born in the USA.

Pick a Bigger Weapon would’ve made a truly killer party album, but two factors hold it back--no one cares about Riley’s politics, and he’s not nearly as clever as he thinks.