Kotche delivers on all accounts, tastefully propelling the music into timelessness, nearly filling the shoes of his faves: The Band’s Levon Helm, Beefheart’s Drumbo.

The Maginot Line has a title almost as dreary and foreboding as The North Sea had, a sense of vast futility and inescapable fate, and like that first album, the title belies the often bright and sparkling parts of the music.

So much here rests on formulaic indie tropes.

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.

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.

Soft Money is full of the sort of guitar riffs that mutter their notes and beats that knock about to break themselves free from dumpsters.

Pencil Ne-Yo in as R&B rookie of the year--and don’t be surprised if no one trumps him before 2006 is gone.

If you’re so inclined toward this type of music, you’ll assuredly love Precious Memories. But if you think you’re not, you may be surprised.

[Their] debut, a scrappy collection of twee garage-pop, isn’t bad. It is half-bad, though. Which isn’t to say that every song isn’t good—they’re just fine, the emphasis on ambivalence.

What makes OK Cowboy worthwhile is not a greater emphasis on the chilly tones that made Vitalic’s initial singles so impressive and characterized some of his savage DJ sets, but the demonstration of a surprising degree of variety and even humanity within those seemingly narrow colonnades of rising and whiplash synths over soulless, mechanical drums.

Right now Elbow are hitting an emotional pitch no one else is managing; one more personal and more potent than those that might be considered their competition.

Put it this way: do you think "Panic (Hang the DJ)" with its unique branch of bitterness, provincialism, and notions of white pride was the Smiths' best song? You'll be like a hog in shit here, then. If not... avoid. Like the plague.

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

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.

Bejar is so wound up in his own idiosyncratic mythologies, so hopelessly himself that some fans have already said it sounds like a greatest hits record; appropriate that a meta-rocker’s final frontier is his own reflection in the mirror.

It doesn’t try to scrape the lofty heights of the two or three masterpieces in Heasley’s catalogue, but by not making the effort, it doesn’t sink as low as his least impressive stuff.

A subtle improvement on the band’s debut.

Congotronics 2 sticks closely to the sonics of the first volume, possibly because the bands do actually sound similar, or possibly because the bands have been recorded in similar fashion.

This increased humanism lends Fleischmann’s compositions an evolutionary sense of dynamism, thawing out his stern soundscapes.

They make a better Shins than a Stooges. For anyone looking for a relative of the former with an interestingly rough sound and loads of potential, the M's are good to go right now; but the rest of us are stuck mining gems from amidst muck, like normal.

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

It is a measure of Albion’s strengths that it can make itself heard above the crumpy distortion and shrill feedback generated by its author.

Young for Eternity is the record that US labelmates the Von Bondies should have made to follow-up Pawn Shoppe Heart, and the album that the White Stripes should make period.

Timeless falls awkwardly between Buena Vista Social Club and Santana’s latter-day Rolodex albums, deftly combining multi-culti good intentions with the bathos of a great artist aiming squarely at commercial revival.

This is the best pop album of the year and what Ashlee Simpson wishes to be.

It's a smooth, cohesive ride that never lapses into boredom.

Not every classic song from the era is here, but yes, if you do choose to own only one Tropicália disc, then this should be the one.

It's not as much a progress as DCW, but it's easily its equal.