Impressively raucous. [#240, p.68]

Juggles multiple ideas of modernism with unusual grace and success. [#234, p.53]

This is Pole at his most expansive and communicative. [#233, p.69]

New York Noise is exemplary: the right mix of 'hits' and obscurities. [#233, p.71]

At their worst, Ui thrash like run of the mill math-rockers, basses turned to 11 and meandering loudly.... What rescues them is a burgeoning melodic sensibility. [#233, p.71]

However hit and miss, though, all of these voices and genre grabs are made to sound stylistically coherent. [#236, p.71]

Guru is... pushing the same grim consistency that makes folks describe Gang Starr albums as 'solid', not budging, not boring, but not better than Moment of Truth. [#234, p.73]

Initially sounds nothing special but gradually crawls into your subconscious and sets up home. [#233, p.72]

Tricky's problem is that the future has caught up with him. [#233, p.71]

Unlike a lot of electronica, the music never lapses into mere tastefulness. [#235, p.75]

Sadly few of his spiels impress solely on the strength of their content. [#235, p.55]

Has a lot more of SF's itchy electro-Techno fizz than it does 'proper' HipHop beats. [#231, p.75]

Those who find Anticon's selfconsciousness and self-flagellation a bit hard to stomach may be able to digest Odd Nosdam's maddening instrumental collages. [#230, p.71]

Band Red suggests they have reached meltdown and anybody encountering their post-punk roar would be advised to stand well back. [#243, p.74]

Delicacy replaces density here, but his capacity to unnerve remains on these sedately mournful chamber pieces. [#231, p.74]

The only problem with Politics of the Business is that there are too few of the loose ends and lateral leaps of, say, Three Feet High. [#232, p.69]

Frankly, the guy defies you not to be impressed by what he's got. [#234, p.53]

As Four Tet, Hebden has devised a musical identity that is distinctly different from his work with Fridge, but both projects share a passion for defying boundaries. [#231, p.60]

For all the homemade, quirky charm on show here -- and the album has plenty of wide open, lyrical moments -- Ether Teeth leaves behind a lingering, moody, melancholy aftertaste. [#231, p.60]

Isn't so much a leftfield perversion of HipHop as it is a restoration of the genre to its avant garde roots. [#231, p.67]

A set of intelligently performed rock tunes distinguished by Karen O's smart and smarting lyrics. [#232, p.74]

A taut, brutal collection which is as strong as anything they've released in their previous incarnations. [June 2003, p.65]

The feel... is more relaxed, more organic, more approachable. [#230, p.69]

A feast of buried treasure, a flickerframe parade which continually offers up magical fragments of sound, revelatory and transitory in equal measure. [#230, p.46]

Adult. proves that there need be nothing fey or even particularly cheeky about synthesizer music. [#231, p.75]

While rock fans may be disappointed by Yo La Tengo's fleeting venture into playful jazz, the group continue to produce music that's full of gesture and emotional intensity. [#231, p.73]

Approaches the psychedelic grandeur of Spiritualized or Mercury Rev at their finest while still offering a wealth of carefully placed sonic detail. [#229, p.71]

A very nice slab of pan-generic, lof-fi, yearn-pop. [#231, p.59]

It all sounds very loose and off the cuff, but any positive sense of spontaneity is sabotaged by a delivery so careless it borders on the sloppy. [#229, p.68]

Jurado's spare, edgy songs are miniature masterpieces of mood and character. [#229, p.68]

A natural follow-up to his first solo outing. [#229, p.68]

This is a dark night of the soul record, a distant country cousin of Young's Tonight's The Night, but it feels flooded with light and air and space. [#232, p.73]

A fastidiously crafted and appealingly damp hour of digital earthsong. [#229, p.57]

Callaghan has served up an album that, interestingly for his fractured vocals and streaming lyrics, is unusually coherent. [#230, p.61]

It's an uneven set, relying strongly on her performance to carry the songs forward. [#229, p.68]

If Lightning Bolt works best live, Wonderful Rainbow loses nothing of the duo's spontaneous wallop. [#230, p.56]

It may lack subtlety but it sounds incredibly vital. [#229, p.68]

An engaging, unpredictable album of Tortoise-like vibraphones, guitars, minimalist repetitions, wry syncopations, occasional duff notes and subtly daubed electronics. [#228, p.69]

All the sharp, cold ridges of the usual electronic sound palette are sheared off and smoothed down on this beguilingly gentle release. [#228, p.65]

Downhome and earthy, cut through with sensitivity and intelligence. [#229, p.58]

Overall you sense that the full potential of the encounter is not being realised. [#230, p.61]

Combining tight dynamics with the blurred intent of an impressionistic backwsh, some tracks rush by like vast landscapes, with individual features suddenly highlighted in freeze-frames. [#228, p.59]

What the album lacks in innovation, it more than makes up for with its sheer edginess. [#228, p.59]

It's all elegantly executed and often beguiling, but just too clean and predictable to be really involving. [#228, p.62]

There's little to set the sombre half-tones of the Cave and Seed world alight with suspicous glimmers. [#228, p.59]

It might sound unbearably contrived, but the combination of crystalline guitar, sly time signatures and Kinsella's stream of consciousness lyrical musings makes for an unexpectedly coherent whole. [#229, p.68]

A pleasant if somewhat plain folk-rock record, less adventurous than either Wilco's or O'Rourke's own recent outings. [#227, p.68]

A rewarding and self-consciously motley fest. [#227, p.60]

Every knot has been planed away. It's hushed, wistful, 'cool,' acoustic, sweetly dolorous and subtly well crafted... and dull as corrective footnotes in a treatise on ditchwater. [#228, p.54]

Brokeback's airier tendencies are always balanced against the hint of depth and punchiness behind the twin basses, and the bittersweet, reflective quality of the melodic lines. [#228, p.57]

It's surely his finest recorded hour to date. [#230, p.61]

The production is so delicate and the arrangements so well crafted that you can't help being utterly seduced by this open-ended, non-narrative yet elegant and accessible pop music. [#227, p.71]

"Miss Lucifer"... [is] the first of many tracks on Evil Heat that cross rock 'n' roll and electro, only to get Sigue Sigue Sputnik. [#223, p.61]

It lacks something crucial at its centre: definition, precisely. [#221, p.66]

You are reminded that yes, this has all been done before, but Out Hud get by with the wistful innocence of well-intentioned brainiacs. [#225, p.71]

It's on tracks like the ethereal, 15 minute "Oh Shadie" where the group's acid washed sound really takes off. [#232, p.74]

More substantial, positive and dynamic. [#225, p.58]

Possibly their best.... Brave, bleak yet compassionate. [#225, p.77]

His verbal style is notable because it avoids typical ragga chat or MC freestyling in favour of an almost literary blend of prose and verse. [#219, p.75]

A slippery, shape-shifting quality is one of the great strengths of Amon Tobin's sixth album. Plainly put, Out From Out Where is impossible to pin down. [#226, p.67]

MBM's wholehearted embracing of the familiar is stronger than ever, erasing any freshness or innovation, and cancelling out all distinguishing features. [#226, p.72]

After long, lean years of straight edge piety and arthouse restraint, guitar solos that don't hold anything back are as refreshing as they are liberating. [#224, p.56]

The somewhat dated style and sound of Nextdoorland gives it a charm wholly unaffiliated with any current scene or trend. [#225, p.77]

The risky juxtapositions that mark his best work are critically missing. [#224, p.51]

Uncomfortable deliery and thin lyrical content suggest that utilising vocals isn't their strong suit. [#223, p.69]

I Phantom could prove to be one of the most consistently rewarding HipHop records to land in 2002. [#223, p.52]

A highly engaging and very endearing album. [#223, p.59]

Some awful lyrical lapses scupper otherwise promising pieces. [#223, p.51]

They're at their best on tracks like "Nothing Is Ever Lost[...]," where they conjure the wheeling claustrophobia of PiL circa Metal Box. [#223, p.66]

May be the year's most surprising pure pop pleasure--precisely because it's nothing like you'd expect a pop album to be. [#224, p.61]

An album of mostly pleasant contemporary pop. [#218, p.61]

Optometry is a success in terms of both sound and vision. [#221, p.53]

This is an archive of surprises. And one of the surprises of the year. [#220, p.50]

25 years down the line, Wire are still pulling off coups as daring and deadly as This Heat's debut. [#224, p.73]

Sonic Youth have made a joyful return to their No Wave hardcore rock roots with a vibrating set of muscular songs which glide effortlessly from Gooey power pop to full on guitarmageddon meltdown, skulled out psychedelia and beyond. [#220, p.53]

The emphasis now is on the delicate interplay between acousitc guitars, and vocals which sound somewhere between Jonathan Donahue and Syd Barrett. [#221, p.66]

Suavely assembled big band pop. [#220, p.66]

The sense of loss and longing becomes so physical at points that rather than respond, it's simpler to go with it until the ride ends in a drained silence. [#219, p.72]

Disturbing and delirious when it's not romantic and hilarious, the songs have a much more direct emotional appeal than the patently surrealistic Alice. [#219, p.72]

Like Urge Overkill or The Velvet Monkeys at their grossest, Trans Am's genre exercises don't stand up to close scrutiny, but as a dim soundtrack to your next beer bust, you might want to bring it on. [#220, p.66]

Much of it is subtly melancholic, like a Broadway medley received in a dream. [#218, p.71]

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's faceless, airbrushed production takes you back to the dead days of 1970s AOR radio. [#220, p.66]

The moments of beauty caught fleetingly in the gaps between over-arranged blocks make for frustrated listening. [#218, p.64]

Sample heavy numbers like "No Secrets No Surprises" would have been standards of Coldcut mixes ten years ago. [#219, p.77]

Jocular and enjoyable to flip through, but the nagging feeling that leaks through is that this collection is little more than a respite for Giant Sand until Gelb returns from the bunker with enough fresh material to record a real new album. [#216, p.63]

Poorly sequenced instrumental epics and rap cuts leave Something Wicked sounding disjointed. [#217, p.56]

This isn't really the future of HipHop, but as a fleeting reverie on its conflicted present, it makes for a fantastic detour. [#217, p.55]

As Town And Country's move into mellow artists maturity, C'mon is an oasis of sensitive calm from our loutish world. [#217, p.61]

A record that urges you to lean closer to the speakers in order to fully hear everything that is being played and sung. [#216, p.63]

Of the 23 tracks, only four truly stand out. [#218, p.58]

There's an appealing openness and lack of guile to much of Sign. [#215, p.66]

A decent film soundtrack. [#219, p.74]

In isolation, no individual song is particularly memorable but together they add up to a musical vision you just can't ignore. [#215, p.52]

The new, mature De La means traditional pop over brash artistry, religion over irony, and conformity over the extraordinary. [#215, p.59]

A pleasurable collection of comfortably played, understated, slightly skewed songs with smart lyrics. [#214, p.52]

Superficially, Lovage is a continuation of the Handsome Boy Modeling School aesthetic that collides HipHop, rock and electronica into an ironic hipster epic. [#213, p. 59]

Sandoval's overly stylised vocals really start to grate over the distance of a whole LP. [#213, p.65]

Not enough of Drukqs confidently breaks new ground, and too often James falls back on the all too familiar dysfunctional jitterbeat which has typified Aphex output since 1996's Richard D James album. [#212, p.55]