The chamber-pop arrangements make pretentiously snarled lyrics slip down smoothly. [Oct 2005, p.108]

Hayden's nagging melodies and deadpan delivery occupy their own peculiar kingdom. [Sep 2004, p.102]

Deeply average. [Apr 2004, p.91]

It's like John Bonham playing with Can, or Floyd-meet-Spiritualized with a barely repressed pop consciousness. [Jul 2004, p.95]

Tracks such as "Where Ya Going?" and "Chicken Out"... make them sound like Southport's answer to ZZ Top. But there's plenty more going on that doesn't involve such dumbing-down. [Jul 2004, p.107]

An essential listen for anyone interested in where music might take them. [Jun 2004, p.86]

Flares dazzlingly on initial contact, but dims a little. [Jun 2004, p.92]

[An] effervescent, sun-dappled debut. [Aug 2005, p.103]

A curate's egg of tested pop styles.... Though hardly the album-length E-rush of career peak Tellin' Stories, this approach still offers small gems. [Jul 2004, p.101]

A curiously uninvolving affair. [Jun 2004, p.95]

Moments of startling beauty emerge from the fuzz-drenched experiments. [Sep 2005, p.112]

Banhart's free-flowing oddness makes most musical eccentrics seem self-conscious and predictable. [Jun 2004, p.90]

OnOffOn has an incredibly dense, thick sound, and it sags a little in the middle, but Miller can still write terrifically belligerent pop songs. [Jun 2004, p.96]

The best record he's made since 1996's Casanova, it's one of those rare instances when an artist retraces their steps and successfully locates what made them interesting in the first place. [May 2004, p.102]

A slightly disappointing attempt to hammer their quirks into a more commercial rock shape. [May 2004, p.99]

When Trampin' doesn't work, though, it plods, though never as badly as the worst bits of Gung Ho. [May 2004, p.94]

Another relaxed but enigmatic foray into modernist roots territory to stand alongside records by Gillian Welch, Laura Veirs, Sparklehorse and Bonnie "Prince" Billy. [Jun 2004, p.98]

It's Krall's voice that has always been her biggest problem... consequently, these songs feel like elegant but bloodless conceits. [Jun 2004, p.85]

Understated and underestimated. [Nov 2004, p.113]

White's willfully basic approach is what gives Van Lear Rose its freshness.... If you thought Rick Rubin's Johnny Cash reinvention was impressive, wait 'til you grab a fistful of this. [Album of the Month, June 2004, p.84]

Might be a primer for his various selves, so redolent are individual tracks of previous songs. [Jun 2004, p.92]

Another truly wondrous record. [May 2004, p.99]

A triumph of sample-based, groove-cutting rap that shifts ground with every attempt to pin it down. [May 2004, p.106]

Intoxicating. [Mar 2004, p.87]

Despite its DIY origins and almost hallucinatory feel, this is a peach of a pop record. [Apr 2004, p.108]

[A] promising, flawed debut. [Apr 2004, p.110]

Documents a continuing decline. [May 2004, p.93]

The whole thing tingles: you're in the presence of diamond-hard greatness. [Nov 2004, p.110]

There are some pleasantly elaborate, wayward songs here... Forays into funk and Tom Waits' scrapyard are cringe-inducing, though. [Sep 2004, p.110]

A rare treasure indeed. [Aug 2004, p.101]

A remarkable return. [Oct 2003, p.130]

If the piano melodies lapse into sameness, Russo sprinkles John Barry and Carpenters motifs on top to keep it trembling. [Feb 2005, p.74]

He doesn't have that doomed, hellhound-on-my-trail intensity that makes Johnson's recordings so spooky. But, at 58, he sounds like a man who has faced down more than a few canine devils of his own. [Apr 2004, p.102]

Gorgeously warm, forlorn and wounded. [Mar 2004, p.95]

It works, mainly: though one or two songs could benefit from the old viciousness, these are seductive confections. [Apr 2004, p.104]

As ever with Reed, when it's good, it's blistering. [Apr 2004, p.104]

Fly Or Die has more in common with 10cc and XTC than it does Common.... Prog-pop album of the year. [Jun 2004, p.91]

Often shambolic and in-jokey, it's also sensationally good fun. [May 2004, p.93]

Beam is a master of circumnavigating cliche. [May 2004, p.106]

It's hard to fight the feeling this is average songwriting buffed into something near-palatable by the amount of money spent on it. [Apr 2004, p.101]

Humanely crafted, with a warmth unusual in the avant-garde. [Jun 2004, p.96]

Everything they do is infused with an undeniable, albeit sometimes unfathomable, psychedelic spirit. [Mar 2004, p.92]

The instrumental palette is more wide-ranging in a subtler, more subversive manner. [Apr 2004, p.96]

Stevens' strumming often has an unworldly quality that transcends folk archetypes. [Apr 2004, p.92]

Deerhoof's skittish collages always, miraculously, have a pop logic to them, and their desire to show that experimental music can be playful rather than forbidding is often heroic. [Jul 2004, p.102]

As wilfully indulgent as it is breathtakingly advanced. [Apr 2004, p.101]

NIO seem more intent on gazing at shoes than stars. [Apr 2004, p.92]

Where on 2001's Lack of Communication their cranked-up Stoogeisms were adorably desperate, here they're glibly glamorous, energised by a Pixies-like concision. [Mar 2004, p.87]

What's most frightening is that, mighty as Desperate Youth... is, their real stone killer is probably yet to come. [Jul 2004, p.100]

An acquired taste. [Jan 2005, p.124]

Think swoonsome pop at its most non-cynical but with a left-field twist. [Aug 2004, p.98]

For all the influences, their voice is uniquely, gently mad. [Mar 2004, p.88]

Liars' aim is to challenge the listener with their gruelling strangeness. [Apr 2004, p.101]

Casts them as confident modern classicists. [Dec 2003, p.126]

Arguably slight at first, it rewards repeat listening as its seductive, heartfelt stories unfurl. [Mar 2004, p.90]

Tough, funky and proud, she sounds like she could have been the new Aretha. [Feb 2004, p.87]

Full of surprising songs with some cracking tunes that step far outside the punk-funk-grunge-metal formula of the Chili Peppers. [Mar 2004, p.99]

The combination of tinkling pianos, gutsy strum and homespun wisdom places this very much in the middle of the road. [Apr 2004, p.92]

Delivered via rolling, thunderous rhythms--part Can, part Black Sabbath--moody synths and mournfully melodic guitar, using the slow-build-to-explosion method. [Apr 2004, p.91]

Yoshimi's ebullience is inescapable on Kila Kila Kila, from the gymnastic drumming to her ecstatic, Bjorkesian yelps. [Apr 2004, p.106]

Draws intelligently on its sources, revealing itself as more than mere pastiche. [Nov 2004, p.108]

In ditching the band ethic, they've tapped into the finest folk gothic traditions of death, suffering, misery and hardship and fashioned a paradoxically uplifting, transformative record of extraordinary power. [Album of the Month, Jul 2003, p.110]

It's a calmer, less ambitious album than 2001's All This Sounds Gas, but no less beguiling. [Mar 2004, p.92]

Wagner has achieved a fusion of the outgoing, string-driven country-soul heard on 2000's Nixon... and the reluctant intimacy of 2002's low-key Is A Woman. [combined review of both discs; Feb 2004, p. 68]

It's not hard to work out that these two albums really do function as a double, and certainly represent the group's most complete work to date. [combined review of both discs; Feb 2004, p. 68]

A functional selection of unspectacular power pop with the odd pastoral bit. [Mar 2004, p.102]

Yes, it's an unchallenging and even deeply conservative record. But its class is positively aristocratic. [Mar 2004, p.99]

Think Randy Newman crooned in a voice like Peggy Lee and delivered with the panache of Rufus Wainwright. [Sep 2004, p.96]

A darker and dramatically more cohesive collection than its predecessor. [Sep 2003, p.108]

America's Sweetheart is petulant and self-pitying. Worse, it's self-righteous. Worse still, it's musically crass. [Mar 2004, p.98]

West's rhymes are wry, witty, warm and unswervingly self-aware. [May 2004, p.106]

The Church are, against the odds, still a dreamily appealing proposition. [Mar 2004, p.100]

Flutter[s] between commune jazz, zen folk and straightforward hippy rock. [Apr 2004, p.106]

The minimalist grooves grow ever tighter. [Feb 2004, p.71]

Despite--or perhaps because of--its viscous air of paranoia, this record is unputdownable. [Mar 2004, p.100]

Sodden with emotional profundity. [May 2004, p.104]

Addresses the stained beauty of all things LA via psychedelic washes of keys, honking sax and country stomp. [May 2004, p.100]

As good a record, in fact, as anything this gifted polymath has ever released. [Feb 2004, p.82]

Their most convincing, most composerly music to date. [Feb 2004, p.69]

Impressively pretentious, and brilliantly executed. [Dec 2003, p.126]

This run would undoubtedly be shown to greater effect on a more succinct collection. [Feb 2004, p.86]

It's human where Radiohead are impenetrable, but complex where Coldplay are banal.... Elbow remain unquantifiably great. [Sep 2003, p.100]

Falls into an identikit pattern of string-laden sentiment. [Oct 2003, p.120]

The band's most organic-sounding record since 1996's Emperor Tomato Ketchup. [Mar 2004, p.90]

Little more than a bunch of B-sides in search of a point. [Mar 2004, p.87]

Theirs is a maniacal mish-mash of seemingly incompatible musical styles--Krautrock, psychedelia, no-wave, prog, synth-pop, '70s stoner rock and punk--wrought from a deeply felt, genre-leaping love of challenge. [Feb 2004, p.80]

They remain funny, fly and fit for the future. [May 2004, p.104]

A free and forward-thinking kind of record, but also one that taps into forgotten, mythic resonances of American music without ever sounding ersatz, hokey or remotely contrived. [Mar 2004, p.92]

As background listening, this sounds like high-class Enya, but listen harder and dense textures and nuances lie beneath the surface. [Feb 2004, p.78]

Paradoxically, its spare, solo-voice-and-guitar format... comes closer to matching DiFranco's charismatic live performances than prior band-driven efforts. [Mar 2004, p.87]

Revitalising indie-pop. [Feb 2004, p.78]

The best rapper this country's ever produced, period.... Next to Dizzee Rascal everybody looks pale, uninteresting and irrelevant. [Sep 2003, p.98]

It's less a Kelis venture than it is a showcase for the various producers Virgin could afford. [Feb 2004, p.72]

A rare and fascinating glimpse into the raw stuff of the creative process. [Jan 2004, p.103]

It's a less daring enterprise overall. [May 2004, p.106]

If she's going to make us read her diary entries, she's going to need something more compelling than this litany of cliche and hackneyed need-a-man Bridget Jones-wailing. [Feb 2004, p.72]

If she began coasting on 2002's Under Construction, here pop's most innovative black female is on repeat mode. [Feb 2004, p.72]

It's not amazing... but it's great. [Jan 2004, p.106]