The music is accordingly spectral, with sparse piano teasing its way into break-out crescendos of strings, French horns and a children's choir. [Dec 2009, p. 87]

While Lanegan could sing the Richard Stilgoe songbook and still enthral, there remains a hint of contrivance about Soulsavers' self-consciously cinematic, grungey trip hop. [Sep 2009, p.95]

Ultimately, though, it's another Squarepusher album you don't really need. [Oct 2009, p.112]

It’s a ravishing production, and with a companion disc promised next year, feels like a fresh start for a brilliant career.

Back To Yasgur’s Farm has a documentary feel that’s one of its most successful aspects.

There's a sense that it trawls the finest moments of his 15-year carreer. [Jul 2009, p.93]

On her opening 21st-century work she's still raging. [Jul 2009, p.97]

Lean Forward occasionally falters toward generic Southern rock, but contains its share of gems. [Nov 2009, p.81]

The results are impressive: the requisite 1960s garage cover sits happily alongside the band's traditional urgency, and their newfound classicism. [Nov 2009, p.99]

Yorkston may have set aside his “personal muse” for a moment, but Folk Songs is still part of his rich re-imagining of our heritage.

Most of the album comes across as a weedy, irritating student pastiche of the DFA sound rather than something that deserves a place in its esteemed catalogue. [Sep 2009, p.105]

Skyscraper is largely drab, despite Banks experimenting with beats, samples and chamber pop orchestration. [Sep 2009, p.90]

Overall though--a quality 'One More American Song' shares with the whole collection--this is a song with an understated, but crucial, element of hope. [Aug 2009, p.100]

The new line up and improved prodution give songs more space, but haven't hindered the jaunty, lo-fi, eclectic iindie that made "Moonbeams" such a treat. [Sep 2009, p.101]

Constancy is provided by the band's sleek economy and the piercing, implacable vocals of Sian Alice Ahern herself. [Sep 2009, p.92]

The rest of the album struggles to maintain that high standard [of the second track, 'I Know'], but 'Take It Home' is a magnificent dirge. [Sep 2009, p.86]

Nonsensical, inventive and captivating. [Sep 2009, p.89]

It all adds up to an immaculately composed, if soft-centred, avant-pop proposition, and suggest Frank might just turn out to be the British Justin Timberlake. [Aug 2009, p.92]

The narcotic haze of early singles is missed, but their knack with a loping pop hook is still ever-present and thier euphoric harmonies find new perches in "Back Where We Started" and "Twit Twoo." [Aug 2009, p.109]

A palatial record. [Mar 2009, p.89]

What's in here finds the band inventive, unfailingly tuneful, and, rather belying the title, mellowing magnificently with age. [Aug 2009, p.87]

The result is earworms aplenty, but any angst feels airbrushed, the effect is rather like rlaxing to a mobile phone commercial. [Apr 2010, p.95]

As guitarist Russell Marsden steps aside to let bassist Emma Richardson sing, it's less White Stripes, more Brody Dale, but momentum is maintained. [Oct 2009, p.91]

This second is a well-crafted collection that finds McClure pondering his place in a rotten world. [Aug 2009, p.102]

It takes a while to move beyond prettily pleasant, but the band's pining melancholy kicks in on 'What There Is' and 'Real Meaning.' [Sep 2009, p.79]

They rather more resemble the wilfully over-wrought pastiches of Flight Of The Conchords, but without the jokes. [Sep 2009, p.82]

Aside from sime sly gender-bending and lovable kitsch, there just isn't much interpretive room to roam. [Aug 2009, p.105]

Molina here opts for a more expansive spproach with reedy harmonies, horns, soulful guitars and gospel piano. [Aug 2009, p.100]

These nine abstract sound paintings strip away the guitars, drums and vocals of Sigur Ros to liberate the avant-classical spirit within. [Aug 2009, p.87]

If you want epic, check out the eight-minute sprawl of 'Mary Is Mary.' For a bit more raw noise terror, try the speed-rush of 'Tattoo.' [Nov 2009, p.117]

Man Overboard doesn’t quite scale the heights of its predecessor, even containing a stumble or two ('Girl From The Office,' with Hunter playing the cad, falls flat), but it still offers plenty.

It ain't always pretty. [Oct 2009, p.104]

The conceit, owing as much to Thomas Pynchon as it does to the Grateful Dead, and songs like 'Jehovah Will Never Come' remain delightful. [Nov 2009, p.104]

The Dead Weather is another slightly unsatisfying fling alongside The Raconteurs. [Jul 2009, p.84]

An LP that once raved shamelessly now shuffles, twitchily. [Oct 2009, p.95]

They deliver a debut of confidence and conviction. [Oct 2009, p.112]

Welcome To... is impressive rather than truly loveable. [Aug 2009, p.102]

Embrace plies its trade with a neat mix of musical proficiency and stylistic flexibility. [Jun 2009, p.93]

The song themselves are thoughtful, ambling between folk, country and mid-paced roots-rock. [Aug 2009, p.100]

It shares Bon Iver's "For Emma, Forever Ago's" exquisite sense of existing in its own hermetically sealed world. [Aug 2009, p.87]

The RAA's narratives are as expansive as the prarie where singer-songwriter and guitarist Nils Edenloff grew up, but they're also full of resonnant, intimate detail. [Aug 2010, p.94]

The passion evident throughout help disguise the feeling we've been here before. [Jul 2009, p.109]

Rated O delivers more often than falters. [Aug 2009, p.98]

Regularly a memorable lyric leaps out--but too often the pared-down aesthetic is an excuse to coast. [Aug 2009, p.96]

While they are unlikely to blow any heads off, track like 'Graffiti Eyes' show that they haven't lost the knack of writing diverting pop songs. [Sep 2009, p.96]

The songs are often gently ironic '70s orchestral pop with overtones of striped caps and Edwardian moustaches. [Aug 2009, p.90]

Their supple, smouldering songs take you back to an innocent, pre-Britpop indie era while retaining the thrust of contempories like Bloc Party. [Aug 2009, p.87]

This debut release on their own label is an uncompromising instrumental beast, rammed with weapons-grade jazz-metal riffing and ultra-heavy No Wave sax skronking. [Aug 2009, p.85]

Wilco (the album) picks up more or less where 2007’s mellow and soulful "Sky Blue Sky" left off, but subtly expands that record’s parameters.

The musical palette, however, is wider this time round, emphasising the breadth of Helm’s interests rather than the stuff on which he was weaned--numbers by Muddy Waters and Nina Simone rub shoulders with works by Randy Newman and the Grateful Dead.

Elsewhere, sluggish excursions in ambient pop and a commitment to melancholia that borders on the opppressive suggests that all those years grasping at the advertising dollar have left a taint of bland that won't scrub off. [Aug 2009, p.96]

American Saturday Night has its fair share of hokum but proves that Paisley has a tough baritone voice and is a mean, bluesy guitarist. [Aug 2010, p.92]

When he's not making party music, he stretches out and delivers deep fluid grooves. It's the naggingly simplistic melodies and dumb call-and-response choruses of tracks like 'U Want Some?' that spoil the fun. [Aug 2009, p.92]

Everything sounds deliciously grubby and unpolished.

At best, Varshons is a joy forever. Even at worst, it’s a forgiveable, even likeable, labour of love.

The solos are majestic and Barlow even contributes a couple of thumpers. Nobody does this better.

As ever with The Mars Volta, there are enough flashes of brilliance to make up for the wearying material elsewhere. [Sep 2009, p.86]

Throughout, there's an ungainly combination of the leaden and the jaunty. [Aug 2009, p.102]

Murdering Oscar is all about connecting with the past, as Hood cuts loose with old and new bandmates, crafting tender paeans to his new wife and daughter, dusting down childhood memories against a backdrop of roughhouse blues, swamp-country and slow Southern soul.

Spinnerette sees the former Distillers leader at the head of a band not dissimilar to that run by her husband, Josh Homme. [Jul 2009, p.101]

Their grandiose Baron Muchhausen indie rock does tend to veer toward indulgent. [Jul 2009, p.101]

Beacons Of Ancestorship is rather unlovely beast, sagging under the weight of hoary synths, lumbering dynamics and improvisatory formlessness--not to mention high expectations. [Jul 2009, p.101]

McCauley's time might just have arrived.

The pulse of the blues still beats deep in his soul but the emphasis here is on Taylor's poetic sensibility on an emotionally charged set of songs loosely dealing with the darker side of the human heart. [Sep 2009, p.96]

A frequently startling record of no little beauty--which threatens to launch a new, esoteric generation of Williamsburg wonders.

A band that couldn't ddcide if they preferred the caustic post-grunge of The Jesus Lizard or the absurdist, singalong witticisms of Half Man Half Biscuit, so choose to do both. Happily, the band have the muscular riffs and eloquence to pull off both. [Jul 2009, p.88]

It helps that Wilkinson sings sweetly, too, distancing and layering his vocals for that dewy, lost-in-the-woods effect. [Aug 2009, p.87]

It is the clan's most successful production since 1996's "If You're Feeling Sinister." [Jul 2009, p.88]

The band are now reactivated for their seventh, and pick up pretty much where they left off, the strum and twang now augmented by strings, but with the same determinedly old-school indie happysad heart. [Jul 2009, p.81]

Morello's guitars tend to dominate, Riley's best lines get lost, and none of the songs here have the tunes to convert floating voters. [Nov 2009, p.106]

If polished solos from Steve Vai and Keith Emerson detract from the original film's clumsy verite, some lines can still elicit big chuckles. [Aug 2009, p.105]

It's an energetic and clattering punk listen, topped by Ada's louche vocals, but suffers from over-exhuberance in its production. [Jul 2009, p.101]

Still, as a whole, Bitte Orca feels nothing less than a modern equivalent to Talking Heads' Fear Of Music or Scritti's Cupid & Psyche 85 –art-rock with intellectual rigour, borderless curiosity, and no fear of the mainstream. Pop, by any other name.

Good, but the exciting notion of a genuine career left turn feels increasingly unlikely.

The band utilise new instruments--saxophone, brass and more--in a too-blantant attempt to convince us that they are more than goths. [Aug 2009, p.101]

Mos Def can still create the year's finest hip hop album. [Sep 2009, p.88]

A world away from their ladrock roots, you might say.

The album closes with a reprise of 'To Ohio'--possibly superfluous given the perfection of the earlier version, but the only marginal misjudgement on an otherwise largely faultless album.

They aren't up to the job. [Jul 2009, p.83]

Flowers is occasionally emotional, but really, Kinsella is all about an off-the-cuff approach. [Jul 2009, p.90]

Even by his own standard, the conceptual breadth and sonic dexterity of Jhelli Beam dazzle. [Sep 2009, p.79]

Surprisingly, though, it's all a damn sight better than Velvet Revolver. [Sep 2009, p.81]

At 36 minutes, Preliminaires is slight and covers-heavy, but points to a promising new career phase for Iggy as Detroit’s answer to Serge.

Most crucially, Costello manages--apart from the previously cited cringe-worthy lapses--to play along with Burnett’s in-soft/out-LOUD approach, making this his most engaging album in a very long time.

Too often they sound like Sting fronting Counting Crows. [Jul 2009, p.93]

It’s E’s lyrics that are the true, bitter joy of this record, sacrificing nothing of their wit in pursuit of heartbreaking, heartbroken directness.

There’s more, too much more, to come, but for now, Volume One will do just fine.

Thier latest dusts off their usual blend of late-'70s Clash-styled punk, ska and dub reggae, but applies topspin via 'Civilian Ways,' a bluesy folk exercise inspired by the return of Armstrong's brother from Iraq. [Sep 2009, p.92]

More than just rote electro workouts, Carey successfully transforms 'Can't Stop Feeling' and 'Turn It On' into rich, dubby bleepfests. More of this invention on the album proper wouldn't have gone amiss. [Jul 2009, p.88]

The gravel voice and self-penned songs are distinctive, and though he's not beyond over-emoting, this stakes claim on a wide territory in a bold manner. [Jul 2009, p.95]

While I’m not sure Veckatimest is the huge improvement on Yellow House that some blogs claim it to be, it’s unquestionably a lovely record and it deserves to be heard on land, sea, indoors and out.

These Varsailles dwellers make records that initially seem like delicately generic powerpop, but gradually emerge as vivid, bittersweet epiphanies. [Jun 2009, p.99]

Eating Us is a litle too tidy, their frazzled wildness cultivated into ordered orchards, but on tracks like the typically titled 'Bubblegum Animals,' BMSR still conjure a ravishing, stoned cyber-soul pinic. [Jun 2009, p.83]

II might as well be a sketch for something more impressive. [Aug 2009, p.94]

Curious webs of blurry guitar, analogue keyboard and cranky drum machine, song like 'Blue Lights' resemble a lower-than-lo-fi Cure, where ramshakle recording and budget texture becomes part of the appeal. [Jun 2009, p.83]

Their seventh LP is a(nother) case of "none more black," but 'Big Church'--in which a Viennese women's choir provides the counter to crushing, sustained chords are striking departures from Sunn)))'s awesome canon. [Jun 2009, p.103]

Here, the presence of a harmonium updates some lava lamp pyschedelic freakouts, David Axelrod's jazzy grooves and the feathery female harmonies of The Free Design, whose Chris Dedrick provides sleevenotes for the vinyl. [Jun 2009, p.101]