Much of this album sounds like its been stitched together from 4AD's finest moments. [Dec 2008, p.88]

The hipster-redneck rhetoric could grate, but O'Death are too good to be dismised as a novelty act. [Dec 2008, p.105]

Ultimately, Cardinology serves as another minor indictment of Adams’ famously lackadaisical internal editor. Neveretheless, it is still, almost infuriatingly, a stretch better than most people at their best.

The dreary emotional content and the sub-MBV soundscapes set out to gaze enigmatically at their shoes. Sadly, they don't get past the navel. [dec 2008, p.115]

Eventually Brad Hargett's depressive baritone voice will get you down, but not before it has demanded your attention. [Apr 2009, p.87]

It features tracks recorded with rock outfits like The Flying Hearts which recall Jonathan Richman and Lou Reed; minimal, folksy miniatures that sound a ltttle like John Martyn or James Taylor; and a string of delicious, whimsical synth-pop songs that are as good as anything in the early-'80s canon. [Dec 2008, p.115]

The result is a confusing confection that plays out like "Anti-Capitalism: The Musical." [Jan 2009, p.96]

Odds and sods, then, but not without appeal. [Jan 2008, p.101]

Skeletal Lamping follows the latter path, fleshing out the polymorphous persona of Georgie Fruit via brilliantly executed attention-deficit funk. [Dec 2008, p.105]

The Sea And The Cake's refusal to budge from their original MO for the last 14 years seems like an admirable show of restraint. [Nov 2008, p.119]

The eclectism is exhilarating. [Nov 2008, p.96]

There are epic power ballads, which just manage to avoid faling into Keane/Coldplay territory; there are terriffic, drone-laden stomp-rockers....The use of saxophone, however, is ill-advised, and Lightburn's voice can get a little ponderous. [Dec 2008, p.88]

'Little Ones' is insanely jaunty, like somthing out of "Sesame Street" and one of the most enjoyable songs of the year. The rest of Receivers is equally buoyant. [Dec 20008, p.108]

His debut for Thurston Moore's label is another walk in the forest of heavy psych rock and avant folk, that blurs the boundaries between the timeless and traditional and the tres moderne. [Nov 2008, p.100]

While it frequently feels like a particularly inspired "Mighty Boosh" number, the absurd ambition, chutzpah and execution of it all is perfectly awesome. [Nov 2008, p.89]

Grainger's first solo outing swaps the lascivious intensity of his former outfit for a rakish new wave ramalam somewhere between Cheap Trick and The Strokes' "First Impression of Earth." [Apr 2009, p.86]

If Black Ice has a weakness, it’s that it betrays an anxiety. As if AC/DC really might be uncharacteristically worried that their grasp on the planet is in danger of slipping. As if they’ve tried to discreetly update their sound, while hoping that their rebarbative old fans won’t notice what they’ve done. Invincibility suits AC/DC. Self-doubt, even a microscopic hint of it, does not.

For newcomers, Is It The Sea? offers a neat summation of Oldham’s quiet industry, while it may just mark the turning point from his darker years.

It's ambitious, triumphantly executed stuff--melodically, lyrically, Tim Oxley-Rice is a vastly superior songsmith to Chris Martin--and will doubtless shortly be inescapable. But you can't shake the dispiriting feeling it might have all been expressly commissioned by Dave Cameron for the opening night of London 2012.

Little Honey is a heartening and humble album, sufficiently smart and aware to be an expression of thanks for the journey as well as the destination.

While ['You Are The Best Thing'] gets the LP off to a rousing start, the song also serves a thematic purpose by celebrating the pleasures and synergy of a smoothly functioning conjugal unit--an ideal that stands in stark contrast to the romantic torment that follows.

The material on what's intended to be her big breakthrough is however unispired. [Mar 2009, p.80]

Songs remain huge, sitting just the right side of overblown, ornate but never delicate, as if hewn from stainless steel. [Feb 2009, p.93]

For his last couple of albums, cowpunk songster Snider has pitched himself in the sort of satiracally confrontational and liberal-minded territory occuupied by Randy Newman or Steve Earle. Peace Queer follows that pattern. [Jan 2008, p.113]

The resulting hazy acoustic soundscapes are only a soft-shoe shuffle away from Caribou's neo-pyschedelia. [Dec 2008, p.108]

Her own songs are more intriguing, however; poetic mediations on love and its destructive powers, sung in a tremulous but intense voice. [Feb 2009, p.76]

It's Religious Knives' proto-PiL, art-punk minimalism and addiction to the motorik groove that mark them out as different. [Nov 2008, p.117]

This dispiriting posthumous EP suggests there was little life left or love lost. [Dec 2008, p.108]

The complete recording reveals many (until-now) hidden delights that we can enjoy in full. [Nov 2008, p.89]

This collaboration with Athens lo-fi specialists Elf Power isn't his most immediatly appealing set, but it's worth it just for 'Bilocating Dog,' a lovely shambles of a song with an absurd chorus. [Jan 2008, p.88]

Never self indulgent, this is enquiring music that's frequently beautiful. [Dec 2008, p.81]

Fucked Up Friends isn't that great of a departure from this year's "Eating Us." [Aug 2009, p.105]

Headhunter's laboratory productions are probably just a bit too clinical to transcend their genre. [Jn 2008, p.96]

Sounds alarmingly authentic to boot. [Nov 2008, p.102]

This is a hugely infectious debut. [Oct 2008, p.81]

The devil is in the detail--and Skinner's devilish side is his most appealing.[Oct 2008, p.108]

It's an uninspiring ending to a record that it's best faces up to some pretty downbeat truths and thus seems to fit right into the current national mood.

Their tenth LP OH (ohio) lands with some nervous expectation attached. As it turns out, it’s their best record since 2000 landmark, "Nixon."

If Offend Maggie doesn't have quite have that idiot's glee it's nevertheless quite a riot. [Nov 2008, p.94]

So while it's hard to quote a single memorable line, Yo Majesty's attitude is infectious. [Oct 2008, p.94]

A bargin it might be, but the triumphs of yore tend to expose the new album's low-fi rockabilly and country strums. [Jul 2009, p.95]

The Living And The Dead finds her broadening her palette, enlisting Tom Waits guitarist Marc Ribot to bring a miore rock flavour. It's only partially successful. [Nov 2008, p.102]

Tell Tale Signs is awash with evidence of his staggering mercuriality, his evident determination even in the studio to repeat himself as little as possible, re-takes not merely the occasion for refinement, the honing of a song into static finality, but serial re-imaginings.

Pleasingly, the most difficult thing about the album is its name. [Dec 2008, p.116]

On Un Dia with her insistent, looped and latered frooves to the fore, her seductively dreamy voice is used as both rhythmic counter and complement. [Nov 2008, p.109]

The sextet's second effort is both an expression of their anarcho-punk fury and a declarartion of straight-edge commitment, but it's also a radical redrawing of hardcore's boundaries, that reanimates the genre with an aggressively intelligent jolt. [Nov 2008, p.96]

If you had Yamagata bagged as "winsome singer-songwriter," the breadth and ambition of this double-disc will knock you sideways. [Apr 2009, p.105]

Rosen and Nicolaus stride forth as songsmiths of a much more assured vintage, harp, piano, brass and chocolatey harmonies coming together in vividly orchestrated numbers. [Nov 2008, p.94]

Smart, cocksure and as cosmopolitan as New York itself, Live At Shea Stadium deserves a place amongst the greats.

This album is overflowing with ideas that the band don't have the means--or, indeed, the patience--to explore fully. [Feb 2009, p.85]

If it sounds suspiciously of coffee table, it is. But the coffee is freshly grounded, and thr table an elegant modernist sculpture. [Nov 2008, p.119]

The music on this debut is nutritionally meager powerpop. [Nov 2008, p.120]

Peer behind the pose, owever, and you'll find a sparky outfit whose towering tunes, such as 'Sun comes Up,' match their lofty ideas. [Sep 2008, p.115]

Folds' third solo album is filled with songs about breakups, laced with some low-key experimentalism and, of course, a lot of keyboard pounding. [Nov 2008, p.94]

There are flashes of thrilling chaos but all too often they are contained and subdued by fussy programming.

Constantly questing without ever becoming indulgent, 4 is intoxicating. [Nov 2008, p.94]

It proves a diverting tour round Seeger's perennial concerns. [Jan 2008, p.111]

There's a sense that he's doing little more than cobbling together offcuts from his recent stream of projects. [Dec 2008, p.105]

Out Of My Window shimmers like a heat haze. [Nov 2008, p.105]

Absentee's Dan Michaelson proves he could give Lee Hazlewood and Mark Lanegan a run for their money, but its not just his voice that plumbs depths. [Oct 2008, p.81]

A triptych of gauzy electro-country duests show what they can do when they shake off some of their self-conscious wackiness. [Dec 2008, p.92]

The only danger of such an exercise being the risk of tarnishing the legend. But there's no problem here. [dec 2008, p.100]

Pleasant, but utterly inessential. [Mar 2009, p.104]

As a studio album it's dull and rather pointless. [Dec 2008, p.116]

When ever Gordon Anderson admits to being "lost inside the chasms of my mind," therre seems little hope for the rest of us. [Nov 2008, p.87]

It all proves that Seasick Steve is at his strongest when he’s playing solo.

Sadly, Feed The Animals blends commercial US rap with rock classics with so little charm or skll, that even Jive Bunny is slightly annoyed you've used his name in vain. [Nov 2008, p.96]

Their debut reveals a band bristling with ideas who've taken the time to streamline their influences into a syrupy white funk. [Nov 2008, p.98]

Fine, but no surprises. [Oct 2008, p.101]

The four players are able to design the tracks in architectural detail, each part locking into the rest with unerring precission, and this tautness keeps the album from sagging through its most challenging stretch. [Oct 2008, p.78]

All are very good indeed.

The skeletal bluesy shuffles are easy to follow, but the likes of 'Avalanch In B' suggest a band lyrically happy to keep the unpleasantness in their woodshed under wraps. [Oct 2008, p.81]

Like most big pop groups, they're great at singles--Rodney Jerkins' 'When I Grow Up' fashionably disses fame-- but fail when it comes to albums. [Dec 2008, p.115]

Acid Tongue is imperfect, but nevertheless slightly more than halfway to astounding.

It is not hard to make fun of this band, even if you’re broadly sympathetic to their beliefs. But the atmosphere they create in their music is so heady, so insidious, so rooted in their environment and their Utopian ideals, that the whole package becomes compelling.

This is a much more laid-back collection of strangely alien desert music written in Hagerty's adopted home state of New Mexico and recorded in Texas. [Oct 2008, p.92]

Tennessee Pusher is comfortably up to standard, the demented Dylan pastiche, 'Alabama High-Test' a particular highlight. [Oct 2008, p.101]

It probably made for a more interesting theatrical experience than it does standalone album, but if the form--expressive, exaggerated musical drama--is a bit unfamiliar, then Albarn's insidious tunes are not. [Oct 2008, p.101]

They've come up with a non-vocal album that surprises and delights. [Nov 2008, p.112]

The pinnacle is the tidal rhythms of 'Sickness, Bury,' but there's plenty more here to admire and absorb. [Nov 2008, p.98]

The title song contains some lovely imagery enwrapped in one of Browne’s signature ribbons of melody, while the following 'Off Of Wonderland' is a wistful look back on the early days, but both are presented in arrangements so bland it’s shocking they passed muster.

It's all craftily entertaining, but loopy lead single 'Paris Is Burning' is the one track that escapes pastiche. [Oct 2008, p.94]

Tindersticks have returned refreshed, but some of the old dissolute glamour is gone.

Twenty-one-year-old Charlie Fnk's cracked baritone is brown sugar-sweet, '5 Years Time' is a hit, and the album's Jonathan Richman-esque gawkiness makes it double endearing. [Oct 2008, p.94]

Their rather timid approximation of prog lacks the charisma or gravitas required to persuade listeners that theirs is a cosmic expedition worth joining. [Sep 2008, p.100]

There's still an organic, soaring bluster to the music, too, though a shortage of obvious anthems this time. [May 2008, p.100]

The most initially striking thing about Gift Of Screws is that, despite its brevity, it’s actually quite varied.

But this band has no interest in putting everything in plain view; you have to meet them halfway, and that entails traversing bleak terrain on the way to sharing in their hard-earned sense of release. [Dec 2009, p. 98]

It's Saadiq's fine songs--notably the showstopping slow-jam 'Oh Girl'--that makes The Way I See It less a homage, more a timelessly enjoyable 42 minutes. [May 2009, p.97]

All are by turns playful, impassioned, and intelligent. [Oct 2008, p.118]

The languid vocal delivery does little to dispel the Dido comparisions of old, the polite and impassionate tones irking the listener even in the smallest does. [Mar 2009, p.89]

The pace is laidback and determinedly downtempo compared to some of their more rebarbative free rock releases. [Jan 2009, p.96]

This is music that was manufactured to be played everywhere except those places to which people go when they want to hear music. [Oct 2008, p.105]

Given a few spins, their hilarious, loopy, layered approach sinks in deep. [Dec 2008, p.124]

Like all the best heavy rock albums, it suspends your disbelief, demands your attention and connects directly with your inner adolescent.

Even at times it's over-polished, at the very least, it's super-sized. [July 2008, p.113]

Tricky is back with his best album in at least a decade.