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]