Untrue is altogether warmer than its predecessor. [Jan 2008, p.87]

Best enjoyed with your brain set to simmer, it's harmlessly high-octane fun. [Dec 2007, p.119]

Buck 65 returns to abstract hip hop, but injects it with cool, psych jazz and '70s cinematic funk. [Dec 2007, p.86]

Sighing, panting and smouldering her way throufgh a dozen digitized come-ons, she maintains the fiction of a robo-pop nymphomaniac while all around her, Rome burns. [Jan 2008, p.102]

That band’s ambition is intact is remarkable--that they’ve made an album that captures the zeitgeist is maybe even more so.

The result is a collection that sounds like nothing so much as a modern-day Dock Boggs signed to the Lost Highway label.

The theme of lost innocence is ideal for the sad sweetness of Conor Deasy’s voice, which has never sounded better than on 'This Year,' a rush of noise which restores the busked immediacy of their debut.

Street entirely avoids DIA’s flinty spectrality and staticky crackle and turns a bright light on the smart, compact and relentlessly exciting arrangements he’s here coaxed from the band.

The album is a powerful exploration of faith, with Young circling his own mortality.

You leave Load Blown feeling that Black Dice, unlike many of their kin, are actually genuine experimentalists--even if it's with the caveat that sometimes it all rather blows up in their face. [Nov 2007, p.96]

Tankian combines prog pomp and a variety of vocal techniques, all irritating, to uniformly unlistenable effect. [Nov 2007, p.125]

'Object' is a highlight, as is the lovely 'Sweetheart In The Summer.' [Dec 2007, p.119]

Gahan is a way off from being a David Sylvian–-but not as far as you might think.

The pairing of the wily old tomcat and the classy country thrush turns out as magically in reality as it seemed unlikely on paper.

Preparations smudges the distinction between Herren's Prefuse 73 and Savath & Savalas aliases, and shares with Golden Pollen, his summer S&S release, a listless drift. [Dec 2007, p.101]

A full LP exposes their limitations and suggests that the songs may work best as soundtracks to their elegant stop-motion videos. [nov 2007, p.108]

Unsettling to the last, it’s Blanche all over.

In The Vines reveals more of its peculiar candlelit charm with every play. [Dec 2007, p.106]

Hooking up with Butch Vig, evidently--and trying for a heavier sound, It's a fair effort, certainly, but an unconvincing strategy. [Dec 2007, p.98]

This is a finely polished album, but low on guts, grit or urgency. [Nov 2007, p.129]

This conservative collection feels more like musical air freshener than any kind of statement. [Dec 2007, p.104]

It's harder to fault the tunes, however, smeared thick with QOTSA sludge or pretty 'Dakota' clones 'It Means Nothing' and 'Daisy Lane.' [Nov 2007, p.123]

The result is a delight. [Nov 2007, p.115]

Radiohead have made their most well-behaved, classically structured album since "OK Computer."

The results are frequently souless and over-produced. [October 2007, p.93]

If you can forgive Condon’s mannered delivery and overabundance of drunken waltz rhythms, this is an audacious experiment in cultural appropriation, an enchanting musical holiday in someone else’s misery.

By now the patience of even their most ardent fans must be wearing thin