Despite the metaphysical yet conversational “Knowing” and a sexed-up title track that begins with his come in her hair, she doesn’t offer enough evidence that her new love is any realer than all the others she’s exulted and struggled through in eight albums going back to 1979.

[An] entertaining album. [Apr 2005, p.119]

Scored with ramshackle grandeur by scribbly guitars, fat horns, poignant keyboards and ragtag sing-alongs, Benaim’s lyrics narrate the anxieties and optimisms of New York City’s young, educated and underemployed.

Travis may have grown serious, but at least it hasn't gone to their heads. [Nov 2003, p.122]

The dramatic arc of these songs is built around the way instruments lurch into place and dance drunkenly around one another before staggering off once again.

The missing links between club night, rock show and 2001-style cosmic experience, these boys are still worth digging. [Mar 2005, p.138]

Sky Blue Sky often feels like the Dead's American Beauty if Jerry Garcia had taken Paxil instead of acid. [Jun 2007, p.103]

The best of Shadows lives in murky half-light where texture matters as much as melody. [Oct 2004, p.112]

She balances her freakiness by matching her sublime chirp with grounded glories. [Jan/Feb 2006, p.93]

This album is luxuriously, fantastically gay, a nod to the origins of disco, when the music was known for its queer fan base as much as anything else. [July 2008, p.73]

She still goes into circles sometimes, but you might too if you could roll a phrase around your tongue the way Wainwright can. [July 2008, p.77]

Viva La Vida still manages to seem downsized compared to the band's gradiose early work. [July 2008, p.69]

With Simon LeBon sharpening his typically abstract lyrics and everyone bolstering the contrasting, constant hooks, Timbaland perfects the rock-techno fusion his solo album fumbled, while Duran emphasize their willfully plastic extremes. They’ve never sounded this pretty and severe.

Loose Fur is fun, even if it is exactly the sum of its parts. [#14, p.139]

The mood of Jones's second album is more or less the same, if slightly friskier. [Mar 2004, p.118]

Only on "Prison Song," a jokey fake-oldie, does the Offspring's weakness for novelty tunes lead them astray. [Dec 2003, p.145]

Her ardent love songs ultimately come off not as love songs but standard ache-and-pain Mary tracks--making this album not quite the breakthrough it might have been. [Mar 2006, p.109]

[An] album of sharply assembled rock & roll. [Jun 2007, p.105]

Will Gregory’s sparkling webs of acoustic guitar, synth and strings allow the more slender melodies to slide into vaporous prettiness, but Goldfrapp’s voice remains extraordinary, as witchily sensual as Kate Bush’s, as otherworldly as a theremin.

This Austin trio makes a uniquely wigged-out noise, like genuine Lone Star lone wolves, mixing psychedelic boogie and spastic punk (á la ’80s titans the Minutemen) into shifty, sharp songs that whirl by like tornados with ADD.

It's Banhart's gift for melody that ultimately carries the day. [Nov 2004, p.128]

The clarity of her frustration gives the songs an unsparing honesty, but it's also frustrating to witness. [Oct 2007, p.112]

Earth is the sound of a band coming to that inevitable realization: five patrician perfectionists who've resolved to sound sloppy, even (or especially) at the risk of fucking up. [Jan/Feb 2006, p.98]

The minimalist tracks rate among his best. [May 2006, p.109]

The acoustic Spooked surveys post-millennial life. [Nov 2004, p.135]

The gruff, authoritative Chuck and irrepressible second-banana-turned-VH1-ladykilla Flavor Flav know that uplifting kids corroded by gangsta rap means offering something emotionally fierce and reasonably current.

His most intimate recording yet. [#17, p.138]

The quartet has the virtues of youth... and some of the drawbacks. [May 2007, p.106]

A terrific joy bomb of power chords and power-pop keyboard riffs. [#27, p.142]

[A] tightly coiled second album. [Jul 2007, p.119]

The familiar-sounding song structures are an artfully crafted misdirection.

The songs transform emo's search for truth and its vivid angst into great drama. [#15, p.122]

[OK Go's] sophomore album rocks most amiably when wordy frontman Damian Kulash loosens up. [Sep 2005, p.135]

There's an intensity here that's hard to resist. [#14, p.142]

Kasher is back to the microscope and black light, using willful musical twists to tear apart his own thirtysomething hypocrisy on this ambitious, kinda-grossly-titled sixth CD.

DiFranco seems less the compulsive confessor here, more the storyteller. [Mar 2005, p.139]

The two Louris/Tweedy writing collaborations stand with the best work of both. [Aug 2006, p.108]

[An] excellent, star-studded farewell. [Sep 2006]

Where his pals Outkast seem like genuine freaks of nature, he sometimes seems apologetically weird.

Destroyer's slickest synthesis yet of ornate hooks and cryptic poetics. [Apr 2004, p.127]

A surprisingly heartfelt collection, heavy on lullaby-like ballads yet still oozing with sexy noir ambiance. [Jun 2005, p.113]

Scabrous, overdriven spallter-punk. [Nov 2006, p.136]

The cocky songs mask a lot of misery. [Jun 2007, p.107]

Junior Boys’ immaculate synth-pop comes with a heartsick afterburn, even such unrobotic elements as a wandering saxophone or gentle acoustic guitar.

As eclectic as these 13 songs are, they all sound of a piece: Experlty cut and finished with fine details. [Nov 2004, p.135]

Retro-atmospherics guru M. Ward and grizzled guitar genius Marc Ribot leave their dusty fingerprints. Holland leaves behind a trail of her own.

Us[es] Nevermind as a trusty road map. [Apr 2006, p.116]

On this eight-song EP--available for free on his Web site--the amiable 42-year-old lends his peach-cobbler drawl to songs about maimed soldiers and power-drunk bullies, a doleful cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 'Fortunate Son' and 'Mission Accomplished (Because You Gotta Have Faith),' which deploys a Bo Diddley beat to excoriate a leader who “drove us off a cliff and told us we were flyin’.”

Satisfyingly sloppy.

There's a little too much goop here. [Mar 2006, p.113]

Some selections are heartwrenching... But others bear the stain of sentimentality, denial, even exploitation. [Jul 2006, p.98]

Suffer through some over-eager violin and flute solos early on, and by the time Morrison hits the guttural blues moans of the bonus track 'Listen to the Lion,' the songs have opened up like a source of eternal life.

It’s a modest record, but also the first Byrne album in decades to feel sprung from outside the ex-Head’s head space.

Produced by hip-hop head case Danger Mouse, who is half of Gnarls Barkley, Modern Guilt mixes ancient rock--mainly the incense-and-peppermints-flavored ’60s psychedelia of Revolver-era Beatles, the Zombies and Pink Floyd--with the woozy, abstract beats Danger Mouse manages to turn into freaked-out fun.

One of the country highs of the year. [#15, p.121]

Perry’s creative-writing-class punch lines don’t always justify her self-congratulatory drag-queen tone. But she hiccups quirkily enough, and myriad big-name producers (from Dr. Luke to Glen Ballard) keep the new-wave synth hooks hopping

They're not just churning out electro-scuz-soaked romps, they're reclaiming music's right to drop the verse-chorus form, set out on weird five-minute electronic benders and end up somewhere strange and exciting. [Oct 2008, p.80]

This follow-up just isn't as lovable. [Jul 2007, p.110]

A whiz-bang jukebox of state-of-the-art West Coast scruff-rock. [May 2003, p.126]

The beats throughout are deliriously varied. [Dec 2004, p.138]

Andersson’s lyrics are often tricky to make out--can she really be singing, “We talk about love/We talk about dishwasher tablets”?—but almost every song incorporates shrewd production details, like the clog-dance percussion that kicks 'I’m Not Done' forward.

The proceedings get a little bit samey, but the band's fearless optimism and knack for a bookish groove are hard to deny. [Dec 2004, p.140]

The idea is to build a monorail between Aphex Twin and Stax Records; the songwriting eventually slacks off, but Lidell's performances don't. [Aug 2005, p.111]

This is 21st-century lounge with a Manson heart — music for unwinding, or maybe plotting crazed revenge.

For the first time in El-P's career, he's realized you don't need to be loud to get your point across. [Apr 2007, p.110]

The quintet’s debut LP often plays like a low-budget male companion piece to Amy Winehouse’s throwback hit 'Back to Black.'

An excellent debut.... Derivative, but irresistibly infectious. [Sep 2003, p.129]

The record's initial thrill comes from the confidence with which the Distillers and producer Gil Norton revive rock as a demolishing force. [Nov 2003, p.116]

They're intensely twee indie rockers, prone to brisk, even jittery, grooves, and with his pinched voice, Reyes sounds as though he's grasping at something just out of his reach. [Nov 2008, p.75]

This music is better hazy, its messages garbled and out of reach. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.82]

He is clearly invigorated by the tensions between pretty and ugly, simplicity and chaos. [Nov 2004, p.130]

Many bands sound like this, but few do it so well, or with such dorky haircuts. [June 2008, p.77]

This is their sunniest, most likeable record, leavened by hints of light-footed dance music.

Jet frequently manage to turn in the kind of bulgy-veined, streamlined gonzo rock that [Oasis] haven't managed since the mid-90s. [Nov 2003, p.114]

He took three years to produce this follow-up, and the labor shows, for good and ill. [August 2007, p.117]

When it comes to creating nuanced and irreverent, yet oddly touching, pop and rock simulacra, no one really touches pseudonymous Pennsylvania duo Gene and Dean Ween, still together after 23 years.

If David Lynch were to direct a remake of the Victorian romance Wuthering Heights, he wouldn’t need to commission a soundtrack; Secret Machines have recorded it.

The diversity isn't as effortless, but the pushier, poppier beats dislodge A&M from their polite safety zone. [Apr 2009, p.58]

Striking [and] confident. [Apr 2006, p.116]

It’s a fantastically difficult record, but almost every passage of knotty head-game weirdness quickly dovetails into something dramatic and physical, and it all sparkles with crushed particles of the blues.

Strangely compelling. [Nov 2004, p.129]

While none of the new album’s hooks match the taurine-mainlining rush of “Sugar, We’re Goin Down,” there’s still lots to love.

As lively as contemporary folk gets. [#14, p.144]

Lost in an eerie, graceful torpor, he opens his mouth and lets words seep out and linger, like so much intoxicating smoke.

Quirks and all, it's a consistently absorbing tale from a songwriter who's still pushing himself. [Sep 2003, p.132]

The album is crisper than the band’s early-’08 EP, thanks to Spoon producer Mike McCarthy, who let the fury bounce around every inch of a cinder-block space in Austin--where, appropriately, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" sound effects were recorded.

With this foulmouthed, backsliding rock, Hull and his flock do Dixie real proud.

Even if nobody's made a record that sounds much like this before, she's given her performance here too many times already. [Jun 2007, p.106]

Black Lips make the same album over and over. If that album sucked, this might be a problem. But it doesn’t.

DMB's five nimble instrumentalists... take Putumayo globalism to a Sigma Chi frat party. [Jun 2005, p.107]

There's no great leap into maturity... They've kept their salient feature--scorching, adolescent tantrums--unchanged. [Jun 2007, p.109]

The songs have as much personality as ever, reviving bygone styles, from falsetto lite-funk to electro proto-rap, with goofball energy and a music geek’s careful ear.

When Ville lets loose a rare scream on 'Love in Cold Blood,' it's a downer. Dude: We know you've come to suck our blood, but at least have the courtesy to romance us first! [Oct 2007, p.110]

On their fourth record, the tempos are slower, the guitars thick and meaty, the rants kinda melodic, the thoughts impressionistic.

This orderly collection of messy leftovers suits his disheveled talents. [Nov 2006, p.137]

Despite all the players, these lush songs are transitory, not bombastic or cluttered. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.78]

More mature, more focused, and a little less fun. [Mar 2004, p.115]

Kelly's true genius is the metaphor-laden sex jam, and Double Up has some great ones. [Jul 2007, p.115]