[Case] settles into a relaxed dive-bar groove. [Nov 2004, p.130]

They follow measured guitar burn with bone-rattling explosions, and roll mesmerizing tension into colossal release. [#14, p.138]

A rare case of one step back, two steps forward. [Nov 2006, p.144]

Some songs are all middle, stuck on what might be mere bridges by, say, Rufus Wainwright or Paul Simon. Yet Bird’s open-field poetics do let a wider world creep in, from the corruption of ecosystems to the isolation that can afflict a touring musician or a declining leader alike.

South won't win any prizes for originality, but their songwriting is endearing enough to mask the stink of opportunistic career change. [Nov 2003, p.121]

Full of the sort of twitchy New Wave pop that really gets the hipsters' hips a-shaking. [Jun/Jul 2004, p.148]

Brainy, brooding, classically "indie" guitar music. [#16, p.121]

Lambert has a strong voice, if not an exceptionally pretty one, and it suits her badass hell-raising much better than it does quiet laments like "Desperation." [May 2007, p.107]

From the AC/DC-guitar rips of 'So Hott,' the first single, to the tongue-piercing snare of the title song, the album revels in the physicality of rock & roll.

The band sometimes flails ineffectually, but more often it stays streamlined and urgent. [Jun 2005, p.109]

An album this pretty can make you believe in romantic spells lasting beyond first semester.

With so many hip people in the studio, it's no wonder Echoes sounds like such a party. [Nov 2003, p.119]

The quartet throws itself into these vintage gestures with so much verve and dumb-fun exuberance that the songs, even with their simplistic, catchphrase lyrics, are hard to resist.

Pernice's neuroses sound as compelling as ever. [Jul 2005, p.121]

Scary. And at times, scary good. [Nov 2008, p.73]

The sonic and theatrical muscle it takes to project to 50,000 people who've paid to see another band adds a sense iof purpose that can't transfigure the superb material but does give the music its own charater. [Nov 2008, p.81]

On this sublime set, Case's own sweeping, backwoods melodies and bloodstained Southern Gothic lyrics finally match the drama of her wails. [Apr 2006, p.111]

Even the most hardcore riddims here percolate with moments of silky soul, pop and gospel. [Aug 2004, p.128]

The music, coproduced by M.I.A. confederate Switch, warps and wanders too, from rock-rap to dancehall to new wave to folk.

Xzibit reinvents himself as a rapper invigorated by current events. [Nov 2004, p.146]

Enough human warmth sneaks through to make this second album exciting and affecting. [Nov 2005, p.133]

Though less dynamic, the weary mid-tempo arrangements embody the album’s crushing hopelessness, tempered only by John Neff’s elegant pedal steel.

It flows like a scrapbook rather than a novel, but it portrays them as diligent experimenters and meticulous melodists who have been liberated by embracing restrictions. [Sep 2004, p.155]

With CSS, even biting the dust is a blast. [Aug 2008, p.82]

He's a master of sweaty hyperventilation, but it's his less frenzied moments--the techno equivalent of circular breathing--that keep the party from collapse. [Apr 2009, p.59]

There are magical, creepy moments here. [Nov 2005, p.131]

For all their wriggly noise details and fragmented language, their center of gravity is in their hips. [#23, p.101]

[Moffat's] monotone is offset by colorful arrangements. [May 2003, p.114]

A hip-hop Blood On The Tracks. [#27, p.143]

Their new boss's hooks are often slicke rand less arresting than the minor-key grit they thrive on. [Jun 2006, p.142]

They're not the kind of band that ages well... [but] one hot summer is all they need. [Aug 2006, p.107]

The jumble of stuff that spills out -- from Delta blues to nineteenth-century ballads to spoken-word rambles -- is surprisingly consistent, at times transcendent, and not just for people intimately acquainted with Waits’s honeyed craziness.

A set of abrasively melodic pop songs. [May 2004, p.124]

Sounds like it's been held in a vault since her heyday. [Oct 2004, p.112]

Lord’s voice is breathy and sweet without being tiresomely innocent or fragile -- it’s Candyland by way of Troubletown.

Weird, hook-filled, and irresistible. [Nov 2004, p.146]

Youngblood's tunes are so clever it's easy to overlook the commitment to new wave it took for him to avoid wasting his love of wordplay on folk music. [Aug 2008, p.84]

Dulcet R&B hooks are spoonfuls of sugar that make De La catchy enough for a new generation of fans. [Nov 2004, p.132]

T.I. boats one of gangsta rap's most mellifluous voices and more polysyllabic lexicons, and when he combines the two, he's dazzling, hypnotic, virtuosic. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.82]

Despite a new set of producers... this vivacious, club-friendly sophomore set merely tinkers with her old recipe. [Jan/Feb 2007, p.83]

It's all top-shelf alt-country: road-hardened, literate and dark as ever. [August 2007, p.114]

Log 22 may be Holland's greatest export since Heineken. [May 2003, p.115]

Maps... swap[s] the band's trademark dreariness for the U2-style arena-rock sweep that makes their live shows... so exciting. [Mar 2005, p.140]

They're old-fashioned ballads, all very tasteful, but few hooks poke through the froth. [Jun 2006, p.139]

Effortlessly surges into the stratosphere of his better work--when not slipping into new age-y monotony. [Jun 2005, p.113]

Cute but not too sugary, smart but not too brainy, [Stacy] Jones's songs practically define pop-punk. [#14, p.130]

Her voice--half dark, lazy molasses, half bourbon with a silky finish--rings with equal parts defiance and vulnerability. [May 2004, p.128]

This is virile, excited music. [Jun 2006, p.146]

Seachange wrap their songs in the glorious dissonance of Sonic Youth and the mighty alt-rock-meets-R&B rhythms of the Afghan Wigs, but underneath it all, they just want to creep you out. [May 2004, p.131]

While none of these spare summer jams of knotty beats match his Marvin Gaye-sampling 2001 hit "Music," almost any would freshen radio. [Aug 2004, p.139]

All that carefulness turns out to be bloodless. [Mar 2007, p.139]

Out Hud don't write songs, they whip up grooves: streamlined throbs and pulses, transmitted live from Saturday night at the coolest club in town. [May 2005, p.123]

The sonics beneath Buck's deadpan rhymes are too often more subdued than the dense collages he started out in the late 90s, but jazz keyboards and conga poly-rhythms keep the backing from sinking into mere soundtrack. [Nov 2007, p.146]

Proves that [You Forgot It In People] wasn’t a fluke.

But vintage doesn’t mean nostalgic. 'Dirty Old Man' is the pissed, hilarious antithesis of his wide-eyed ’70s signature 'Old Man,' and it rivals Nick Cave’s 'No Pussy Blues' (see Grinderman) as the year’s best song about a deranged, horny graybeard.

At Bloc Party’s best, music and message collide with astounding force.

A casual, mostly charming sketchbook of diffident alt-country laments. [Mar 2004, p.116]

Wordman Lillian Berlin murmurs more than he declaims and prefers to share vocals with members of a shifting communal entity dubbed the “Living Things Choir,” and if that fuzzes up the lyrics, well, like most bands, Living Things are more into emotions than ideas anyway.

[It] sounds fantastic--partly because the production nails sample-ready '60s soul right down to the drum sound' and partly because Winehouse is one hell of an impressive singer. [Apr 2007, p.121]

An utterly original if slightly queasiness-inducing album. [Nov 2003, p.109]

Smarter, bouncier and more full of insidious electronic hooks than its predecessors. [Aug 2003, p.124]

It's art music first and pop second. [Oct 2003, p.115]

Cobra Verde embrace classic-rock posturing with all of its messy emotional overreach, wanky-yet-tasteful guitar solos and bombastic songcraft.

Kweller's skeletal songs rely mostly on his acoustic guitar, garage-y riffs and swinging, Beatlesque piano. [Apr 2004, p.130]

Somehow, amid all of this assault, the band builds some excellent tunes. [Sep 2005, p.136]

Gorgeously understated. [Nov 2006, p.138]

Pete Yorn’s songs sound so damn good, it’s easy to assume they’re not smart.

His most relentlessly aggressive album yet. [Oct 2003, p.119]

Bedingfield’s second U.S. release sticks mostly to love odes and peppy self-help bromides, which occasionally veer close to Colbie Caillat’s lake of goop. It would be irksome if not for the uniformly strong pop and R&B songcraft.

Her woodwind-like voice and lucid sensiblity are hardly weird, but Andrews pushes her toward a dreamy and daring edge. [Apr 2005, p.117]

Over the course of an entire album Twista's gift proves his curse: Uniterrupted, it can get taxing. [Mar 2004, p.129]

Dawson's as self-assured as she is sensitive. [Jun 2006, p.137]

The Dears’ breakthrough was 2004’s "No Cities Left," a post-apocalyptic expedition through emotional and political wreckage, and they’re still mining that barren landscape, trying to rebuild.

[Beans] makes music for MCs to scratch their heads to. [#15, p.120]

Urgent, atonal post-punk. [Nov 2003, p.113]

The Sparks' performances are so understated, their arrangements so mechanically soothing, that it's easy to miss Rennie's brutal, elegant twists on folk cliches. [Jul 2006, p.99]

He can go from dazzling to deadeningly dense over LP lengths, so this smaller dose is appealing. [Apr 2005, p.112]

Simple, charming and surprisingly innocent. [#17, p.143]

[Hammond's] "Crown Vic"... fits snugly among these relaxed, happily run-down blues. [#14, p.136]

This is an indie rocker introducing great disco to a bunch of beer drinkers. [Nov 2007, p.150]

Sometimes they're tossing salad, with predictably sappy songs about sainted all-stars Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson, yet theyre funny throwing chin music at cult figures Fernando Valenzuela and Harvey Haddix. [Sep 2008, p.76]

It’s a steadfast assault, whether he’s brooding over dust in the wind ('If Today Was Your Last Day') or idealizing a girl (“She ain’t no Cinderella when she gettin’ undressed/’Cause she rocks it like the naughty Wicked Witch of the West").

McNew adds his own hybrid theory, wittily merging classic and iconoclastic by exploring his influences. [May 2003, p.116]

This album has some of what was missing from Home: fire, ugliness, resentment. [Jun 2006, p.135]

[She] displays the true grit of a younger Bonnie Raitt.

Muscularly arranged with bongolated beats, psychedelic swamp guitars, boogie-woogie pine top and snowballing chorus hooks, Just Us Kids approximates a certain literate strain of early-'80s album rock.

This return to murky obscurantism, thankfully, comes with a return to guitar noise. [Jun 2005, p.115]

The tunes are basically chants and the drumming is more straight-ahead than "tribal" and when the vibraphone trips in after 40 seconds of 'The Ballad of Butter Bean,' you may not bust a gut laughing, but you'll probably grin. [June 2008, p.75]

When the singer’s overfamiliarity with certain material risks turning him nonchalant, Dan Nimmer’s barrelhouse piano picks up the slack; just when you’re ready to give up on an uninspired Hank Williams cover, some New Orleans parade funk kicks in.

[Holland] has been rather mistakenly compared to Billie Holiday; she’s more like Jeff Buckley covering Nina Simone, turning a very modern ear toward yesterday.

Their debut throbs like the Strokes with cross-eyed parents, their songs gritty and economical, their drummer nasty in all the best places. [Aug 2003, p.126]

In place of the band's distinctive head-banging limberness, there's a strange hybrid: a new sort of hard-rock soul, slightly lumbering in spite of its virtuosity. [Sep 2006, p.136]

This wistful, road-trip nostalgia-pop is the sound of alt-rock after the gold rush. [#14, p.141]

Chinese Democracy's non-existence is so well-known and ingrained, the source of so many jokes, that its actual existence can only be a letdown. That is until you hear it. Then, somewhat astonishingly, 5,475 days, at least $13 million, fourteen studios, twenty or so musicians (including five guitarists and a harpist) seems just about right.

The Furnaces play with a whimsical charm, so the band seems more like an arts-and-crafts project than an occupation. [Nov 2003, p.113]

The two halves of OutKast seem less collaborative than ever.

Singer-guitarist Eric Earley accesses the haunted Americana Wilco nailed on "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," with big nods to mid-'60s Bob Dylan, early-'70s Neil Young and the country Grateful Dead. [Oct 2008, p.78]

Doughty’s fourth and best solo album gives up two keepers: the semi-absurdist 'More Bacon Than the Pan Can Handle,' with Stephanie Bischoff’s guest vocals sexier for sure than any synth weirdness Soul Coughing ever confabulated, and the mournfully understated Iraq opener, 'Fort Hood.'