With drums, strings, pianos, amps and backup singers, this is the biggest sounding record ever for a band that used to consist of one guy on acoustic guitar. [Apr 2008, p.81]

On his solo debut, Bradford Cox sinks, phantomlike, into lush, highly processed arrangements of organ, drum machine and (evidently) whatever instrument is laying around. The disappearing act really can be magical.

This album about the seamy, scary side of Bushland, conceived after Davies was shot in New Orleans in 2004, is a mixed bag of pointed personal reflection (Good Ray) and facile social critique (Bad Ray).

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.'

Things get almost crushingly heavy, but he fights through his nightmares like he's one spastic stab in the dark from flicking on a night light. [Apr 2008, p.77]

Album three aims for maturity, but the results are stunted.

Even as they cherry-pick from seemingly incongruous sources (deep house, hard rock, smooth R&B), there’s a newfound decisiveness, a move toward heavier beats, meatier grooves and warmer sentiments.

For all its ambitions, Detours aims too low.

On record five, their lovely, surging melodies suggest a minor-league Coldplay, while singer-guitarist Matthew Caws recalls a lost golden age “when I could fix anything with sound.”

The more you listen, the less soothing his songs become; this is drifty music about living a rootless life where satisfaction is elusive.

There’s an exhilarating and ruthless intensity here, mingling the grimness of country murder ballads with the simplicity of girl-group pop.

Never before have these kings of experimental metal sustained such pulse-quickening energy, honing their tricks--cryptic lyrics, cliffhanging cries, spine-twisting rhythms--into a screaming arrow of sound.

Vampire Weekend’s version of globalization is too tightly and smartly woven to be mere dilettantism, and at times Koenig is emphatic, even desperate, about escaping white-bred familiarity.

Veteran producer Phil Ramone helps Lynne emphasize the loneliness of 'You Don't Have To Say You Love Me' and linger in the sensual transgressions of 'Breakfast In Bed' until this drastically rearranged but delicately rendered tribute feels like a candid self-portrait painted in watercolors and tears. [Apr 2008, p.81]

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.

Even the otherworld instrumental 'Oceans of Venus' can’t counterbalance Venus’s ballad-heavy bottom half.

More diabolical and daring than the band’s shaggy 2005 debut, Future peaks with the primordial 'Bright Lights.'

But there’s a fine line between subtlety and listlessness, and while Marshall’s purr excels at postcoital melancholy or numb disaffection, other times it’s just a bore. Her blues aren’t nearly as vibrant when they’re drenched in gray.

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

This successor improves, sonically (recording in a studio with a producer will do that) and in its energy and sharp writing.

Even when he tries to make a connection between pickup lines and international tension, in “Made of Codes,” Peñate never forgets that even quasi-protest songs need a good beat.

Every instrument here distorts, giving tearjerkers like 'I’ll Dream Alone' complementary grit.

Her story-songs about crushes gone wrong and nerdy social skills are like late-night IMs set to coffeehouse guitars. [Mar 2008, p.100]

Much of the CD feels as though it could have been made anytime in the last 15 years.

The CD is loosely tied together by a browbeating concept that condemns the glorification of Scarface-style violence and disposable pop-rap, but the moralism is as trite as a Tony Montana reference.

Some are endearingly autistic... And some are sublimely idiculous. [Mar 2008, p.97]

Despite the odds, their fifth album is arrestingly, chillingly good.

Filling the shoes of Jay-Z and R. Kelly--collaborators on two albums--is no easy feat, but thanks to slick production and stay-in-your-head melodies, the duo nearly rises to the challenge.

The softening of his hardcore tendencies makes for a fruitful middle ground between his threats to foes and his pleas to Allah.

The result is a happy souvenir, best experienced among 12,000 of your closest, Ecstacy-popping friends. [Dec 2007, p.144]

As Clef drops mostly trite lines about green cards, strippers and police harassment, this strategy either succeeds brillantly--or goes haywire. [Nov 2007, p.153]

Fresh off his triumphant "Fishscale" series, the thinking-thug’s MC once again shows why he’s the alpha Wu-Tanger: palpable street authenticity, classic taste in R&B (Stax, Motown) and the breakneck rhyme virtuosity of hip-hop’s golden age.

This compendium of pop standards is as good an introduction to the great American songbook as any.

Most of the album, like the single 'Tick Tock Boom,' sticks to formula. [Nov 2007, p.150]

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.

The music is dizzying, even mesmerizing.

It’s easy to see why these songs didn’t fit on their record but, while a full listen turns unrelentingly dour, they’re better than discards have any right to be.

This album, the second from Angels and Airwaves, is thick with U2-aping major-chord bluster and well-meaning meaninglessness.

As groups like Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem are making analog programs ring clear as Marshall stacks, Williams makes them sound mysterious, creepy and sexy again--even when geeking out on a cover of Bow Wow Wow’s big hit, 'I Want Candy.'

The album works as an ambient whole, its fog-bank synths, yearning vocal slivers and stoic basslines filling the room with melancholy.

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]

Spears’s fifth studio album is her most consistent, a seamlessly entertaining collection of bright, brash electropop.

While straying from metal's path, they uphold its legacy of conservative politics. [Nov 2007, p.148]

The best songs here are the least ambitious: love laments that coleader Glenn Frey and bassist Timothy B. Schmit both sing the hell out of.

Pete Doherty remains the British tabloids' pinata of choice--but at least his music is looking up.

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.

This is mostly music to zone in and out of--periodically, new sounds and rhythms croip up and coexist in rough approximation of grooves, catching the ear; other times songs drone in the background, either beatifically ot forgettable. [Nov 2007, p.146]

Coheed have found their sweet spot.

Cheery and unassuming, Underwood is a pleasant oddity: a pop star whose central belief is her own powerlessness.

He's screaming louder than ever on his solo CD, but what's notable is how all the titanium riffs and loud-soft-loud dynamics now feel personalized, a little cozier and multihued than on SOAD record. [Nov 2007, p.157]

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.

Even more surprising is how dynamic the duo sounds, as their voices both blend together and draw each other into fresh territory.

The result is a mess but--thanks to Bemis’s passion, humor and knack for inserting multiple hooks into a single song--an exhilarating one.

Their sixth album sticks close to what they know best. [Nov 2007, p.153]

Too bad, then, the album drifts off into the ambient sighs and murmurs of their recent movie-soundtrack work, minus the diverting visuals.

There’s nothing like a concept album for faking musical maturity.

It’s strange and sometimes fascinating to hear R.E.M.’s oldest songs played so differently, though vintage tracks are rare in a set concentrating on 2004’s mostly inert "Around the Sun."

In Rainbows is far more pensive and reflective than its predecessor.

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.

J. Lo's music has been upgraded from quite bad to merely bad. [Dec 2007, p.148]

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.

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

The lighthearted genre-hopping suggests nothing so much as a Broadway smash about a restless country star, borrowing from many styles, beholden to none.

Even the loudest moments reverberate with warmth. Bridwell sounds determined to build a new world for himself, one gorgeous ballad at a time.

Unlike other current heart-on-sleeve troubadours, Lekman uses his tender touch to brilliantly tease out the bumbling awkwardness that defines modern love.

Begging can be sexy, too, but for SWR it’s just another joyless act by a hateful species.

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 2005 AIDS-related death of Extra Golden cofounder Otieno Jagwasi shades the follow-up to last year’s rough yet lovable "Ok-Oyot System."

His rage is mostly disguised within the most anthemic music he's made since the '80s. [Nov 2007, p.143]

The music is dominated by the same pounding pop-disco beats and thick textures that have defined all her record. But now Lennox sounds like she's been rubbed raw by life. [Oct 2007, p.111]

The result is more than nostalgia: Carrabba imbues all 12 tracks with welcome new tricks--layers of cascading harmonies, a startling falsetto and even a dash of subtlety.

Michael never shies away from going pop, and the results are spectacular: Every hook on his stellar debut is instantly alluring.

The band replicates the surface effect of Otis Redding ballads, New Orleans jams and Motown pop-soul down to the last tambourine rattle, but their material rarely goes deeper than nostalgic genre exercises--which means it never satisfies like the real thing.

Simple pleasures rarely get any simpler--or more good-natured. [Dec 2007, p.152]

Refining the spare sound of her last studio album "Uh Huh Her," she herein presents an 11-part song cycle about loss, longing and wandering bereft through the moors. [Oct 2007, p.108]

Throughout, the Foos are as tight as ever, even if the songs are mostly unmemorable. [Oct 2007, p.108]

The whiff of apocalypse is unmistakable. Yet the scent of wildflowers and lovers’ musk wins out.

Coherence dissolves over the album's spawl of 72 minutes and 16 songs. Barnhart can still be quietly metaphysical now and then, yet too often he settles for a less lovable tie-dyed legacy: cutsiness. [Oct 2007, p.106]

Movement and change remain his inspiration. [Oct 2007, p.107]

Beneath the heavy petting, he displays a pleasant touch for soft '70s soul.

Their fourth album toughens things up immeasurably. [Oct 2007, p.114]

Like his debut, is a coffeehouse classical-guitar-and-voice affair long on tonal beauty but short on melody and emotion. [Sep 2007, p.126]

The album’s dense, electronically seasoned pop includes her catchiest tune in two decades.

The big surprise on the 61-year-old’s follow-up isn’t her knockout voice--it’s the sympathetic backup provided by Lynyrd Skynyrd–worshippers Drive-By Truckers (whose guitarist, Patterson Hood, produced the record). The well-selected, never-obvious covers of songs by writers from Elton John to Willie Nelson are unflinching tales of struggle and survival.

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

He devotes himself largely to unremarkable romance chronicles and blandly competent hooks. [Oct 2007, p.107]

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]

It's the sound of a 24-year-old accepting death, as imagined by a lifelong misfit aging gracefully. [Nov 2007, p.158

It's sharp and in your face, like a scimitar. [Oct 2007, p.110]

Underneath his architecturally impressive hair, front guy Justin Pierre is a savvy melodic songwriter and, refreshingly, he’s completely incapable of taking himself seriously.

The blend of organization--even the oddest, most precarious combinations of instruments sync up--and derangement is Animal Collective's version 2.0 of hippie whimsy, and it's quite a buzz [Oct 2007, p.105]

Rather than homogenizing his sources, Parton rubs them against each other. [Oct 2007, p.108]

Now, on only their third major-label release, they sound almost middle-aged. [Oct 2007, p.110]

Their hard-bitten Calvinist worry and storm-a-brewing' guitar tangle feel earthier than most back-to-the-land hipster escapism, especially when threshed out by roundhouse drummer Greg Anderson. [Sep 2007,p.129]

It feels like a record assembled by a focus group. [Oct 2007, p.107]

Almost every one of these twangy, homespun gems finds him in the heat of romantic battle--taunting, eviscerating or pleading with a lover or an ex.

Borrowing liberally and transparently from Bright Eyes, the Cure and mid-1960s chamber pop, the band sublimates familiar expressions of indie gloom with string flourishes and twink­ling piano lines, giving Olenius both a shoulder to cry on and, in soaring songs like 'Tonight I Have to Leave It,' a source of joy.

Chao’s jovial, chatty, Spanish-English-French crooning helps the ADD sensibility flow into something that feels like a happy incantation rather than a protester’s harangue against George Bush.