British Sea Power's vision makes most independent rock seem callow and weak-minded. [Sep 2003, p. 119]

It radiates the observant calm of old masters who have seen enough life to be ready for anything--Yeats, Matisse, Sonny Rollins. [Sep 2006, p.139]

[Finn] tells better stories than anyone else in music these days. [Oct 2006, p.131]

Presents a rarity--a genuinely new sound. [Nov 2004, p.136]

It's the sound of a band not stretching out so much as digging in: burrowing deeper into loamy soil they know well. [Jul 2007, p.109]

Could be the best album he's ever made. [Dec 2004, p.146]

Handled with less love, this could feel like a smug wander through an ironic record collection. Here, it becomes sexy, life-affirming pop. [Aug 2004, p.141]

For her to pull off something as ambitious, gritty and accomplished as this at age 21 is flat-out amazing. [#15, p.127]

Is there another "Float On"? It scarcely matters: 10 years into their career, Modest Mouse have stumbled into their best album yet. [Mar 2007, p.137]

Backspacer is the bands most mature album to date and clocking in at just over 36 minutes, it is also their most condensed work; It’s as if Pearl Jam is channeling Ernest Hemingway, with not a wasted breath or note anywhere to be found.

Creamy and precise, every coo and arpeggio blows through your ear buds like the ruffle of crisp bills.

There's an exhilarating, disorienting sense of freedom tot he album, the ruse of rules being ignored. [Aug 2008, p.79]

Singer-songwriter Britt Daniel's gift for obtuse yet engaging melody is now where it ought to be: up front. [#9, p.155]

Stupid-brilliant punk rock. [Dec 2005, p.147]

She offsets an assault of cheekiness with confessions so intimate, they could have been drafted during an A.A. meeting.

Brings Pierce's preoccupation with panoramic emotional and chemical excess to startling, transcendent climax. [Oct/Nov 2001, p.112]

She's just as acute as [Rufus] is, as centered on the poetry within the profane, as able to write songs whose meanings stay kept behind doors within doors. [May 2005, p.125]

Less hook-a-minute than its predecessor, 1998's Powertrip, but with a more heavily articulated wallop. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.114]

Imperial Teen deploy the familiar language of pop-rock, then subvert it with strange, chewy tales, making music that wraps arsenic in a candy coating. [Apr/May 2002, p.114]

The real hero is Sean Eden, whose lyrical lead guitar--a bit Harrison, a bit Morricone--makes even the silliest songs sound majestic. [Nov 2004, p.138]

Blend[s] limpid Velvet Underground textures, strolling country-rock and wry, cryptically plaintive Malkmus poetry well enough to sound like neo-classics destined for a Wes Anderson film. [Jun 2005, p.111]

Beneath the highlights, she's still a messy troublemaker whose brain is as spicy as the rest of her body. [#17, p.146]

Pragmatically exploiting his sure tune sense, his saving falsetto and a command of the political facts well exceeding that of Living With War, he’s turned out the first great protest album of the new dispensation.

What Led Zeppelin did for bombast, Lambchop try to do for delicacy. [Apr/May 2002, p.114]

The songs are sincere without sappiness and orchestral without bombast. [Apr 2005, p.125]

It’s a very rare, wondrous thing: prog-rock for firesides and fuzzy-slipper Sundays.

Delays have found a way to combine the sparkling harmonies of the Byrds with the glorious noise of My Bloody Valentine, and still sound as fresh and surprising as a London heat wave. [#27, p.134]

A widescreen goth-punk stunner. [Jun 2006, p.144]