Credit four supportive guys rolling out unkempt riffs at tempos so punky they reveal the guitar line of Joy Division’s 'She Lost Control' for the pop hook it is (with saxophone icing).

They've been compiled to death, but this two-disc set is the most comprehensive survey yet of the Mancunians' brief, tear-stained blaze through the mid-'80s indie-pop firmament. [Feb 2009, p.67]

The first few songs on their fourth might fool you into thinking they have a future.... But it's downhill after the highpoint: 'Sirens in the Deep Sea.'

The Renaissance hints at newness, but its cushy boom-bap grooves, airy soulfulness and rhymes about struggle and redemption recall rap’s Edenic “golden age.”

It's delightfully wacky and right in character. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.80]

Here, they simply sound jittery, putting romantic complaints to studio-worked music that's oddly brisk and busy, with a dissonance that drowns out the emotion. [Nov 2008, p.73]

This mismatched combo brings out the best in each other only on the refreshingly lightweight 'Call Me.' [Nov 2008, p.76]

With his buddy Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age, Hughes gets the details right all over Heart On.

Amid the frenzied melancholy, there’s filler and a histrionic misstep or two, but for those willfully lost in the perpetual adolescence Smith has always documented, here’s the new soundtrack to Saturday night.

The bigger the gamble, the stronger she feels. By the end of the record, she’s lassoing the moon, getting through her loneliness the way she got past teen pop: by sheer force of will.

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

Prince made sexual audacity a trademark ages ago, but Legend is just too cautious to put it over--he sounds like a CPA on his first trip to the Hustler Club.

Cardinology lays even deeper into the language of rehabilitation, grace and renewal.

Skeletal Lamping is a new high for this long-running yet just-peaking band.

GGD’s career has been a gradual climb out of primordial noise muck and toward beats, and album four is their most propulsive.

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.

Reborn, the track leads off the sardonic sextet’s fifth album of apocalyptic buffoonery shot through with metal, new wave and disco, all of it hilarious, none of it a joke.

While their new album never thrashes, it at least keeps its pretty bare feet on Mother Earth.

Half of their new truckload feels typically phoned-in. But sometimes they surprise you, nailing the signature sounds of their '70s boogie-metal brethren. [Nov 2008, p.72]

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.

Despite its boldness, Perfect Symmetry is as swollen with corny grandeur as a political convention, guided by the delusion that a pompous speech somehow becomes fun if it’s accompanied by a balloon drop.

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.

Too often, though, Pebble is like a falsely vintage digital photo with specks, grain and worn edges Photoshopped in--it’s convincing on the surface but crumbles under close inspection.

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.

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’.”

Production by Bjork’s longtime collaborator Valgeir Sigurosson paradoxically plays up the transparency of Brun’s music, floating ghostly string arrangements and vocal harmonies nearby without ever making her sound less alone, or less mournfully serene.

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

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

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]

Where the last Streets record was mainly about coming up with new words to describe cocaine, the fourth is surprisingly expansive and often quite deep.

Overall, Dig Out Your Soul is a dark, heavy, chart-snubbing record that acts Oasis’s age (main songwriter Noel Gallagher is 42) and is their first in eons that doesn’t seem desperate to please. Oasis have their devil back.

OH (Ohio) ends with a straight-faced rendition of the hokey country standard 'I Believe in You,' with lyrical mush about dogs and babies, but Wagner sings it like he wants to believe every word.

The craziest moment on this debut LP is 'Fucked Up,' where they beg to have their pussies eaten one second, their teeth smashed the next.

The Pretenders’ ninth studio album is a pleasant roots record.

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

The eighth volume of the erractic and fancinating Bootleg Series, exhumes his unreleased music. [Nov 2008, p.80]

Her music is exhilarating, enigma-packed and, despite the unceasing noise barrage, winningly sweet.

Here, they combine hardcore punk’s combat-boot side with its tortured-noise side, layering what sounds like scores of tsunami-distortion guitars over an atomic-speed drum blitz to attain rarely witnessed levels of obliteration (think Black Flag reincarnated as psychotic yetis).

The album splits the difference between smart and smarty-pants: The articulate arrangements occasionally overdo the left-field instrumentation, and Richard Edwards’s empathetic short-story tales flirt with fussiness.

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]

El Guincho has only himself to get along with, but you'd never know it just listening to his album. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.78]

At its best, the echo-chamber soup of flute trills, infinitely cascading drums and fuzz-ball stoner riffs does seep into your head and expand the contents. But the jams often drift when Ejstes wants them to glide; his singing, all in Swedish, is a touch whiny; and his ear for melody can be painfully flat.

Every white soul traditionalist from Hall & Oates to Duffy demands catchy, impactful songs, yet that’s where Thicke is thinnest.

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]

The protest ballads plod, and even the song about praying for God to drown the president sounds more weary than pissed. The Nightwatchman is that rare crusader whose secret identity is more exciting than his alter ego.

The recording quality on their debut album is admirably scuzzy; the drums sound like somebody’s banging a cereal box on the floor, which is part of the immediate charm.

Throughout, atmospheric ennui tugs against upbeat synth-pop--this band is best wehn it's got a beat. [Nov 2008, p.73]

A DJ is only as good as his taste, and Girl Talk is immaculate. [Sept 2008, p.78]

When Caleb evokes God's wrath on the "crucified U.S.A." or describes lost-highway lonelines, the batter-fried U2 atmospherics and portentous Dixiefied grunge makes his worry as real as Brimstone. [Oct 2008, 2008, p.80]

They've toned down the distorted-guitar squall and ash gray skronk that blanketed their first two albums, the rhythms are friskier, more vigorous; the hooks accessible and easier to love. [Oct 2008, p.77]

Throughout the album, haunted-saloon piano and reverb-choked guitar conjure a murky, wobbly misaligned version of old R&B.

Lively and loose, cut with collaborators including her talented Scottish boyfriend Johnathan Rice, spooky folkie M. Ward and actress-singer Zooey Deschanel, the 11 songs (many of which she has performed live for years) encompass Southern-gothic folk, Appalachian blues stomps and 'The Next Messiah,' an eight-minute, Who-style rock mini-opera.

Where past albums documented a litany of bummers, cascading melodies now airbrush moments of depression or kinkiness--even the horny groupie of 'Natural Disaster' sounds like a girl you could take home to Mom. Higgenson’s new outlook is surprising.

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]

The result is severely mellow, but too sensuous--the basslines thick with libidinal tug, the vocals steeped in contented, coital afterglow--to ever get boring.

THe British balladeers have returned after a long layoff as elegantly miserable as ever. [Oct 2008, p.83]

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.

Saadiq is a romantic who stays true to the deliberate simplicity of such titles as 'Sure Hope You Mean It' and 'Just One Kiss.' But his adaptable baritone is always crisp and cocky--he never threatens to assume the fetal position if he doesn’t get the extreme cuddling he craves.

They fluctuate between those two poles while their by-the-book hard rock continues to split the difference between Black Crowes and Guns N’ Roses--though no longer with the wit that fueled their coke-y 1999 breakout, 'Lit Up.'

Rubin pointed the direction, but credit goes to the band-which, for the first time on record, includes new bassist Robert Trujillo-for recapturing their old sound and reconciling it with what followed.

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

From the way gently twanging guitar builds to toxic fuzz on 'Man Made Lake' to the whistling in 'El Gatillo' that nails the stranger-in-town vibe, the band’s best stories are in their music.

Sheff straddles the line between precious and brilliant, warbling twisty, appositive-packed tales about life on the road and crumbled relationships over cranked-up, vaguely folkish rock riffs.

[McCoy's] delivery is laudably cool for a Warped Tour MC. But it’s gunk on the gears of this dancing machine.

Torrini captures a few joyful infatuations followed by a lot of lingering wounds; she’s vulnerable but never conquered.

Sadly it's undercut by music that tirns Brian Wilson into merely another Brian Wilson imitator. [Sep 2008, p.85]

If recession-era Jeezy sounds a lot like boom-time Jeezy--describing coke cooking and the cars one gets in reward—that’s because he has always fancied himself an educator, a Learning Annex lecturer, an inspirational-desktop-calendar hustler.

Forth is that rare comeback record--unafraid to show its age, and better for it. [Sep 2008, p.85]

Although their guitar-drums set-up is reminiscent of the White Stripes, the Animals are more interested in the wake-and-bake vibe of haggard hippie bands like Love and the Jefferson Airplane.

Finding new targets for their thrashing contempt, Slipknot make ugliness sound just a little bit pretty.

It's Li's confidence to stray that gives this album its depth. [Sep 2008, p.82]

Endearing hints of '60s pop glow faintly beneath the frictionless surfaces of Gane's loops, chirps and austerely percolating rhythms. [Sep 2008, p.84]

Their sixth album is shambling and empty, spiked infrequently with a good bassline or an almost-good chorus, and even the jokes founder on the band’s contempt.

It's done two good things for the Stills: sharpened their songwriting and returned them after a dull Album No. 2. to the crystalline guitar minimalism of their debut. [Sep 2008, p.84]

Julian Raymond's production gives the good-timey guitar-and-bajo sound a sharp kick in the butt. [Sep 2008, p.78]

Yes, the Jonases are squishy, vanilla and too sweet. But so is an ice-cream cone. And ice-cream cones are freakin’ delicious. Especially when they come with a cherry on top.

Sometimes the sumptuousness feels a little excessive, like an ice-cream headache. But most of these love songs are uncommon, illuminating and elevating, just like the real thing at its best.

Oberst always projects a spiritual generosity unknown to most footloose troubadours who can’t commit.

This is Newman’s most unwound album.

Like the previous Brazilian Girls records, New York City is a lounge-y pileup of bossa rhythms and Old World romantic ache, girded by slithery push-button funk throb—at once refined and happily trashy.

On the album’s best moments, he pours his hopeless longing into sweaty, inebriated celebrations of love’s boundless optimism.

It's 10 tightly wrapped wads of black bubblegum, not a politicized sci-fi fantasia like "year Zero" or a two-hour drift into instrumnetal blip 'n' grind like this spring's "Ghosts I-IV." [July 2008, p.74]

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]

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

Even as they take on the album title's potentially heavy theme, two vocalists sing with wide-open smiles, and they toss in new-wave beats alongside the saloon pianos and tube-amp guitars. [Aug 2008, p.84]

Now and then, the energy lags. But mostly, Sugarland’s shameless mining of VH1 Classic hooks keeps their more tepid tendencies in check.

With music that evokes cheesy early-’70s MOR and the modern Hollywood-hipster songbook invented by Beck, this is pop that gets out and moves, and has you rooting for the wallflower with the yawny voice to do the same.

Finn has been sharper and funnier before, and their fast-and-down-the-middle rock has gotten more experimental, which isn't the same as better. But it's still a pretty good way to spend 45 minutes. [Aug 2008, p.86]

Even when the Wire slow way down, their densely layered riffs reward wall-shaking volumes. [Oct 2008, p.83]

By now he's decided he'd rather be Bob Dylan--recent Dylan, that is, devoted to phlegm-clogged blues-codger grumbles about how he's ready for his pine box. Producer T Bone Burnett proves a willing accomplice. [Aug 2008, p.88]

He tries to atone on the bluesey and somber 'Cadillac on 22's Part 2,' but--like much of this album--the sequel is a downgrade compared to its wrenching and confessional original. [Aug 2008, p.82]

In a style gentler and more richly textured than the crudely amplified minimalism of the series’ debut by Konono N°1, the songs swell in and out of expansive and hypnotic patterns, forming clouds of interwoven rhythms.

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.

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.

It occasionally feels slack, especially compared to old faves like “Wildcat” or their bootleg hip-hop remixes.

Unfortunately, it translates into kohl-eyed pantomime, rather than cathartic music, with lyrics so hopelessly trite they sound like a feel-good tract for preschoolers.

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]

She’s more geeky than queenly anyway, ­jazzily singing and breezily rapping over buoyant reggae and soul throwback beats sculpted by a guy named Adam who previously worked with American Idol finalist Elliott Yamin.