Despite Wilson's wrecked voice, it's surprisingly grand and moving. [Nov 2004, p.146]

Some of the most gripping singing you're going to hear all year.... A brave, unrepeatable record that speaks to her whole life. [May 2004, p.123]

Lush and languorous, velvet-robe decadent and soft-focus steamy, Histoire is a make-out record and a gross-out record.

A torrid album that marries old-school rap aesthetics to punk-rock concision. [May 2004, p.127]

Not since 1966's Blonde on Blonde has Dylan sounded so happy and alert. [Oct/Nov 2001, p.102]

The momentous band [on the 1980-81 disc] stretches out and jams, both celebrating and escaping the band's trademark anxiety. [Sep 2004, p.158]

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.

His hard-edged, dance-inflected debut makes East London sound like the new Dirty South. [Jan 2004, p.108]

They break their own rules, even adding expansive guitar solos, to keep themselves interested and fans off-balance. [May 2003, p.123]

This 'boxxx holds an explosion of creativity that couldn't have been contained in just one LP. [Nov 2003, p.118]

The exact opposite of background music, A Grand Don’t Come for Free demands the same attention as a movie, and that’s why some people will hate it while others will find it uniquely riveting.

The biggest draw is the Iggy-Jagger sexual charisma of 22-year-old singer Julian Casablancas, whose self-possessed cool is astonishing. [Aug/Sep 2001, p.130]

A mesmerizing history lesson. [Aug 2005, p.114]

The most distinctive producer-rapper Britain has coughed up since Tricky. [#11, p.143]

After decades, Waits's theater of musical cruelty is familiar stuff. But the old dog's tricks still have bite. [Applies to both Alice and Blood Money, Jun/Jul 2002, p.111]

Reveals added nuance with every listen. [Jan/Feb 2005, p.102]

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

The band's warm way with weirdness remains; it's just flashier now. [Oct 2005, p.140]

Hebden treats software as a rocky road to hummable compositions of seductively intricate invention. [#17, p.135]

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]

"Get Ur Freak On," the frenetic lead single, relies on boilerplate hip-hop braggadocio, but the beats are something else: head-snapping electro-funk spiced with tablas that herald Missy and [Timbaland's] return as the rulers of the hip-hop avant-garde. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.106]

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

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

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

While cliches abound... this huge music is delivered with panache. [#9, p.154]

It's ghetto viciousness as literary exercise--an episode of The Wire with a better soundtrack. [Nov 2006, p.142]

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]

Convincingly lovely through and through. [#17, p.140]

Their second album is equally charming and more consistent. [Nov 2003, p.120]

The world's heaviest band turn out to have metal's lightest touch too. [Nov 2005, p.137]

The songs themselves don't amount to much... but they're basically an excuse for Ejstes's gloriously lysergic arrangements anyway. [Sep 2005, p.133]

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]

On their lush major-label debut, the haunting Peter Gabriel-esque yawlps of singer Tunde Adebimpbe are punctuated by singer-guitarist Kyp Malone, whose raspy falsetto provides a sense of deadpan panic. [Jul 2006, p.103]

Bejar's most accessible album yet. [Apr 2006, p.111]

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

Vespertine is her most intensely private and intimate-sounding work, a journey through an interior world that is quietly ecstatic, erotic and playful.

His bleakness was never this naked or all-consuming. [Nov 2004, p.143]

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

Valhalla, they are coming! [Jun 2005, p.114]

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

The kind of boiling, roiling blues the Bad Seeds haven't cooked up in years. [Nov 2004, p.131]

These bluesy spirituals are so raw they bleed. [Mar 2005, p.136]

Strange, spooky and brilliant. [Apr 2006, p.114]

It doesn't feel like soapboxing; it feels like life. [Mar 2005, p.142]

Pacific Ocean Blue [is] a moody, groovy and deeply congenial solo album. The earthier Banbu. regularly rises to the Malibu heights of the first album. [July 2008, p.79]

None of the album rocks, or gets particularly rootsy. [July 2008, p.72]

He has his own personality: not a gangsta or a player but a diligent pragmatist. [Apr 2004, p.124]

Some of Dizzee's insecurity is replaced by newfound swagger. But swagger works, too. [Oct 2004, p.112]

These rough, bitter, ruminative songs are slower, longer and wordier than those on Decoration Day. [Sep 2004, p.139]

Their first protest record. [Oct 2006, p.137]

Unlike 2001's spare Essence, this album prickles with the lyrical details that make Williams's work exceptional. [#15, p.126]

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

The band's debut struts and flirts like the best-looking guy at the bar. [Apr 2004, p.126]

You can only discover fire once, though, so instead of a revolutionary blueprint, Neon Bible makes a triumphant clamor that's nearly as cathartic. [Apr 2007, p.109]

Tweedy whittles down the arrangements and drops in enough experimental nuances to make the whole thing sound refreshingly lo-fi. [Jun/Jul 2002, p.116]

Phrenology is a celebration of self-determination, a nonstop joyride through some very complicated brains. [#12, p.149]

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

The impact of M.I.A.'s music isn't in what she says, but how it arrives: in tracks so irritating they're irresistible. Anything but naive, M.I.A. brings a connoisseur's ear to her beats.

Beneath the sweetest of the album's retro harmonies, though, lurk harsh synths and dark thoughts. [Oct 2003, p.128]

The handclaps will make you happy, but it's DFA's prog moves and knowing, if self-deprecating, nods that make this music for the head as well as the hips. [Jun 2006, p.147]

Turns out there's a functioning soul beneath the smirk. [Apr 2007, p.115]

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

The outfit dispels any virtuoso vibe with their joyous absurdism. [Jun 2007, p.104]

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]

Folding in lean funk, tender arias and as many catchy tunes as West Side Story, Ze makes his cryptic polemic perfectly enticing. [Jul 2006, p.105]

The hooks come off-kilter and all killer.

Sounds like the best bar band in the world. [May 2005, p.122]

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

Unless you've just fallen off a bong, the endless whimsy lacks meat. [Apr/May 2002, p.118]

This is really a missing Greatest Hits in disguise. [Jul 2005, p.118]

It sounds so damn joyous. [Nov 2005, p.134]

A nearly flawless collection of hummable overtures. [#17, p.138]

Murphy pushes the near-immaculate music into the realm of genius with witty lyrics and wonderfully tetchy vocals. [Mar 2005, p.141]

The songs aren't strong enough to hold the disparate influences together. [#13, p.91]

Not all connect, but a bonus disc, the soon-vanished 2002 full-length Nothing to Fear, compensates. Buy this before it vanishes, too.

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 quartet fills out the album by executing almost eactly the same formula [as the first track] four more times... and the dramatic shock wears off quickly. [Jan 2004, p.103]

This is Newman’s most unwound album.

It's not so much what Zevon says as how he says it: with an air of ragged, nothing-to-lose spontaneity. [Sep 2003, p.133]

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

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

An album of languid grooves and slowly descending melodies. [#16, p.117]

Any collection that encompasses A Guy Called Gerald's peerless dance anthem "Voodoo Ray" and Joy Division's exquisite "Atmosphere" is "double double good," as the Happy Mondays' drug-addled singer Shaun Ryder used to quip. [#9, p.158]

[Meiburg] applies this Audubon-ish enthusiasm to his songs, too, crafting a rich, occasionally macabre, fantasy world populated by starlings, gulls and solitary falconers.

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]

Despite all the lonely missives and political outrage, Oberst comes off more like a troubadour of hope. [Mar 2005, p.132]

It's groove-deprived and difficult, and not in a particularly inventive way. [May 2008, p.78]

Is it uneven? Yes. Self-indulgent? Unbearably, at times. But that's what makes West one of hip-hop's most exciting, funny, and human stars. He's unafraid to make a big, fat mess. [Sep 2005, p.130]

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]

Striding purposefully forward on vaguely cinematic fanfares and catchy soul-queen loops, Murs reveals more than you want to know about his sex life. [May 2004, p.130]

The album seems resigned, defeated, passive -- like an hour-long sigh. [#17, p.130]

It's Twin Cinema's relative melancholy that makes it the band's best album yet. [Sep 2005, p.134]

New Moon sounds less like a pile of outtakes than an official album released in a parallel universe.

The Drift is like a nightmare you look forward to repeating. [Jun 2006, p.148]

Another assault of angular, Sonic Youth-style guitar and earnest anger that's more leftfield than most punk, and more engaging than many of their post-rock peers. [Feb/Mar 2002, p.110]

Without much international color or guest flourish. [Nov 2003, p.122]

The album is wonderfully cohesive. [May 2005, p.119]

Sounds like a greatest hits set. [Dec 2005, p.156]