The album is livelier for its contradictions. [Oct 2004, p.124]

Less lugubrious and more melodic than [Bright Lights], but the improvement is marginal. [Oct 2004, p.119]

Despite Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga's adventurousness, it's highest points end up being the most conventional. [August 2007, p.112]

Her voice was made to rip, and when she lets go just a little, the coyness turns sultry--proof that she might just have a life after high school.

A showcase for Weiland's vocals. [#27, p.148]

Witness the birth of a new dance genre: fantasy-core!

Perspiration trumps inspiration, as madly sawing strings and short-circuiting robot bleeps compensate for the lack of hooks. [Oct 2004, p.120]

Lurches from dewy-eyed sentimentality to vicious funk. [Oct/Nov 2001, p.105]

Picture a protest of the World Trade Organization led by Bananarama. [Nov 2004, p.131]

So low-key that even the amplified instruments sound semi-acoustic. [#10, p.116]

The offhand charm isn't enough. [Sep 2003, p.123]

Lateralus sounds like Black Sabbath jamming with Genesis at the bottom of a coal shaft. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.115]

The album merely washes pleasantly past, tickling the ear and delivering a few hummable refrains. There's nothing here to lift listeners the way White Ladder did. [#12, p.143]

Utterly entrancing. [Jun/Jul 2002, p.104]

Offers something for everyone -- and ends up an intermittently engaging but overall shapeless collection. [#4, p.112]

It's the musical equivalent of George Lucas's tinkering with the Star Wars DVDs--some flaws are best left uncorrected. [Nov 2005, p.135]

The first and less snarky half of Tanglewood Numbers... is some of the liveliest music Berman has recorded. [Nov 2005, p.140]

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]

The melodies are well-shaped and the lyrics twist their knives elegantly. [Dec 2006, p.174]

Punch line for punch line, Luda is still the best in the business (e.g., promising to get ladies “wetter than Michael Phelps”), but these sex jams and hater disses feel too flat and perfunctory for his thousand-watt personality.

Tones down the spazziness and turns up the googly-eyed lyrics about marital bliss. [Jun 2006, p.141]

The end of the working day, the mark of Cain, to win, darling, we must pay--these phrases, variations on ones he's used previously, arise on his fifth studio album in seven years, until it seems his uncharacteristic prolific streak comes partly from lazy songwriting, maybe done with a set of Bruce Springsteen Lyric Magnets.

It's not always successful. But the sheer audacity of taking computers to Camelot works splendidly in the pastoral beauty of "Y.T.T.E." [Oct 2003, p.124]

Freak[s] out thoughtfully. [Oct 2004, p.129]

[It] sounds as if she's happy to give the people what they want: escapism and nostalgia. [Dec 2005, p.152]

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]

Rich, smooth, and speedily forgettable. [Mar 2004, p.128]

A party band to the core, the Ting Tings can't leave the dance floor without stumbling. [July 2008, p.76]