Infinitely better than their last album, and proof that The Manics are now capable of writing pop music that’s neither dull nor pandering.

Pretty much nothing from Dear Heather is without some kind of significant flaw, and the only thing saving it from being below average---at least in a general sense, and not kept strictly to his own discography----are the few moments that Cohen is kept solitary with as little outside interference as possible.

A truly rocking dance punk album that fulfills on the promise of a dubious genre; other artists in this so-called movement have only hinted at something this fun and dance-able.

And with so much music, some cuts solidly fail, and some stand up to the best in the Bad Seeds canon.

It begins to sink in that this band has performed a theoretical feat of Hawking proportions: it has devised a fool-proof formula for the unformulaic.

Razorlight is nearly everything wrong with rock and roll today.

What it lacks is Agaetis’ singularity of purpose, as well as its understanding that atmosphere should be an aesthetic by-product of songcraft and not the other way around.

It's the first truly inessential album he's made.

The album fails mainly in its inability to set itself apart; for a Warp release it’s dull, Beans isn’t enough of a rapper to carry the show by himself, and the beats feel like they would have been interesting if they didn’t just remain stagnant through pretty much every track.

Would be much better if it came with an option to turn the vocals off.

The album is, in short, phenomenal. It certainly doesn’t match the beauty and heartbreak of Either/Or (1997), but it manages to recapture the spirit of that record while properly articulating the orchestration that Elliott had been working with for Figure 8 and XO (1998).

Inevitably, how they treat their dominant influences is what separates the Zutons from the Coral. While the Coral have yet to truly define their sound, The Zutons can bounce from funk, to zoot-suit swing (“Dirty Dancehall”) to alt-country (“Remember Me”) and yet have that tangible, original quality to their music that makes for an impressively cohesive debut album.

In terms of a go-to disc for a pissed off stomp around the bedroom, it’s the finest album I’ve heard this year.

To revise a debut with only a slightly more effective result is nevertheless disappointing for all of their fans awaiting an album as moving as their live show.

[Disc 1] is fantastic and worth the price of admission in and of itself.... Sadly, the results [on disc 2] sound more like the soundtrack to a bad '80s cop movie than appropriate or even interesting re-takes of some of the best pop songs ever penned.

Little of the album fails to impress in its striking melodic strength or its lyrical intelligence---which shouldn’t surprise Eitzel’s long-time fans. But the album does have one recurring flaw: overextension of its ideas.

It’s largely half-baked in its execution.

While Summer in Abaddon features Pinback’s by now trademarked sound and cryptic lyrics with a few nice developments, it falls victim to a sort of malaise of consistently indistinguishable mid-tempo rockers on the second half of an album that starts very strongly.

It is true, this album does have songs and nearly all of them suffer the same fate: a few great ideas ruined by the need for everything to be so overblown and melodramatic.

Sound[s] less like the work of an actual band than a sterile concoction created by scientists in white lab coats.

Real Gone... is Waits’ grittiest work to date and is an excellent introduction, for those unacquainted, to his hard-boiled thirty-year run.

Despite somber interludes like the Shatner-only confession of his third wife’s death, “What Have You Done?” or the subtly rich “Together,” Has Been does little to rescue the Priceline spokesman from the novelty bin.

De La Soul [are] wise enough to keep the filler to a minimum, thus presenting a more consistent product than that offered by their followers/peers.

Littering their album with frail songwriting and all but killing off the aggression of their percussion, the band inexplicably jump into ill-advised stylistic misfires---with a few too many missed falsetto notes.

Although Pressure Chief isn't a bad album, several of its songs come off like b-side compliation fodder rather than a batch of fresh material.

Sets a new bar for self-consciously unlikeable indie rock.

The album manages to achieve that perfect pop effect: the ability to deal with enormously sad and personal subjects within the medium of happy, upbeat music.

[Espinoza] takes the predictably disappointing low road through fanboyville with cruise-controlled caricatures of one of indie rock’s most deified stars.