The material hints at strength, but pieces that should have been severely pruned and used as a song's bridge stretch on and on. Perhaps they're just too thrifty or unwilling to toss anything out once they've gone through the trouble of recording it. The First Of The Microbe Hunters is for completists only.

Closer than any previous mass-market Sonic Youth album to the avant-garde sound that's always popped up in their extracurricular work.

An exquisite collection of thoughtful lyrics and lovely harmonies.

The music is occasionally difficult to embrace, to say the least...

I highly recommend this album - musically, politically, aesthetically, thematically - you name it.

Yet another emotion-evoking masterpiece.

The most exciting album in years....as punishing and urgent as any music you've ever heard.

Most of the time these low-key meditations on enduring love and friendship ring true...

Once in a while, a record will come out that's simply perfect... their finest record to date - pure, gleeful pop virtuosity.

Harkens back to the European pop of the '50s and '60s.

A dreamy, layered work that merely ups the rock ante of his perfectly balanced 1998 release, XO -- an exquisite union of wistful acoustic stylings and polished pop.

At first listen, this album is downbeat minimalism à la Leonard Cohen, but it actually covers a lot of ground.

An uncommonly moving singer whose deliberate delivery extracts volumes of yearning and melancholy from her own material and the work of other writers.

There are elements missing and sometimes out of place on the disc.... Godin and Dunckel, however, succeed in interpreting the film's dreamy '70s vibe and creating sonics with appropriate drama and cinematic flair.

Gorgeously melancholy... mid-tempo grooves and hushed ballads dressed up in dreamy keyboards and liquidly reverberant guitars.

Their disparaging wails and hums are strangely magnetic?

It's pretty much just a silly, goofy, fun record.

Neither modern rock nor dance, Death in Vegas straddle the middle ground -- and prove that it's an extremely good place to be.

One Part Lullaby's songs are the ones a man writes when he realizes he doesn't have to be bummed out forever, the music a person makes when he can afford to trade in his four track for a home studio complete with Pro-Tools and some swanky electronics. Most of all, this is the kind of record a guy makes when he spends a lot of time tooling down the freeway with Beck on the stereo and the sun in his eyes.

It's one of the best albums of 1999 in any genre... [and] one of the finest house LPs ever recorded.

Perhaps the most important album of the decade.

If Blur was a tentative step away from the pop past, 13 is a suicidal leap - the little girls are not coming back after they hear this.

Beaucoup Fish is a steady step above second LP Second Toughest in the Infants, and while it never scales the more spectacular heights of Underworld's debut, this album sounds like a grower.