They've locked themselves in a room for a year, learned to play 11 songs in one style, and counted on the singer to come up with a couple of ace-card tunes. Result.

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

It's a kaleidoscopic ode to the joy of music, and it's the most exciting debut album since Mos Def's Black on Both Sides.

She has conjured the dirty rawness of funk and the smooth, hyper-articulation and commanding, ass-shakin' beats of hip hop and coated them with her own strange, space-age gloss. It is brilliant.

Yet another emotion-evoking masterpiece.

Chiming, richly textured and potently rhythmic, this is starkly, explicitly rock n' roll, and the back-to-basics approach beautifully frames Polly's tales of fear, love, sex, sadness, ugliness, and beauty.

While Homogenic, Post, and Debut were emotionally frenetic and often musically confrontational, Vespertine is rich in its tranquillity and spiritual divinity, full of astute observation and patient acceptance.

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

This is really a leap forward.

The voices are front and center throughout, but the trio has wrought its most elaborate frames for them yet: brass, strings, and distorted guitars amplify the songs' sentiments and reinforce the cumulative strength of their melodies.

This is the best hip-hop album I will never love.

Rings Around the World flows extraordinarily well, making it all the more powerful.

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

What makes this album special is that it's a big wet kiss to music.

Perhaps the most important album of the decade.

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

What SFA have done here is beautifully sublime, and they've done it without ploy or pretension.

The measured use of electronics recalls nothing so much as OK Computer, and in some ways Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots sounds like that album might have if Thom Yorke believed in God.

If anyone's making radio-worthy rock 'n' roll nowadays, it's Guided By Voices.

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

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

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

Elbow understand how to make an album flow without sacrificing the unexpected turns any good record should have.

The music on The Moon & Antarctica is as lonely and desolate as the title suggests...

Unlike most of her peers, she knows that fun is really the fifth element of hip-hop, and she keeps finding thrilling new ways to make this music danceable and fun.

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.

Almost every song here seems unfinished, and while the The Sophtware Slump sounds great -- misfiring machines duel elegant pianos, guitars chug and grind, ancient synthesizers burst through the top end - it never goes much of anywhere.

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