Albini captures a recording full of heart, a sound quiet and full, rough and clear.

There is a shortage of pathos, and relatively little ventured musically and lyrically from a songwriting team responsible for some of the most tortured, searching music of recent years.

The main funk base of E's sound remains consistent but is augmented with harder rock and blues elements, showing he is able to hold onto his signature sound while simultaneously twisting a piece of rose-colored glass into it.

You really don't know what you're dealing with until you sit down and take in the freewheeling beauty of one of the year's best.

A solid collection of the most talked-about bands in the New York underground.

More often than not it's stylish, adventurous and damn fun.

People tend to like Joan of Arc when they play songs, but get all worked up and annoyed when the band stretches out with the experimental stuff. This record is a bunch of the stuff that would have pissed off that latter group of people had the music been bunched in with So Much Staying Alive...

The 10 tracks are hands down the most irresistible pop music you'll hear this year.

Harcourt would do himself well by spending a bit more time on his lyrics; a lot of the time it sounds as though he's just filling in the space between choruses.

The abject despair of The Mess We Made can become tedious, and, more than most artists, Elliott depends on a listener who is willing forgive him his lack of subtlety.

The results are far more interesting than one might imagine, revealing an album that is imminently accessible yet refreshingly unpredictable.

It's not always pretty, but even the mistakes have a remarkable charm.

30 minutes of bluesy punk-rock raunch.

An album that's both effortlessly confident of its sound and monumentally fearless of introducing cohesive surprises.

Broder puts art before music -- as if he's recording an audio version of a painting.

It's every bit as good, if not better, than their first.

There's nothing Herren can't and won't do on this record.

Delightfully pushes boundaries.

Part of the reason this record succeeds is that they haven't tried to replace Coxon, but rather rely on their remaining strengths like inventiveness and songcraft.

This record is a high-quality package of music that will keep most DM fans happy, but is not exactly earth-shaking in any way.

He's simply not an authoritative enough singer to give many of his songs the treatment they deserve. Nevertheless, Lanois is an expert craftsman, and Shine is a rewarding, extremely enjoyable album.

Betke's more minimal application of sound has opened up acres of sonic real estate between the beats.

Monday at the Hug & Pint is Arab Strap's best record, and should land on every critic's 2003 top 10 list.

Sometimes evocative of Joy Division on PCP, sometimes of Arab on Radar on codeine, Ian MacKaye's production maintains the right balance of tin-can sounds with bullfrog disco stylings.

Unfortunately the band sometimes overdoes the sweetness and ends up being too precious.

Though it is at times a forbidding and daunting listen, piercing through the dense thicket of sounds reveals a wealth of melody and funk underlining Autechre's irregular electro rhythms.

It's hard to think of any reason to buy this album, and if you do, it's hard to imagine any reason for listening to it more than once (unless you hate your neighbors or your cat).

That's not to say that Love & Distortion is a bad album, just that it's thoroughly average.