A sinister, slinky catwalk with sharper melodic angles and a propulsive, post-punk groove. [#75, p.99]

The music carries you along, building to a very gradual crescendo that feels like Popol Vuh stretching out one Phil Spector moment for three-quarters of an hour. [No. 118, p.53]

It's an immediate, obvious highlight of Wasner's career, and of the year. [No. 136, p.57]

Andorra is, to use a phrase not heard much anymore, all killer, no filler.

If Low or Acetone pull your melancholy levers and there's a need for some hurt feelings, then go ahead and reserve Skyscraper National Park a space on your 2002 top-10 list. [#54, p.92]

The Whole Love works best as aural comfort food.[#81, p. 60]

In plain but very powerful terms, it's one of the smartest albums ever released. [No. 111, p.61]

Not since the Men dropped Leave Home last summer has a young band made an album of pure, hard-edged rock this good or entertainingly lacerating. [No. 92, p.56]

While there's certainly nothing on Poses so riveting as to signify a rock revolution, there's something to be said for the virtue of a simple crooner operating at the top of his game. [#51, p.122]

No One Deserves Happiness is even better [than One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache]. [No. 130, p.53]

Daniel Bachman is the guitarist's most emotionally complex and stylistically integrated work to date. [No. 137, p.53]

Utopia is the perfect whooshing winter record, just in time for the bitter chill. [No. 149, p.53]

Grim Reaper shows that Lennox has bigger things on his mind than mere crowd-pleasing. [No. 117, p.59]

Ridiculous packaging and intensely personal liner notes make this a must-have for fans. [No. 106, p.56]

Both [At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem and All The Way] elicit a simultaneous sense of terror and wonder as to what demons are flowing through her bloodstream and how she's managed to harness them for the power of artistic good. [No. 141, p.57]

Queens Of The Stone Age lumbers its way through a series of increasingly skronky, sludge-by-numbers jams and sound. [No. 100, p.57]

In Conflict is his masterpiece--if not the best album of 2014, certainly the most profound. [No. 109, p.59]

Blood Orange moves swiftly, wipes clean his chill-pop slate and goes for stark, ham-handed topicality hop and loss as applied to menacingly atmospheric tones. That Hynes does this without losing his sense of pop and tunefulness is a sweet accomplishment. [No. 134, p.52]

Not every song justifies Herring's bold imprimatur, but enough do to make them stand out in a catalog that wasn't wanting for impact tracks. [No. 108, p.55]

Little short of brilliant. [#52, p.79]

Love Streams is a more amiably cluttered affair: bolder, stranger and, at times, considerably more bewildering, but with an ultimately playful, exploratory guiding spirit. [No. 130, p.57]

It's Newman's ability to paint such a scene [narrator's wife, on her deathbed, defending him against their concerned and/or churlish offspring] with humor, affection and honest humanity that makes his albums so thoroughly worth the wait. [No. 145, p.60]

Glass Swords is a testament to the importance of cutting right the chase, boiling house music down to climaxes the way Lightening Bolt compresses wild metal soloing into hard, gnarly blasts of attitude. [#81, p. 59]

It's all very romantic and swoon-worthy. [#67, p.93]

Capturing the band at its creative zenith, the three albums on Volume 2--Music To Strip By, Charmed Life and The Band That Would Be King--are hip-shaking, chin-scratching things of beauty rife with bent-grooves and wacked-out, sexed-up story songs that fall somewhere between Jonathan Richman and the Residents. [No. 117, p.53]

It's amazing that, however slowly, the Ex is still exploring fresh terrain. [#50, p.87]

America is both a progression and a departure for Deacon: an album rife with danceable party music, but also a deeply political gesture. [No.90, p.56]

Collaborations where the principals hail from different ends of the musical spectrum usually lack common ground, making their output little more than a curiosity. Thankfully, this a a problem Harmonic trounces with a big sonic shillelagh. [#88, p.58]