An album that sounds effortless, but at times almost dissyingly diverse--imagine The White Album, but made by happy people. [May 2006, p.96]

Holmes is scrabbling throught he ashes of Vegas strip supper-club jazz to craft a decidedly 21st century soundtrack, mourning its passing while happily rifling its pockets. [Album of the Month, Feb 2002, p.90]

The former Talking Head has rarely sounded so vital.

Listen to Frances The Mute without any prog-induced prejudice... and it emerges as the triumphant sound of a band bound only by their imagination. [Apr 2005, p.86]

If you can stick with its synthetic marionette oompah band designs, become immersed in its whirlwind momentum and flint-eyed wit, the chances are you'll fall in love with the album's deep miined reservoirs of charm and sheer eagerness to impress. [Sep 2004, p.90]

Grohl's pounding presence throughout lifts Killing Joke right back to the savage intensity of their early records.... The best punk album in years. [Aug 2003, p.106]

If Yoshimi.... lacks the sheer shock value of Bulletin's panoramic delirium, its peak moments are enough to make it one of 2002's most rewarding releases. [Album of the Month, Aug 2002, p.92]

A seamless, melodic blend of psychedelia and C&W... the songs and instrumentals here hang together beautifully. [Nov 2004, p.95]

Walks the same Cold War-era Bowery streets as Interpol but is not more than a half step away from lysergic brilliance. [May 2005, p.108]

A work of uncommon beauty and torment. [Mar 2004, p.95]

This is classic Cure. Three listens and you'll love it.

So sweet is the harmonic construction that awareness of the ecclesiastical niceties of such as The Transfiguration... is incidental to falling under the divine spell. [May 2004, p.105]

The genius of past Outkast isn't diluted or diminished across these disks, rather it's doubled, expanded and explored. [Sep 2003, p.99]

Could well be her finest yet. [Oct 2001, p.128]

It is Newsom's voice that provides the stunning balm to bind this strange beauty together. [Dec 2006, p.118]

Melds way-out weird with a pop welcome that sounds like no one else around right now. [May 2004, p.105]

This is a raging leviathan of a set, each track a powerful, swaggering anthem. [May 2002, p.97]

If anything, surpasses its illustrious predecessor. [Sep 2001, p.98]

There's a narcotic quality to these drifting ballads, one that perfectly suits these shell shocked, terrorised times. As the world gears up for the Apocalypse, I shall take comfort in Bavarian Fruit Bread -- a very haunting, beautiful record. [Nov 2001]

A drizzly doomsday masterpiece. [Nov 2004, p.108]

[A] sensual, endlessly inventive record. [Aug 2003, p.106]

Arguably the band's most magical record to date. [Nov 2003, p.123]

An extraordinary album. [Aug 2002, p.95]

Beautifully recorded, this is intimate seduction for voice, elegant finger-picked guitar and not much else. [May 2004, p.93]

A masterpiece of controlled electronic violence. [Nov 2004, p.102]

There's no easy niche in which you can place this new statement: like Dylan's Time Out Of Mind, it ventures into a doomy, mythological area, where the directions are muddied and the heartbreak is total. [Jul 2001, p.98]

2006's album of the year may have arrived early. [Mar 2006, p.104]

This is unmistakeably the Arctics, only stronger, harder, sharper, faster.... An extraordinary and fulfilling sequel to their debut. [May 2007, p.100]

As complex, compelling, and at times unsettling a record as Cale has unleashed since 1982's Music For A New Society. [Oct 2003, p.105]

A nearly flawless set of left-field folk. [Jun 2004, p.106]

Those who want their Emmylou full of sweet, sad longing will play a quarter of this album to death.... Elsewhere, there's righteous anger and an assertiveness and sexuality to the love songs. [Nov 2003, p.128]

A stoner's paradise from start to finish. Most pleasurable.

The playing is terrific throughout... [Jan 2001, p.98]

Kissin Time is full with Faithfull's own history: disaster next to glory, next to the overriding feeling that, come what may, she will slide through it all by dint of charisma, wit and, indeed, charm. [Album Of The Month, March 2002, p.98]

A beautiful, fragile, record that demands your full attention, then pays back dividends.

If this is to be Cash's last album, then what a magnificent way he has chosen to say goodbye. [Album of the Month, Dec 2002, p.100]

Hood have crafted a singular meeting of modern electronics, carefully layered arrangements and more conventional rock melancholia. [Dec 2001, p.96]

As one MOJO staffer commented, "This sounds like I'm trapped inside a damaged mechanical brain." Yes, it's that good. [May 2001, p.116]

This is an album of stadium sized melodies and exquisite songwriting, allied with almost too many ideas. [Jun 2003, p.110]

A phenomenal album.... As always, Wire embrace the technology of the day while always sounding somehow out of time. [May 2003, p.91]

This is a truly freeflowing masterpiece that stands shoulder to shoulder with Mos Def's 'Black On Both Sides.'

Like a cookie full of arsenic, Universal Audio's indie sweetness conceals a dark, deathly heart. [Nov 2004, p.114]

A focused tour de force. [Oct 2006, p.100]

Sea Change aches too thoroughly to be mere career shift. It's the kind of album that at times seems too sad for the singer's own good. [Album of the Month, Oct 2002, p.90]

Measuring out grief and resilience with a steady hand, these are the best songs of Low's quiet career. [Feb 2001, p.98]

With The Private Press DJ Shadow ups even his own considerable ante. [May 2002, p.96]

These intimate hushes and lilts would be remarkable even as instrumentals.... Yet it's Nastasia's voice--and the words that it sings--that really sucks the air out of the room. [July 2003, p.102]

This relentlessly engaging album hangs together even better than its illustrious predecessor.

Magnificent. [Jul 2005, p.100]

Breathtaking moments, brilliant tunes, and Breakdown, a genuinely Beatles-league pop hit. [Nov 2004, p.114]

The work of a genuine individualist. [Aug 2001, p.108]

Paul Simon still has it.

Epic, exhilarating, extraordinary. [Feb 2004, p.98]

Often he sings with a richness, depth and conviction worthy of Johnny Cash. [Jan 2001, p.98]

Tender dream-pop which is simulataneously familiar and novel. [Aug 2004, p.96]

The Moon's musical and thematic diversity is glued together by Brooks' ability to instill even the most desolate musical climes with warmth and emotion.... One of the year's most oddly endearing records so far.

Winehouse remains one of modern music's most original voices and is now emerging as arguably the finest soul singer of her generation. [Nov 2006, p.116]

It is quizzical, troubled, socially concerned, compassionate, schizoid, retro-eclectic, strikingly modern, racially mixed--and even likes women. [Apr 2002, p.112]

Stories is a leaner, less experimental-sounding record than 1998's Is This Desire, its chips stacked on visceral power and vitalising vocals.

An astonishing album... a nu soul master that should ride high on any 21st century 'best of' lists. [Dec 2003, p.109]

Where Elephant does differ from what has gone before is in terms of quality. It's just better all round. [Apr 2003, p.88]

Nick Lowe has made the album of his career, a dozen stories of love and loss so beautifully simple that you'll never get to the bottom of them. [Nov 2001, p.12]

A fabulous, strangely soothing listen. [Feb 2004, p.100]

As a singer, the South Dakota-born, Ontario and Illinois-raised Colvin occupies a niche between pensive Sheryl Crow and pre-jazz Joni Mitchell: no histrionics but a telling, often moving restraint.

By putting some warm flesh on her musical bones, Chan Marshall is punching her considerable songwriting weight. [Jan 2006, p.116]

The wily creativity on display here is astonishing. [Jun 2004, p.114]

Every time you think you've got Idlewild figured out, it zips off in a totally unexpected new direction. [Oct 2006, p.97]

Godspeed have taken their by-now familiar elements and rearranged them in often beautiful or surprising ways.

Tender, wise, compassionate and magnanimous, it's a special, special record for anyone who has ever hurt. [Dec 2004, p.114]

A DIY epic whose brief sorties into often spellbinding instrumental territory are pitstops in which to muse upon profound, touching or witty lyrics. [May 2005, p.95]

Glazed soul music that's both lucid and ambiguous, that chimes simultaneously with Donna Summer, John Barry and Suicide, beautifully schizophrenic and poised on the edge of ruin. [May 2003, p.91]

Sounding assured and triumphant, Scotland's finest finally have realised their true potential. [Aug 2002, p.112]

A fabulous record, a baffling, joyful, touching, frustrating, silly, totally seductive album that you can lose yourself in for an hour, a day, a week. [Aug 2003, p.92]

There is a remarkable consistency about Smile's complex tapestry of delights. [Oct 2004, p.98]

If only all pop music could be this smart and soulful. [Dec 2006, p.106]

An extraordinary record... It's not, nor is it intended to be, easy listening. [Sep 2004, p.94]

Protest music that doesn't protest too much -- a music with such a joy and wit to its outrage that it acquires a universality beyond its subject matter. [Nov 2001, p.98]

Ultimately The Sea And Cake are just making timeless, faultless pop music.

A fantastic consolidation of everything good about LCD. [Apr 2007, p.108]

Fantastic! [Aug 2002, p.112]

It's exhilarating stuff, the kind of record that sets new parameters as to what is possible from a punk rock'n'roll band in the 21st century. [Oct 2004, p.106]

Frankly, you could get drunk just on the minutiae here. [Feb 2005, p.92]

The result is their best and most thematically complete album since Achtung Baby. By turning towards their past, U2 have found their way back to the future. [Nov 2014, p.88]

An effervescent rush of melody, invention and magic. [Jan 2006, p.119]

The mind-boggling intricacies and moody, broody sound-sculpting on tracks like Pen Expers find Autechre zooming off, leaving their followers eating cosmic dust. [May 2001, p.110]

Their masterpiece--the re-interpretation of Western rock history as some consenual power-prog dream narrative where Led Zeppelin and Soft Machine are more important than The Beatles. [May 2004, p.105]

Her songs, paradoxically both epic and intimate, shimmer and pulsate as their kaleidoscopic images and mysterious characters drift in and out of focus.

The most fully realised Lambchop record, the most perfect blend yet of their alt country roots and their obsession with soul.

Damon and Naomi haven't so much altered what they do as augmented it, often beautifully. The results are occasionally breathtaking.... A rare and graceful record. (Oct 2000, p.92)

Sits to the right of the likes of Philip Glass and Glenn Branca while outdoing the experimentalism of either Radiohead or Sigur Ros. [Jan 2003, p.98]

It is Nas's poetic erudition that makes it a stone cold classic. [Mar 2007, p.100]

Choosing favourites is almost futile with so much scintillating brilliance on offer.

A sonic quantum leap. [Jul 2005, p.100]

Vaporous, layered, beautifully evocative, with moments of discordant madness. [Co-Album Of The Month [with 'Blood Money'], May 2002, p.94]

While it still whispers, this third endeavour works its way into your soul.

This record is full of surprises, roping in all manner of esoteria for a sweaty, beer-splattered and tune-drenched rock'n'roll party that rivals even Nevermind for balancing the pop sugar with the twisted underbelly and subtle smarts. [May 2003, p.90]

A brilliant second album unembarrassed about building on the strengths of the first, delivering 13 knockout tunes betraying not an ounce of flab or self-indulgence. [Nov 2005, p.94]

The result is 31 minutes of constantly surprising music, more absorbing and less conventional than anything on their self-titled 2005 debut. [Feb 2007, p.102]