Recorded July 1, 1998, a 78-minute double-CD proves how stiff and thin this made-up collective's mysteriously canonical 1997 studio album is.

The band is on it, the backup singers are solicitous, and Cohen's husk of a voice has been juiced up by the exercise.

Burbling electronic ticktocks vie with a carillon of bell simulacra, and rarely have vinyl crackle or laser malfunction generated more musicality.

The entire construction is a thing of grace -- conservative, and new under the sun.

They're unflinchingly unsensationalistic. But it's the beats that turn this into noir worthy of Jim Thompson. [Feb/Mar 2007]

The thing about the indie-rock life is that even its depressives, not just mere realists like these guys, have a pretty good time.

Never rousing and too often glum, the album is carried by its intelligence, integrity and terrible beauty. [Feb/Mar 2007]

It's hard to imagine their music getting much better. But it's not hard to imagine their lives getting much better. Which may be all their music needs.

They thud rather than thunder. But what a loud and joyous thud it is.

Just when I'd made my peace with pop prog and begun to hope arty prog would prove another casualty of the age of digital instantaneity, these postrock warriors get the bright idea of adding tune and humor to their higher mathematics.

Buy it while you can.

Never have his arrangements exploited his soundtrack chops so subtly, changeably or precisely.

'Stay Positive' nails the travails of the aging rock band harder than 'Start Me Up' because it's about fans, and 'Constructive Summer' craftily confuses different ways to get hammered.

Not only will you hum snatches, you'll parse lyrical bits, too: a basement-dwelling twentysomething high on Gatorade in an underpopulated housing development, a waitressing job for Solange Knowles.

What's most remarkable about this stylistic portmanteau is that every song is an original even though you assume several are among their shoulda-been-a-hit-but-wtf-is-it? covers.

This album lays it on too thick... and declines the thematic burden of "Separation Sunday." As stories, on the other hand, the songs could convince anyone that kids have a hard time.

Of course she's quieting down as she grows up, plus covering her bases, so after half a dozen winners she levels off into a nine- song sequence.

A trifle brighter, quicker and fuller than "Gimme Fiction."

From the start you know this is no mixtape because it's clearer and more forceful. Every track attends to detail, with fun tricks like the chipmunk-chorused "Mr. Carter"'s sudden descent into screwed-and-chopped before Jay-Z comes in.

As narrative and prophecy, a less coherent response to Christofascism than you might want, but one alt needs, held together and moved ahead by its forthright hooks and beats.

For a principled slacker like Snider, diffidence is an aesthetic principle, but here it tends to obscure some affecting little songs.

It serves up the distorted buzz Congotronics fans jones for, sonics that are generally raunchy even though the thumb pianos also generate balafon beauty, and five lead singers.

It defines vicinity so broadly that you'll also find Beiderbecke and Reinhardt, two Ellington tunes, songs by a jazz critic and Ed Sullivan's bandleader.

Though I wish the beats were less corny-orchestral, Fiasco marks his own turf in a three-song sequence that would have led the second side back in the day. [Feb/Mar 2007]

No Age too brutalist for you? Here's a heedlessly beautiful alternative.

Elegiac rather than dancey, but elegiac about the preconditions of the dance, it states, sustains, and varies a bracing mood. It even has an ending.

OK, 19 songs, gotta be filler here somewhere, and there is, only it isn't melodic -- with all music credited to the band, Shonna Tucker's muzzier lyrics and Mike Cooley's more elusive ones sound as well-turned as those of Patterson Hood, who's never written better.

The sound is bigger too, strengthening a band that's all guitars-drums-vocals sonics -- including Molly Siegel's yelping vocables, without which the sound's faux-tween soul and wise-ass tempo shifts would evanesce into abstraction.