Word had already gotten out about this debut LP: that for its genre, it's as seminal as London Calling and as well rounded as Sign of the Times; it avoids the monotony and facelessness of 99% of house records; and it's as funky as anything out there, past or present. Guess what: it's all true.

Think of a universe far, far away, where Ministry, Raw Power-era Iggy Pop, Public Enemy, and Meat Beat Manifesto get together for a pissed-off, hyped-up jam. That's what XTRMNTR sounds like, and it's a downright amazing disc.

Björk's airy and exalted vocals are wonderfully familiar. She may be singing as Selma, but Björk herself isn't too far beneath the surface.

A real piece of art, with an unmistakably original sound and incisive storytelling.

Immaculately recorded and mixed, the set (all classics, from "Pearls Girl" and "Born Slippy" to "Juanita" and "King Of Snake") presents all of the improvisatory and visceral excitement of an Underworld gig without (as is the case with most live recordings) losing any of its sonic intensity.

Think of this sultry record as the night to Odelay's day.

The Platform is one of those timeless long-players, like Run-DMC's Raising Hell or EPMD's Strictly Business, where you'll want to commit every track to memory.

Beaucoup Fish is 74 non-stop minutes-worth of next level disco inferno.

Nearly an instant classic...one of the most convincing and refreshing debuts in recent memory.

Somehow these fragments instantly assemble themselves into a gorgeous whole, and there's not a piece you could imagine replacing.

Enlisting a heavy-hitting cast of helpers -- from the best unknown drummer in the world (Carla Azar) to one of the most creatively pure producers around (T Bone Burnett) -- Arthur has transformed a dozen of his best compositions from the skeletal coffeehouse-ready material they surely were at conception into richly-textured and deeply emotive mood pieces.

An absolutely amazing mainstream pop album.

The Night could very well be Morphine's best work to date. Sandman and company finish the thoughts of 1997's Like Swimming by adding rich, subtle layers to their trio's thick sonic weave without diluting the band's strengths.

A far darker, more turbulent kinda bop.... party music for the dedicated headphone-bobber, barstool shaker, chillout room-gesturer, living room couch-dancer.

Trembling Blue Stars construct gorgeously depressed, evocatively gloomy songs that rival anything the Cure or Lou Reed came up with in their blackest moments.

What's most pure is Eminem's liberating fearlessness in taking hip-hop left turns and acting the fool. The best hip-hop stand-up comic since Biz Markie; all that and a bag o' chronic.

Quite a few steps away from the "typical" girl-with-guitar record, this is the album that reveals Marshall to be quite a unique force.

The trio have hit their stride with a pop confectioner's treat which melds P-Funk with Shirley Bassey, TSOP soul with Caribbean reggae, and Chic disco with Moby-esque blues riffing.

Concise and compelling, Bootleg Detroit is a sonic snapshot of Morphine basking in its best virtues.

Smart, funny and unabashedly feminine....a bouncy and infectious record.

It's a well-thought-out, catchy, and complex body-rocker of a record from beginning to end, with only one or two minor missteps.

Yes, as with OK Computer, stark minimalism marks this effort, and the carefully plotted layers of instruments and machine-generated blips only add to the feeling of emotional emptiness. Seemingly stripped bare of all adornment, however, the new album beats with a loud, persistent, sometimes unsteady heartbeat.

Oops!... I Did It Again proves beyond a doubt that Britney Spears is The One.

With a heavier emphasis on funky bottom end and infectious loops, it could be said that Disco is a much more dancefloor-oriented record, and, to that end, it may very well be. However, resting atop these funky beats is some refreshingly insightful lyricism.

Thickly constructed, melodically rich, and thoroughly well-conceived, Barlow and fellow Implosionist John Davis have concocted a true '90s guitar pop album.

But unlike the band's overbearing forays into trip-hop and dub before, a new level of soul and texture emerge from Saint Etienne's neo-modernist stylings.

Faith and Courage shows a songwriter still in command of her talents.

Yes, nearly every track is a Jeep-worthy jam, and, yes, guest vocals from the likes of Redman, Chaka Khan, Busta Rhymes, and the Beastie Boys introduce unprecedented name-recognition, but this isn't a pop album by any stretch of the imagination.

More than justifies the hype.

So ... How's Your Girl? ... mental infomercial, fashion Trojan horse, soundtrack to a movie we may never see, sheer genius ... uh huh, it's all that and so much more. Handsome Boy Modeling School is your ticket to a better quality of life.

One of the better pop albums of 2000, a multi-faceted offering that resists easy labeling while extending the band's mighty grip on the popular imagination.

[A] tighter, indigo-deeper, more vision cohesive joint than its predecessor.

Spare as the overall sound of the album is, the interplay between the rhythms, samples and voices is vibrant and eloquent...

Ghosts & Flowers, like Sonic Youth's landmark Daydream Nation album, forces the listener to listen very carefully for subtle moments of beauty amidst the near silence and the absolute chaos.

Smith retains the Lennon-esque simplicity and quirky lyrical phrasing that earned him critical praise in the past even as he digs deeper into his psyche and attempts to work through an off-kilter world.

Remarkably mature and absorbing.

Jakob Dylan and his team have fashioned an album that's longer on big guitars, crunchy grooves and cool changes than overt confessionals. All told, Breach is a subtle, seamless effort with nary a lull or misstep -- in contrast to its multiplatinum predecessor, the second half of which suffered from a series of pedestrian songs.

Trickle sounds-feels-smells like both artistic breakthrough and new millennial trip-hop watershed.

From the double album's first echoes of guitar and strings to its droning denouement, godspeed you black emperor! creates a musical soundscape that alternates between flashes of sonic brilliance and moments of quiet ecstasy.

Despite all this experimentation, Blur still sneaks in perfect pop nuggets such as "Coffee & TV," where cheery harmonies share space with a squealing guitar.

Movement in Still Life is a wildly effervescent, effortless sonic bouillabaisse that works dance, rock, hip-hop, pop, new age, trance, house, you-name-it simultaneously and makes it look easy.

An album far better than the last. It's full of clever, upbeat songs and comes close to blending the lyrical and melodic brilliance of their first album, Gordon, with the energy of their live album, Rock Spectacle.

Gone is the preciousness of Elastica. Instead we get a confident and comfortable Frischmann, her voice, ever cool, fronting a rejuvenated punk-loving band.

A beautifully seamless ambient work full of lullabies and dreamscapes?

The result (smells like the blues, bubbles like funk-rock, burns like hip-hop) is some strange new kinda rock 'n rhyme stew... Eat At Whitey's is like nothing else that's happenin' right now.

The seamless integration of acoustic strumming, post-collegiate lyrical references, crystalline ambiance and overall etherealness of the entire album make With Ghost an album that certainly stands on its own.

This time around, LL goes deep and scores with his most consistent, diverse, adventurous, dome blowing/SUV-bumping set of tunes since the Mama Said album...

The Januaries is a most promising first effort.

Like any good party, it's the music and the guests that make Bridging the Gap so memorable.... Each track is so strong and willfully catchy that you may forget who's driving the soul train.

The collection of songs on Horrorscope is a rollicking batch of hooky tunes

Probably the last good album we can realistically expect from Pearl Jam.

At their worst, Deftones can sound almost like a parody of themselves. But at their best, the band fashions a heavy, claustrophobic atmosphere in which Moreno spins his dark, personal tales of misery and heartbreak against a backdrop of music that careens from the ugly to the beautiful. Most of the time, White Pony finds Deftones at their best.

Toward the end of Man or Astro-Man?'s A Spectrum of Infinite Scale there is a track called "A Simple Text File" which is nothing more than a recording of a dot matrix printer producing a hard copy of... a simple text file!... If only the rest of the album were this intensely cool.... Every great leap forward on Spectrum is accompanied by an equal and negative small step backwards...

The slick strings and piano emphasized later in the album aren't as moving as the cascading guitar and Enigk's vulnerable-boy vanity.

That's right, we're talking stadium rock.

Gone is the sweeping piano and oozing horns of previous albums. Gone too is the pop sensibility that permeated Dusk, Mind Bomb, Soul Mining, and others. Matt Johnson has never been a pop artist, but he can craft amazing melodies. However, Johnson has hit a new level of menace here, like he's become a subterranean dweller since 1993. It's musically more free form and grittier. This takes some adjustment.

It's clear that Air didn't spend a whole lot of time on these tracks, since most of the music here revolves around a couple of musical motifs and none are as densely complex as their previous work. However, this reductionist approach serves its purpose and, although conceptually a far cry from Moon Safari -- for obvious reasons -- The Virgin Suicides nonetheless fits well within Air's modus operandi.

Very unique and very, very good....the songs on Righteous Love are brimming with the sorts of influences that you don't hear too much on the radio today: gender-bending atmospherics... Sly Stone/bar-rock amalgams... Dylan's recent haziness...

Amid R2D2-ish cutesy blips, pretty pulsing melodies, and lackadaisical effects, David rambles on about subjects he finds interesting, like a philosophical friend who's maybe had one too many glasses of wine.

While the music is broader in scope than before, Konietezko has given no ground to his choice of lyrics.

A record of both disappointments and welcome surprises.

As lyricists (they co-wrote many of the songs on Revelation), none of the members of 98° bring to mind T.S. Eliot, even at his jiggiest. But as a vocal group, they sure can be impressive.... while Revelation is nowhere near perfect, it is at times undeniably good and quite moving.

Overall, Harsh doesn't lack for bright spots or catchy melodies, but ultimately, it doesn't move me.

This stuff is too cute for its own damn good.

With 1998's Blue Wonder Powder Milk and now The Magnificent Tree, Hooverphonic's sound has become increasingly hip and cosmopolitan, slowly processing out everything that made it so alluring in the first place. It's still sleek and meticulously produced. But, as with the latest from Morcheeba (another band with similar trip-hoppy proclivities), the nagging sense of something menacing behind these songs has practically disappeared.

Orgy sounds a lot like Marilyn Manson on this album, with touches of David Bowie and New Wave techno-pop added for flavor. The results are completely derivative... The result is an album that is often amazing sonically, occasionally gripping musically, pretty dopey lyrically, and absolutely empty in terms of real substance.

A strong Lemonheads kind of vibe-

Rather than highbrow art-rock, we just get a really pretentious heavy metal album.... the Pumpkins' worst album to date.

This new album... sees them mutating into less of a rock outfit and more of what is commonly called "adult contemporary" -- in other words, music for soccer moms and rich yuppies to play really loud in their BMWs-

A too-long, languid mess of Hoboken groove.... a thoroughly disappointing affair.

With "Modus Operandi," Photek blew open the possibilities of drum 'n' bass by paring the genre down to its simplest, most ominous elements. Solaris, by comparison, sounds absolutely generic.

The punky edge to the band has been all but jettisoned, in favor of slick production, orchestral backdrops, and cloying melodies that render even the occasionally dark lyrics (mostly about divorce this time) surprisingly limp.

With Soul Caddy's stunted riffs, lethargic attack and thin, shiny sound, it's hard to believe that they're one of the most amazing live bands in the country, because exactly none of that energy translates here. Even on theoretical ass-kickers like "Irish Whiskey," the vibe is so washed-out (just like when they do "soul" or "funk" or "glam" or "grunge"), it's a bit depressing and Weird Al-like.