A more thoroughly radical-sounding album than even Ray Of Light...

There's still enough synapse-jangling vocal invention and moments of great beauty to make it a worthy addition ot Bjork's singular ouevre. [Nov. 2000, p.99]

En masse, Maroon's brisk acoustic rock settings and the hyperactive rush of words can still have you reaching for the skip button. But broken into bite-size chunks, its bitterly humorous dissection of the fumbling absurdities of modern life and death is not without pathos.

Osborne still sings well, but, apart from the late swamp-dirty sequence of Baby Love, Hurricane and Poison Apples, deadly rock orthodoxy prevails.

A rare treat, with Jones' stripped-back, largely acoustic band brilliantly framing that voice... [Nov. 2000, p.109]

Five years ago she collaborated with Brian Eno and U2 producer Daniel Lanois on the ambient Wrecking Ball. Now she returns with a less intense but no less powerful new record that continues that album's heavy/ethereal vibe, courtesy of producer (and Wrecking Ball engineer) Malcolm Burn, but with a more melodic touch.

The results, although respectable, were never going to ignite anything like their former glories.

Devoid of the chest-thumping drama of the real thing, this sprinkling of tracks, largely taken from Second Toughest In The Infants and its follow-up Beaucoup Fish sound curiously neutered.... Hugely disappointing.

At first listening, this feels vexingly inconsequential, but after a few loosening listens the music's slight but simple pleasures shine through.

The 6ths is all about incongruity (where else could you find Gary Numan, 70-year-old folk diva Odetta and Sarah Cracknell sharing space?) and as such it`s an eclectic affair.

The songs here convey life's troubles - failing relationships, feelings of rootlessness - with an unfeasibly languid, almost opiated calm.

An LP of sleek, sophisticated and teasingly soulful tunes. Eerily introverted one moment, warm and open the next, Essence demands attention but makes for an intriguing, rewarding experience.

Regrettably, Williams fourth album continues her "progression" from convincing acoustic confessional to mild, gutless rocking with sessioneers who lack inspiration. [Nov 2001, p.130]

At his best, Jean writes great tunes that don't give a stuff for anyone else's criteria of cool, but amid the overlong skits/underlong songs of Ecleftic, and despite the super-silly brilliance of It Doesn't Matter, the lasting impression is of a talent at sea, cut off from his roots and uncertain of the path ahead.

Compared to the angular new wave of yore, the Elastica sound has matured into something far more interesting.

A profound disappointment... few songs lift themselves above pedestrian tedium. [Nov 2000, p.117]

Spring Heel Jack exist in that increasingly exciting no-man's land where clubland and modern jazz call a truce and have a kickabout.

At times the sound of Peter Hook eating himself, at its best - the epic, Hook-sung It's A Boy - Monaco display a powerful combination of emotionalism and bombast all their own.

It's not for everyone. It's certainly not for Blur fans of Country House vintage. Nor is it the best dinner party album in the world ever. But it's no knottier than 13 and in its own noisy way, great fun.

Many will be quick to dismiss this as a shadow of 3 Feet High, but it's their loss when hip hop's as infectious and intelligent as this.

MOR for the Ibiza generation.

More than ever, they can be summed up by the epithet "The Brand New Heavies, only a bit more hip hop", peddling a soft kind of soul that fuses old-school influences with feelgood philosophy of the "believe in yourself" variety.

While their previous albums have always had great songs, with this latest set they've managed to place them in the right order, creating a truly impressive journey...

Similar in spirit to [Primal Scream's] Exterminator or Death In Vegas's The Contino Sessions, his third album tools up a live rock band with dance music's sonic armoury... it's a claustrophobic listening experience, challengingly thick with ideas.

Long-vowelled and nasal - Redman without the charisma - and with a tasty line in mortuary slab terminology, he's never knowingly caught short of a rhyme.

By far their most effective release.

Now more than ever Richard Ashcroft is comfortable with music that strays alarmingly close to the Middle Of The Road.

A belligerent record: fiercely independent, full of right angles, curious sound effects and a guitarist, Aziz Ibrahim, who believes, incorrectly, that the soul of Jimi Hendrix is preserved in his G-string.

At its best, this is strangely charming, chiming pop music with a twist. At other times, the bare-boned production hampers the inventiveness, rendering a track such as Y Teimlad (The Feeling) a workmanlike Velvet Underground retread rather than the thing of symphonic beauty it briefly threatens to be.

11 new songs of singularly cloying contentment; no soaring highs, no debilitating lows, just minor pop platitudes with hollow, echoing centres.

Their most adventurous and assured album to date?

A single 47-minute long track, subtitled An Electronic Night Ceremony, it begins with a slowly unfolding dystopian bass rumble to which a pulsing beat and subtle layers of electronic soup are laboriously added. Sounding more like the hum of a car factory (they still have them in Germany) than the celestial sphere of the title, it's a querulous throb of a record which, once heard, hardly invites repeated listening.

The results are perplexing. An artist who has made a career out of pushing herself to extremes has put together an album of pappy, poppy songs that sound like they were written between cups of tea in the garden.

Pop Trash proves to be far from embarrassing...

Sounds something like a male-fronted Cardigans... [Aug 2001, p.141]

This is a quietly adventurous coming of age, as languorous and fuzzy around the edges as a summer afternoon.

Moffat's half-sung, half-muttered confessionals still lurch between the pulsing beats and pensive instrumentation but the tone is now more funereal than carnal.

Looking for fresh inspiration, he relocated to Los Angeles for this third album, embarking on some musical revisions that will surprise even long-time fans.

Simone and Amedeo Pace weave intricate musical patterns on a collection of songs distinguished by their fundamental lack of tunes. Aside from the exuberant frisson of This Is Not, the album staggers unsteadily between serene chamber pop, looping layered electronics and shouty, full-on hyperactive thrashy punk...

There is no doubt that his songwriting chops just keep on getting better.

The album lacks the breathless show-stoppers that have long peppered their records.

There are few surprises here: white trash raps hollered over a musical backdrop that sounds like an evil pub rock band.

Vol. 2 proves the equivalent of its parent release.

Utterly forgettable and hampered by Ruth-Ann's thin vocals. [Nov. 2000, p.113]

Their second album is a melange of found sounds (Piero Umiliani, Nancy Sinatra, Harry Belafonte), daft titles (Duckweb & Fishlip, Barry Normal Eyes, Busyness Mans Lunch) and much studio jiggery-pokery. The result is a surprisingly viable whole... There's nothing of substance, despite the swearing on A Lot Of Stick (But Not Much Carrot), but it's fair fun while it lasts.

Using everything from string quartets to jet turbines, metal sheets and electric guitar, it moves from being severely irritating to moments of great beauty. Worth persevering with, if you're willing to go the emotional distance.

Their debut album sits comfortably between the party-heart, old skool shape-throwing of Jurassic Five and the darker weedscapes of Cypress Hill.

The follow-up is an equally passionate, turbulent affair, sounding, oddly, like a cross between Foreigner and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

True, even misdirected, Eminem's disaffection sucks you in and the wholesale nihilism can still provoke shivers. But it all used to be more fun.

They make often wistful, often wry, but always intelligent pop.

Yet tracks such as Moody, You're No Good and UFO are far more than mere sample food, and these original recordings recall The Slits given a rudimentary disco makeover. But where their British peers revelled in sloppiness, ESG's rhythm section is as tight as the JBs in bondage gear.

At their worst, Pearl Jam witter on pointlessly.... When Pearl Jam gel, though, it's close to special.

Beautiful Creature dwells too self-indulgently in a faux naïve girlish tone...

47 minutes of homogenous power pop...

A superbly stealthy assault on the ears, stroking and unsettling in equal measure.

By turns soothing and jarring, the tone suggests Death In Vegas with the neurosis replaced by a mood of ennui.

Hanson's second studio album is better than the first.

:?q:,ails is much better than a collaboration between a former Luscious Jackson keyboardist and a former Breeders bassist has any right to be.... the surprise derives from the convincing Gallic pop-meets-Brazilian tropical-meets-American prairie blend.

An eyebrow-raising mish-mash of cheap keyboard and guitar sounds and DIY grooves..... an awkward, yet occasionally beautiful listening experience.

Yet again, Mann's songs concentrate on life gone wrong - but this is timeless stuff.

A wildly inventive, often sprawling opus, comprising a multitude of styles from boisterous guitar rock to psychedelic nonsense.

A darkly uncompromising and often difficult record: uneasy, sinister, scored and scarred with sonic detritus and, in layman?s terms, a bloody racket.

Broadcast are detached and austere, but mesmerised by their discoveries in the radiophonic workshop. Current single Echo's Answer and the unusually upbeat Come On Let's Go are the best places to start, but this is a classic case of an album working as a whole. Hard work, but compelling.

Most riveting are the ballads, where he conveys a devastating truth with conversational ease.

Despite a clutch of well-crafted songs, the results are hit and miss.

Stylistically he's been likened to just about everybody from Leonard Cohen to Kurt Cobain. However, the use of loops and samples on Chemical, for instance, are just as likely to recall Beck, while the damaged tone could give Eels's E a run for his money.

Back in the real world, fans of the disconnected Callahan know what to expect. They're a loyal breed who puzzle over his dryly funny lyrics and file the CDs next to Mark Eitzel and Nick Cave... His best yet.

Despite the presence of original Patti Smith Group members Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty, this lacks the buzz of her past material.

Eventually, though, the guitar-and-piano-only, stripped-down dynamics mean that a dull torpor settles over the album.

Though rockier in parts than any of his previous work, this 12-track set houses some of Johnson's most impressive songwriting to date.

MACHINA/the machines of God is, mostly, a wonderful rock album.

They've produced a demanding slice of music, brilliantly out of sync in an age of quick fixes and plummeting attention spans.

From any conceivable angle, it is an indulgence...

At times recalling Eno's Another Green World.

Wisely, Bloodflowers is every crotchet a Cure album. True, there's no blatant hit single - one of those sudden shifts into gloriously barmy pop frenzy - but there's still ample compensation to be had...

Heartbreaking, gorgeous and totally individual, these big-production numbers meld the different but complementary beauties of Nashville country and sweet soul while adding a dash of wine-dark weirdness.

The trio's nearly sub-sonic blues, jazz and beat poetry hybrid once again evoking a dangerous Spanish Harlem drinking den while Near Eastern influences and a subtler instrumental mesh hint at what might yet have been.

While sometimes determinedly slight, these cunning community-minded grooves - People Power In The Disco Hour, in particular - do gradually insinuate their way into the affections.

Stylistically, Lynne steps out in several directions and gives the impression that she could succeed in any of them: the warm caress of her voice and the cool, cutting edge of her songs suggest great things.

As musically dazzling as Midnite Vultures often is, the one criticism that can be still levelled at Beck is that his songs remain strangely soulless, failing to ever really grip the emotions or stir the soul.

Part Jewel-with-tunes, part Tori-Amos-without-kookiness, it noodles, but only rarely.

Sixty minutes long -- the album's subtitle is "A Musical Curriculum" -- this is pure, hip-hop-based sampledelica and anything but po-faced.

It's a magnificently gothic trip in which guitars grind pitilessly against hip hop beats, electronic circuitry throbs to breaking point and Iggy Pop cameos as a serial killer.

One Part Lullaby's chugging, folk/soul interface and tagged-on beats has a more natural flow than before ... He's still proffering those cryptic, jittery asides ("one part lullaby, two parts fear" in the title track), but at least Lou Barlow's music sounds relaxed these days.

A boundlessly entertaining expose of what happens when you mix fine words with excellent melodies to make great songs.

Remedy follows a growing list of albums born of an infectious energy and bubbling belief that, dance-wise these days, almost anything goes.

The Soft Bulletin echoes the oft-mimiced Smiley Smile by The Beach Boys, with its psychedelic wobbliness, songs-within-songs and airy termperament.

Play's inventiveness will restore his reputation as a puck-like, maverick talent.

Over 27 unpredictable tracks that run the gamut from soaring Byrdsian harmonic rock to the sound of wind in the trees played backwards, Black Foliage is a marathon.

A dense, fascinating, idiosyncratic and accomplished art rock album.

Midway through, however, Karl Hyde stretches himself too far with the minimal This Mortal Coil-styled ballad SKYM, exposing the weaknesses in his singing voice.