His smooth, Sam Cooke-esque croon makes Coming Home the best kind of nostalgia trip.

On her new album, Bette Midler has gone into the studio with a master of makeovers, producer Don Was, and ended up sounding pretty much the same. That's a good thing.

The best songs here suggest an alternate universe where Bob Dylan and George Harrison agreed to collaborate full-time.

It's a fun ride. [6 Oct 2005, p.154]

For all the up-to-the-minute production talent--including Stargate and Mike Elizondo--this often sounds like an Eighties record, all big, clipped drums and guitar-face soloing.... Still, the best tracks are the most country.

This teaming of a gifted poet and bruising metalheads is like Lou Reed and Metallica's Lulu--but about half as long, and about twice as heavy.​

Camila is sleek pop that gets straight to the point, just 10 songs around the three-minute mark, eschewing celebrity guests or big-name producers.

Terraplane is less a soul-searcher than a sturdy vehicle, built to chug through hard times.

Here Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg hook up with indie boy Andrew Wyatt, manhandling his plaintive love ballads until they explode into freewheeling electro fantasias.

Just as downtrodden and elegant as those [albums] before it. [1 May 2003, p.56]

Hanna sounds like her old fearless self.

Reznor's own hyperdetailed language defines the set: heaving synthesizers, doleful piano, alien-insect noises.

Cut with a country-rock pickup band, his first solo album is full of bleakly funny noir tales.

Heroes & Villains is entertaining enough as a man’s, man’s, man’s world. It’s better conceptualized and executed than Only Heroes Wear Capes, even if 21 Savage can’t quite match the ASMR pleasures of that album’s “Don’t Come Out the House.”

Cuco transmutes various pop methodologies to create his own blend of burnout soul.

Regeneration, the Divine Comedy's sixth album, could find fans on either side of the Atlantic, as it's their first to pay as much attention to the sound as to the songs.

With the help of producer Jeff Tweedy, Thompson knows that bitterness goes down easiest when paired with autumnal Celtic-pub melodies (see "Josephine," which evokes his time in Fairport Convention).

Lupe's beats run from Nineties buoyancy to driving rap rock, but his most exciting tracks are operatic brawlers that give his athletic, whiplash flow and rich imagination room to move.

On Obviously, they’re still oddballs, but in the best way. At a moment when pop strives for lo-fi, solitary-world intimacy, the jazz-pop-whatever band refuse to think small. Fully living up to the water imagery in their name, they’ve made their first truly abashed yacht rock record — with all the hooks, musical interplay, sophistication and sometimes dodgy lyrics of that genre.

"Do you think we could save the world?" This album--at turns discomforting, optimistic and altogether necessary-- makes you think the answer might be yes.

Mostly White sounds like a scrappy, abstract-leaning '80s-style battle rhymer who probably didn't win a lot of battles. Elsewhere, experimental detours dead-end: "Everything You've Ever Learned" feels like aimless twaddle with newly-unboxed digital toys. But at its best, the spirit of freaky free-play is thrilling and refreshing, a worthy end unto itself.

Howard's black-dirt gravitas holds it all together.

The riffs are more memorable than the songs, you say? Does it really matter?

Unfortunately, Scott doesn’t keep the envelope pushing up for the whole album: a seven-song stretch in the back end is vintage Travis with its zoned-out, hypnotic throb. However, the rest marks the most interesting music of his career, Scott no longer just looking the part of a brilliant artist, but sounding like it too.

Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant embellishes on the coyly lavish arrangements of 1998's The Boy With the Arab Strap without forgetting to flex real heart muscles.

Occupies that small overlapping space between breezy commercial craft and alt-rock subversion.

The songs shuffle styles, but the voices transcend genre distinctions--you may not hear a more beautifully sung record this year.

The Portland trio make decaying states of consciousness seem like heaven with psychedelic guitar-pop that's alluringly out of focus.