When I Was Cruel is a collection of tough tunes and textures that recalls -- but doesn't recycle -- the records that endeared him to his earliest admirers.

The group's secret weapon is the way it so vividly captures the storms of confusion, anger and self-recrimination that swirl around inside a boy.

Maturity suits these guys: Five albums into their career, it sounds like they're just getting warmed up.

The music's shift from trivial to memorable dominates Maladroit; this is Cuomo's attempt to make his voice and guitar move as quick as his mind.

They actually took the time to make a totally crunk geek-punk record, buzzing through ten excellent tunes in less than half an hour with zero filler and enough psychosexual contortions to buy Cuomo's shrink another hot tub.

Black Cherry is both retro and futuristic, like vintage synth pop heard through a wall of distortion. [15 May 2003, p.134]

Just when new metal seemed utterly played out, Deftones blows open the possibilities.

In the face of hysterical expectation, the Strokes have resisted the temptation to hit the brakes, grow up and screw around with a sound that doesn't need fixing -- yet.

Kweli smoothly bridges the physical and the political.

It's not that Come With Us doesn't rock like a jet engine in a jewel case - it does - but it's more striking for the moments when a warped loveliness, like the icy, phased harpsichord gusts of "Pioneer Skies," wafts up and out from among the roar of the sirens and sequencers.

For now, the Strokes have mastered their style; they have yet to come up with the substance to match it.... But the music leaves no doubts - more joyful and intense than anything else I've heard this year.

The evidence here suggests the Sleepy Jackson could make a great punk album, or a great country album, or a great psychedelic album. Instead, they've simply made a great album, and one of the best debuts of the year.

The songwriting marries the band's penchant for recalling its wide-ranging influences (Neil Young, CCR, Mission of Burma) with a casual, off-the-cuff air that belies the meticulous craft underneath.

Waits' ravaged voice surrendered all pretensions to melody ages ago; his throat is now pure theater, a weapon of pictorial emphasis and raw honesty.

A near-perfect balance of gutter grime and high-art aspiration, the Rick Rubin-produced By the Way continues the Peppers' slow-motion makeover.

Despite the anger and bitterness, Hail to the Thief is more musically inviting than Radiohead's last two outings.

A Mark is the first time he's let the musical intensity match the lyrics.

A luxuriant union of black-ice electronics and chamber-pop instrumentation. [14 Oct 2004, p.98]

The album isn't the romp it might have been had Lopes survived, but 3D solidly embodies black pop in a year in which it has lacked a center.

Greendale has a tattered, buzzing, demolike sound, rude as any Young has put out.

Most of the collaborators turn up only as backup vocalists or orchestra members, enabling Lightbody's heartbreaking ballads and sublime baritone to soar.

Ten New Songs manages to sustain loss's fragile beauty like never before and might just be the Cohen's most exquisite ode yet to the midnight hour.

Where the album truly shines though is in the way Armstrong gets the most of his vocalists.

It feels like one big loft party, even when it veers into psychotic, dissonant No Wave by DNA and Mars.

The album's wanton schizophonia results in such a switched-on pileup of styles that Groove Armada have earned their own rubric -- call it electrocrash, and consider it great.

The ebb and flow of eighteen concise, contrasting cuts writes a story about Moby's beautifully conflicted interior world while giving the outside planet beats and tunes on which to groove.

An earthy, moving psychedelia, eleven iridescent-country songs about surviving a blown mind and a broken heart.

Somehow, the Primals' fury never seems misguided: This is one ball of aggression that hangs together, thanks to the band's smarts and funk.