U2's tenth studio album and third masterpiece, All That You Can't Leave Behind, is all about the simple melding of craft and song.... The album represents the most uninterrupted collection of strong melodies U2 have ever mounted, a record where tunefulness plays as central a role as on any Backstreet Boys hit.... Every track -- whether reflective but swinging, like "Wild Honey," or poised, then pouncing, like "Beautiful Day" -- honors a tune so refined that each seems like some durable old number. Because this is U2, there's a quick impact to these melodies, yet each song has a resonance that doesn't fade with repeated listening.

The new album is their most adventurous and passionate since Disintegration.

Virtually all of these songs and recordings have held up beautifully. [28 Oct 2004, p.104]

An equally available yet more sophisticated album.

As appealing, focused and straight-up satisfying an album as Prince has made since who can remember when.

Peachtree highlights once again just how soulful John's music can be. [25 Nov 2004, p.92]

One of the best albums of the year.

The ambiguity in the songs adds to their haunting quality.

Over subdued soul loops and improbably mellow piano work, The Lost Tapes displays Nas' gifts for tightly stitched narrative and stunningly precise detail.

Where Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sounded dense and surreal, the bulk of Ghost is spare and earthy, with streaks of Crazy Horse, the Band, the Beatles and the Replacements.

Aaliyah is Control, Velvet Rope and Jagged Little Pill all rolled into one. It's the album Janet should have made with All for You, the manifesto that Beyonce thought she was penning with Survivor.

A series of punk songs that balance throat-shredding, brain-rattling intensity with an undercurrent of sadness and vulnerability.

They evoke folks as diverse as Led Zeppelin and My Bloody Valentine, but the gently woozy Sigur Ros don't sound like anything or anyone else so much as a classic-rock band bewitched by white magic.

The summer's most brilliantly demented party record.

No matter how good your new favorite band is, the Stratford 4 are better.

Miss E is a mess, of course, and not all the experiments work as brilliantly as the single. But if you prefer risky messes to tidy formula, tracks like "Scream a.k.a. Itchin' " and "Step Off" will freak you up something fierce.

Under Construction, uninhibited and unpredictable, is her best yet.

The most pleasingly direct yet musically adventurous hip-hop long-player you're likely to hear all year.

It is the sound of apocalypse now.

Zwan are more straightforward (and much less histrionic) than the Smashing Pumpkins, so a few of the songs in the middle are pretty but not very dramatic.

Revelling/Reckoning is both an accomplished album complimented by a loose-jam of ensemble players and a bare sketchbook where DiFranco sits alone in her room, creating a private universe accessible to anyone with the will to listen.

Typically sunny Fanclub, yet more nuanced and colorful than anything the band has done before.

A ramshackle, art-damaged mess, but it's also one of the most bone-rattlingly ferocious records you'll hear all year.

The energy never sags and ideas never flag.

Jane's Addiction have finally come up with music that can stand alongside their previous albums.

Like Stereolab and Beck, Yo La Tengo liberate their listeners by downplaying language and logic in favor of our bodies' hazy dreams.

If you liked Tragic Kingdom, you should love Return of Saturn. And if you didn't, you should still love it.

By any standard, jazz or otherwise, it is moving, mighty music - bad in all the right ways.