Not only their crowning achievement to date but also one of the year's finest albums, period.

Feels stuck in a holding pattern.... A misfire from a talented band.

Hail lacks the overriding musical, thematic or experimental coherence of the band's post-Pablo Honey work. But it is a strong collection of discrete tracks, like an unreleased B-sides collection finally seeing the light of day.

The guitars stumble in a monotone of mid-level, processed rattle; the drums don't propel as much as struggle to disguise an all-too-turgid pace; and the rage is both unfocused and leavened with too much narcissistic navel-gazing.

A gifted, natural performer, Rice has had little problem connecting with audiences, filling O's quiet stretches with a likeable persona developed from his previous life busking on the streets of Europe.

What keeps Nastasia from succumbing to grotesque melodrama is the razor-like incisiveness she brings to her lyrics.

The approach Welch and partner David Rawlings bring to the material feels crafted for private enjoyment rather than public consumption, and the end result is not only Welch's most personal work to date but one of her most emotionally satisfying as well.

Too much reflection equals not enough action, and Gahan's halting lyrics beg for an urgency and immediacy that Monsters doesn't deliver.

Largely tosses out the loopy musical excursions and surrealistic pillow fights of past albums for a tighter, sparer approach.

A mixed bag of hit-or-miss pop-oriented tunes.

A vital document of Led Zeppelin's formidable legacy.

The Pernice Brothers' strongest effort yet.

The butter-drenched vocal harmonies can be overwhelming in spots, but each of the principals involved brings enough of his songwriting savvy to the table to make The Thorns a guilty pleasure of pure California dreamin'.

While such diversity isn't necessarily a bad thing, it does tend to break the rhythm of his albums.

Birds of Pray just seems clueless, like a high school kid who doesn't realize that his strident need to seem interesting just makes him a joke, and not a particularly funny one at that.

Too much of... Out of the Vein struggles to scratch its way into your memory banks, hobbled by its own melodic shortcomings.

It would have been nice if Kidwell had stuck to his white-schlep soul man routine throughout, instead of gesturing back to earlier electronic or acoustic-based instrumental work.

Rather than lose control of his programmed loops, Hebden sounds completely in control, the conductor of an invisible digital orchestra, changing gears on a whim.

Nothing here approaches the pop perfection of Romantic's "Letter From An Occupant," but songs like Newman's "The Laws Have Changed" and Bejar's spirited "Testament to Youth in Verse" nonetheless add weight to one of the year's strongest and unabashed pure-pop releases.

At 23 tracks (including two strong bonus cuts at the end), One Word Extinguisher simply tries to say too much, dragging noticeably during the final third, thus weakening the final impact.

Ultimately, Black Cherry lacks the unified flow of Felt Mountain, primarily because the band hasn't divorced itself completely from its past sound.

Gibb’s passionate vocals and direct, literate lyrics work best when he’s confronting issues that concern him (like organized religion, for instance), as opposed to wallowing in less confrontational topics (as when he frolics happily on the beach with “Boys Of Melody”).

Think Tank, then, is neither the best Blur album nor the worst; rather, it's a unique creature, guaranteed to be the oddball in the band's catalogue.

Fever to Tell... shows that this seeming one-trick pony is capable of more varied and interesting material than its members have previously exhibited.

One would like to think there's a subversive statement here about the blandness of much of commercial radio, but it's far more likely that the vocal turns by Dave Matthews and Bush's Gavin Rossdale are as free of intended irony as those songs' lyrics are free of fresh content.

With Up in Flames, the sound of post-electronica has arrived.

Keep on Your Mean Side is a solid debut from a duo with enough moxie to shamelessly retread their myriad influences without coming across as so annoyingly derivative as to negate its brash, anything goes energy.

Coming from a group whose debut offered a glimmer of hope for the expansion of the genre's boundaries, such creative laziness is all the more disappointing.