Collapse mostly sounds like a familiar friend -- reliable in all the best ways, but still capable of quietly insinuating surprises.

Even with all the name players involved, Albarn focuses the spotlight on the songs, which are terrific. [Jan 2007, p.92]

There’s a feeling of forward momentum to the entire album but we might not like where it’s headed.

Triplicate is not a shining hour for Dylan when put into the full context of his fifty-plus-year career. But nonetheless, his insuppressible spirit is baked into every moonstruck moment.

The sound is old-fashioned, but the fury is fresh.

Even though The Glowing Man offers a satisfying, substantial conclusion to the Swans discography, listeners shouldn’t expect a now-or-never, paradigm-shifting opus.

You’ve got to give it to perennial over-achievers: sometimes they even know how to make extra-credit assignments sound like A+ work.

More ambitious than on past efforts, Watson slips through quiet night spaces, and like Sendak's Max, puts on his wolf suit, making mischief of one kind, then another, until Wooden Arms flares with his vibrant energy.

The LP is the group’s most enjoyable, but also their most potent, all the more menacing for its unlikely grinning.

Continues their quest for idyllic listlessness, setting claustrophobic love-sucks songs to shy bedroom beats that are always passing (out) into ambient ether. [Sep 2000, p.189]

Three Futures is a slow burn, but Torres doesn’t require speed, not when she can hold our attention with something more akin to intense eye contact.

ken, Bejar’s sparest album in terms of lyrical density and length in some time, is an aggressive, well-chiseled shift.

For all the paradoxical production agendas in play, Mr. West’s guiding hand in constructing the album’s boldly going flow is everywhere in evidence. As glacially paced, mood-enhancing music, Pablo is a hypnotic slam-dunk.

Caressed by gentle guitars and synths, her elegantly serene voice and airy melodies impart a sense of stubborn, reassuring endurance in the face of soul-crushing melancholy.

In years past, Animal Collective have been cast as perpetual Peter Pans, forever stuck in childhood fantasias. But beneath the body-moving throbs and coruscating noises of Merriweather Post Pavilion, themes of domestic duty and devotion abound.

With songs and production this pumped, they’ll continue to make waves far outside their beloved home state.

Purple Mountains was produced and accompanied by Jarvis Taveniere and Jeremy Earle of Woods, with eight other musicians filling the gaps. The arrangements, some of the most gracious Berman’s ever had, hum and glow with foggy organs and soft golden horns. Their serenity is at odds with his desperation: This is a portrait of a shattered man.

Assembled as carefully as he once cut up a cappellas, it's a dance-music textbook.

It’s not easy to homogenize the opposing forces at play, but everything here feels like a genuine rumble through a mind scarred and inebriated by the reality of gang life and chasing the American dream while the room spins.

Here, on record, buttressed by her own diaphanous back-up vocals, she's fading deliciously into the background even as she's finally stepping into the spotlight.

As important as the production is, though, it’s still the songwriting that makes Pawn Shop stand out.

With five songs clocking in at more than seven minutes, often thanks to detours down E Street, it's a big-idea album that feels small and personable, even as it's kicking you in the shin.

They maintain a slow, directionless drift that weights their third record with the dread of what’s beyond the sky.

The dreamy project leaves the snide social critiques and radicalisms to the wayside for 36 minutes that feel of its own realm, where the dichotomies and bodily desire feel self-contained. The intimacy is never lost within the set’s high concept: For an album centered on lonesomeness, Aromanticism feels warm.

Thanks to its polyrhythms and rich instrumental textures, The Animal Spirits is as likely to appeal to fans of experimental rock music (especially electro-tribal searchers like Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance, Fuck Buttons, or Dan Deacon) as it is to those who regularly spend evenings at the club.

In her willingness to tread the line between the crushing flood of data and irrepressible pop hooks has created a record so undeniably of its time and place (that is, cyberspace) that it can’t be easily ignored.

Where Turn Into’s multilayered arrangements sometimes felt scrunched, Everybody Works blossoms.

Lovingly fastidious and packed with special effects.

“Outer Acid” remains uncanny in its mix of blissful keys and menacing acid squiggles and “Spy” diffuses some dubby harmonica into Heard’s atmospheres. “Inner Acid” returns to the squelchy acid house Heard made back in the ‘80s and the knocking beat and bells of “Nodyahed” suggest that he can still make a dancefloor quake.

Sitek's layered sonics have grown more immense... and almost none of these songs charts a predictable course. [Jun 2006, p.81]

There's still something small and handmade about the Thermals' music. [Sep 2006, p.112]

Lyrics referencing both Greek astronomy and the Old Testament, as well as guitar textures indebted more to Glenn Branca than Black Flag, reveal an art-rock ace up the band's tattered sleeve.

This latest effort shift boils down to two key foci: bolder, less guarded lyrical choices (much of the record deals with Paternoster's ongoing battle with chronic mono) and more strategic space for the frontwoman's legendary guitar solos.

Little Broken Hearts is exciting because it explores the darkest corners of betrayal, bad love, and jealousy with enough vitality to propel Jones out of the bloodless purgatory of brunch music.

Hval continues to cleverly connect, and explicitly comment on, matters of sex and politics on her third album.

The most eloquent artistic response yet to the World Trade Center tragedy. [Sep 2002, p.130]

Ween are still perved to the core.

Ironically, spitting over minimal head-knock beats from WHY? and Advance Base, Serengeti sounds reborn.

That it reads like it came from NAO’s diary points to her greatest achievement on Saturn: every song can shine as a standalone track, but they sound even better together.

Mazzy Star steadfastly stick to their dusty, psych-folk, dream-pop tableaux on Seasons of Your Day. Yet it feels nothing like a '90s hangover; in fact, the touches of organ and pedal steel that open the album hint at Beach House's hazy indie-pop.

Desire Lines sits with remarkable ease next to Camera Obscura albums released a decade ago.

[Frontman Miles] Kurosky finally has the audio toys to jazz up his Technicolor sandbox... [Oct 2001, p.134]

Like Confessions on a Dance Floor, Fundamental uses squelchy electro-disco grooves that smuggle sly pop-culture commentary. [Aug 2006, p.83]

There is almost always an underlying inorganic sound that’s either ominous, nauseous or both, and it’s the only thing that guarantees that none of the slower tracks will unknowingly be embraced in dentists’ waiting rooms next to classic soft rock. The faster songs are highly danceable, especially with these queasy keys.

On this debut, Lerner's gorgeous vocals, sunny melodies, and ultra-catchy choruses sound like a Fab Four fantasy trip as he logs extensive mileage in a rush of crisscrossing travelogue songs.

One Beat's hooks require a few passes to take hold. [Sep 2002, p.127]

The way What a Time to Be Alive zooms by, there are songs you might blink and miss if McCaughan weren’t writing some of the most sharply worded lyrics of his career.

Synth-driven grooves that feel communal and cosmic at the same time.

It all looks backward unabashedly--fitting for a band formed 30-plus years ago--but no less resonant.

Every twinkling ambient moment is remarkably humane.

The band is smart, then, to play to their strengths on Something to Tell You: experiments at small scale.

Derulo’s latest, Everything Is 4, proves he’s a workhorse, with possibly even (gulp) a vision.

They just want to rock you into peaceful submission, and they are successful about 70 percent of the time. [Dec 2002, p.135]

Medicine is a barrel of tailgating, beer-guzzling monkey bros; the band’s loosest and most dance-able record in a decade or more.

Holland swings far afield from folk and country on her third album, matching her hornlike voice to cool-jazz rhythms. [Jul 2006, p.84]

More hooks (and cowbell) make Smile the band's most accessible album, but Boris haven't softened. [May 2008, p.94]

Wonderfully unsentimental, beautifully tuneful.

That’s the beauty of Universalists: there’s no use trying to pin it down. What’s more, doing so discredits its core thesis: music is music, plain and simple. Gat manages to capture the ecstasy of his live performance, while expanding his production and experimental practice to a global, and—dare I say—universal palette.

Awesome the riffs may be, one might only want to hear them in small bursts lest they risk being worn out. Still, there’s enough variation to stave off sameness, and the band is smart enough to switch it up from track-to-track.

From yellowed headlines, nature-magazine clippings, marker scribblings, torn paper, even Kurt Cobain's visage, Antony extracts a poignancy that beautifully matches his music.

The album represents an impressive development upon what is already one of the most compelling sounds in rap.

Kelela proudly stands within the genre’s tradition. For the most part, she avoids making any grandstanding romantic or political statements, but Take Me Apart finds its purpose within the subdued complexities.

As addictive as ice-cream dots. [Jul 2006, p.88]

With so many legacy-artist posthumous sets, it’s hard to avoid a certain level of brain mush. The final stretches often feel like pointlessly processed outtakes of alternate takes of fake takes of imaginary takes. It’s like extracurricular archaeology, and it’s often not very fun. But even when you’re working up a sweat with your shovel, Funky Nothingness rewards the strain.

A distinctly contemporary album that is in conversation with trendy, critically acclaimed R&B.

The self-production here is a bit murky, maybe, and the drums and vocals have seen sharper days. But these dudes still turn sharp corners.

I Want to Grow Up involves aspirations rather than answers, and thus little is resolved of the album's many inner conflicts. Only the sweet-and-sour music they're set to offers any kind of relief, deep-fried in fuzz and totally stoked for that Juliana Hatfield Three reunion.

Peace Queer includes an acoustic antiwar rant and a ghostly reading of Creedence’s 'Fortunate Son' (with Patty Griffin on backup vocals). But the high point is a ragged bar-band jam about the dissolution of the middle-class dream ('Stuck on the Corner [Prelude to a Heart Attack]').

Its excellence and momentum vastly outweigh one’s ability to describe it.

It's a minor miracle that these Swedish vets' 24-song sixth album clocks in at 94 filler-free minutes, stuffed with late-'60s guitar romps ranging from slow-burn psychedelia to up-tempo struts, and more deliberate mood pieces.

As music alone, the band is looser and more flexible than ever, deploying Superchunk’s Jon Wurster for accents and subtleties outside of his main band’s dynamic range, and punching out the gate with highlights as varied as the Louisiana ragtime of “Southwestern Territory” and the punked-up “Choked Out.”

As you work your way through the new material, it becomes apparent rather quickly that Shabazz Palaces have elevated their jazz-damaged phrasing into a unique musical language. Butler, of course, responds to the music with idiosyncratic lyrics to match. ... Gangster Star leans towards a funkier, more upbeat mood.

Kicky enough for late-night drives, sultry enough for backseat prospecting, and versatile enough to sell anything, it may be the most user-friendly record of Underworld's career and a better follow-up to Play than Moby's own. [Oct 2002, p.120]

Like all of Four Tet’s work, New Energy can be viewed as an addition to this unlikely canon, whose practitioners share a desire to remove a listener from their surroundings and bring them someplace higher, no matter the means.

They demonstrate their impressive penchant for writing a variety of songs that stand on their own, but also work symbiotically. COVID-19 may have briefly put their ascendancy on hold, but with this EP, Mannequin Pussy show that they haven’t lost any of their luster.

This Montreal group's first full-length features a slightly brighter, looser sound than their wonderfully sludgy 2006 EP, perhaps due to the input of Justin Vernon (a.k.a. folkie marvel Bon Iver), who coproduced with the band.

Jealous Machines tends in a darker, more modernist direction. On Lese Majesty, Shabazz Palaces leaned towards the indulgent, with a scattershot track sequence that was heavy on under-developed ideas bordering on interludes. This time, Butler and Maraire tighten their focus even as they serve up twice as much music.

Lovers Rock is an airy album, demo-like in its simplicity. It has none of the agression of a "comeback." In fact, Sade has never put out anything quite so ephemeral. [Jan 2001, p.114]

It's rare to call anyone's 17th album urgent, but it feels like rocking fast and getting to the point never even 
occurred to Tom Waits before now.

Vibrates like youth itself.

Eno unleashes tempests of breakbeats ("Horse"), electro exotica ("Bone Jump"), even roiling post-rock ("2 Forms of Anger"), creating a perfect storm.

The upgrade is one of focus and intensity.

These are passive recollections that come off as quietly rebellious, because he plainly acknowledges the value of the black voice, as well as the weight of its silence.

What the album lacks in political incisiveness, it gains in the nuance of its twin perspectives. Having told the story of his country, slowthai is ready to tackle his own.

Yet with its detours into slick synth pop, weepy roots rock, and big Broadway music, the sprawling Genre proves that emo needn't be boxed in by stylistic dogma. [Dec 2007, p.120]

The efficiency of his drollness has grown uncanny, in fact, and the creepiness of its perfection is part of the fun.

Just about every song here has a couplet Elvis Costello would be proud to call his own, and the money shot "Elephant" has several.

That Converge can dabble in so many styles and still inherently come out sounding like themselves is what makes All We Love work.

A real corker. [Nov 2006, p.96]

That most welcome of albums: a great driving record that exquisitely soundtracks crushes and heartbreaks. [Feb 2007, p.89]

Infinity on High reveals a group that has grown so confident with success that the members are willing to give in to their every musical whim. [Feb 2007, p.83]

While the lyrics to 'On the Rise' never explicitly address the se-duction of addiction, the pretty drone that cuts through the jangly melody nails it exactly. [Aug 2007, p.104]

Despite the resourcefulness of Kronos’ contributions, though, Anderson is Landfall’s most crucial actor and its saving grace; the humility, naturalism, and humor of her recitations justify the scale of the project.

Touching on elemental fears and desires, Changing of the Seasons rewards intimate listening--in the final verse of the title track, a lover’s embrace suddenly silences any thoughts of straying.

[Corgan's] the closest thing our generation has to John Fogerty--a control freak who actually knows what the fuck he's doing. [March 2003, p.118]

Despite personnel changes, Here's the Tender Coming, the Unthanks' third LP, is still steeped in brutal Northumberland lore, and its doomed subjects (drowning sailors, child mine workers, a woman who dies on her wedding day) are well served by the band's dark, gentle strums and ghostly piano lines.

The first half of Blonde is astonishing, sustained beauty. The second is more distant, closer to the shower improvs of Friday’s sounds-like-a-soundtrack-and-it-is Endless.

Muttering Jon Langford, golden-toned Sally Timms, and the rest of this sweaty eight-strong mob are at their red-eyed best here. [Sep 2007, p.134]