It’s an incredible album strewn with highlights obvious and sneaky, the rare debut that holds up the weight of its backstory, with the added brassiness of assuring us that’s just him on the regular. Now we know.

R.A.P. Music, the sixth album by from Atlanta firebrand Killer Mike, is a stunning anachronism.

A collaborative winner delightfully devoid of ego or pretense. Here, each voice works to create something greater than the sum of its parts, which is rare for supergroups.

Sung with warmth, these tracks offer a welcome antidote to her more familiar performance mode--spectacular austerity. They're as bloody and forceful as the battles Harvey references.

As a body of songs, Lemonade presents Bey at her most skilled and fully matriculated as a pop studio maven and conductor of the present’s preferred orchestral mode: creative file-sharing. ... Lemonade the album, however, is out to sonorously suck you into its gully gravitational orbit the old fashioned way, placing the burden of conjuration on its steamy witches’ brew of beats, melodies, and heavy-hearted-to-merry-pranksterish vocal seductions.

Vol. II may lack the celebratory tone of its instantly gripping predecessor, but this trip through Guthrie's more tormented thoughts finds Bragg and Wilco yet again forging gold with their musical alchemy.

Mostly, it's the wilting pedal steel, warm analog tubes, and lush heartbreak flourishes of "When I'm Gone" that distinguish Rose from the merchants of new country's jingles.

It sounds awesome. [Jul 2007, p.102]

Accelerate will be rightfully championed as the defibrillator that shocked a once-great band back to its senses.

With Tomorrow's Harvest, the Sandisons' return feels natural. Rather than resort to hiring disco session musicians or citing Judith Butler to add a new kink to their sound, they've done something even rarer in the modern era: They’ve aged with grace.

The wonder of 22, A Million is how beautifully he melds the disparate forms--inside and outside, acoustic and digital, past and future, ground level and interstellar. It’s a stunning record, well worth the wait.

No Cities to Love spends much of its running time reminding us not what Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss can do but what other configurations of players can't.

Though they've traded some of the unhinged thrash of 2002's Black City for keyboardy atmosphere, the band's Goteborg gloom can't hide the hooks. [Jun 2004, p.108]

Darnielle's written some of the toughest and most open-souled music of his lo-fi outlet's oft-brilliant history. [May 2005, p.110]

Gleefully impurist and highly addictive. [Sep 2004, p.122]

Here they fe-fi-fo-fum with the exacting crankiness of carny punks who've seen it all. [Mar 2006, p.95]

Eventually it hits you just how godlike catchy these banalities are. [Aug 2005, p.103]

The rubbed-rawness of Uh Huh Her might seem like backpedaling. But the best tracks use the pleasure principles of Stories to update her old approach. [Jun 2004, p.101]

[They] continue to play it sweet and low: hot-cocoa keyboards, heart-monitor beats, glossy high-end string arrangements--and actual songs, as it happens. [Apr 2004, p.94]

Varied and vulnerable. [Jun 2003, p.109]

Almost lives up to the hype. [Mar 2005, p.92]

Emo kids, hold your heads: An Eminem you can call your own is on line one. [Apr 2003, p.107]

In shifting the lyrical focus away from one songwriter’s experience—exemplified by the previous hyper-emotional adrenaline rushes of “Drunk II” and “In Love Again”—some of the lovelorn charisma that made Mannequin Pussy so special has been lost. Nonetheless, the record’s disparate strands mostly hold together, a formidable document of their fire and fury—and one that’s needed more than ever.

It's no mere gimmick. [Oct 2004, p.111]

This transcendent debut is the real stoner rock. [Aug 2005, p.103]

It's the album on which the Chems relax into a comfortable maturity, secure in their status as elder statesmen. [Feb 2005, p.87]

It's such a confident display that you barely notice the English-as-a-second-language lyrics. [Nov 2003, p.117]

The grimy, blues-black nuggets [PJ Harvey] pounds into armor for Faithfull are song-for-song stronger than Harvey's own 2004 album, Uh Huh Her.... But Cave's songs are a little too pitch-perfect. [Jan 2005, p.96]