Vernon's voice--delicately layered and yearning--gives standouts 'Skinny Love' and 'Flume' their stunningly direct emotional impact, but his sturdy folk cords, earthy melodies, and plainspoken, pastoral lyrics prevent the album from descending into self-pity. [Mar 2008, p.97]

The raw-throated, harmonically rich ballads transcend the occasionally schmaltzy production [June 2008, p.119]

This 53-year-old minor folk vet’s drawl doesn’t obscure his flow, making it all the easier to follow his tales in real-time, inhabiting a husband cleaning his deer rifle or the bent-backed Deaver who watched as “Uncle Sam took away the neighbors’ land.”

Rounding off the edges of its tried and true punk-rock grind with the melodic and rhythmic tropes of '60s psychedelia, Unwound has perfectly re-imagined a sound that most art-students wouldn't even spit on the first time around.

Plunge feel vibrant and more alive. There are crucial moments on the album where Dreijer slows things down a bit to let everything sink in. Even on the quieter moments, however, the mood of the album is deeply human.

At its best, Fleet Foxes is warm and cathartic, with all the hopefulness of a balmy summer night.

Her ability to transcend her influences has always been song-to-song, and that’s true here, too. But it also feels like she is inching closer to a breakthrough: an album that fully lives up to her reputation and ambition.

Somehow, these constant flourishes enhance, rather than obscure, the disc's plentiful catchy bits, giving Person Pitch a resonant, off-kilter charm. [Apr 2007, p.93]

Most producers who approach the mic do so at their peril, but on Dropout, West turns out to be a full-service hip-hop artiste.

Twenty years later, he returns with Upland Stories, and the prolific singer-songwriter has never sounded better.

Despite expert camping, the title track, lodged like a splinter at the beginning of the sequence, strikes as too reliant on wintry rue. But when three-note fuzz guitar blasts answer each lyric in “Lazarus,” or Bowie harmonizes with himself on the nonsense lyric of “Girl Loves Me,” it’s hard to resist 40 years’ worth of craft resulting in so intriguing a record.

Its stakes are a little lower, and he’s no longer revealing grand truths about life, but documenting once-dire realities from a rosier lens is still a worthwhile undertaking.

Like The Eternal and The Seer, m b v is a late-period return of the repressed, a middle-aged freak-out tempered by hard-won mastery.

It moves according to the oblique logic of the subconscious, entering your mind through the back door. A newfound attention to space has allowed Big Thief to expand their palette even as they’ve brought the volume down.

The anticipated follow-up to her Grammy-winning masterstroke, 2018’s By The Way, I Forgive You, is once again magnificent — a triumphant patchwork of Americana, folk-rock, pop and soul anchored by yet another show-stopping centerpiece in “Right on Time,” the album’s towering lead single.

The frequent Röyksopp collaborator has clearly learned a thing or two from the dance mavens, sprinkling Ten Love Songs with the mainstream-minded, four-on-the-floor thumping that should make American pop stars seethe with envy.

Her most adventurous album yet. ... On Mañana Será Bonito, the future looks bright for Colombia’s next pop queen.

It's still the best mix of fury and fluency since phony Beatlemania bit the dust. [Jan 2002, p.107]

A raging, ragged Behind The Music--15 coal-black odes to the casualties that art leaves behind and that life can't avoid. [Aug 2003, p.111]

At its core, Showtime is a classic sophomore album in the hip-hop sense: puffy with bluster, brimming with indignation. [Nov 2004, p.107]

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.

Feral intensity abounds. [Apr 2008, p.98]

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

Both sucks the air out of Dixie legend and revives it. [Sep 2004, p.122]

Feel Flows is an absolutely essential document that takes the first steps toward rewriting the story of a band that managed to persevere against overwhelming odds.

Central bulbs in the now-blinding chandelier of Philly indie-punk, Hop Along’s thrilling sophomore effort plays out like sonic arrhythmia.

Just as you've got Cold House pegged as a way-underground cousin to Kid A and Vespertine, another element comes in from far left-field: hip-hop. [Dec 2001, p.163]

While Essence was lyrically spare, World marks Williams' return to the painful sensuality of the specific. [May 2003, p.109]