That pairing of punk force and country grit is nothing new, but Lydia Loveless makes it her own through the strength of a blazing voice, a fully formed persona, and bluntly crafty songwriting.

Parquet Courts' over-the-top energy, speed, and succinctness makes the combination sound fresher than anything the original elements have managed in years.

Luaka Bop has done a remarkable job of collecting recordings that were originally scattered across multiple releases and giving them the feeling of a consistent whole.

Old Ramon is sinuous and unhurried, a beautiful downer of a folk rock record that has the lithe and shadowy promise of the ocean.

One of the best psych-rock records of our young century. [Sep 2004, p.117]

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

Her fifth album is indeed one of the most alt-friendly jazz cycles you’ve ever heard, pivoting constantly on tight, proggy arrangements that evoke St. Vincent, tUnE-yArDs, and Incubus in their odd-angled crunch more than anything on Blue Note.

Ghostface Killah's ninth album consoles his hardcore constituency: Forty-plus minutes of gritty, soul-sampling beats soundtracking bizarro street tales ("Starkology," "Ghetto"), with lyrical tough-guys Busta Rhymes, Redman, and more than half the Wu Tang Clan tagging along.

What keeps Murphy from being an insufferable know-it-all is how he folds deeper emotions into his references....Older, snottier, his edge remains.

Besides restoring the muscle lacking on the emaciated An Object, the opening trio on Snares presents No Age as everything they’ve been (gritty, propulsive, atmospheric, a motorcycle taking on a sandstorm head-on) and the immediately accessible rawk band they’ve never been.

Monumentally caustic but hypothetically a dance band, Sleigh Bells sculpt infectious double-dutch funk from an unlikely acid bath of distorted drum machines and nasal pigfuck guitars.

What could have been an assless art-groove experiment turns out to be a synth-pop idyll. [Feb 2003, p.99]

After ten years, Rancid's still-rock-solid kinship is evident in their lock-step chemistry. [Oct 2003, p.108]

Beam has given us his second straight masterwork: self-assured, spellbinding, and richly, refreshingly adult. [Apr 2004, p.89]

A collaboration that alternates from alienation and sadness to melodic tenderness, punkish rap bravado, and triumph in 23 minutes. It’s both embarrassing and gripping: never boring and often euphoric. ... It makes for a perfect version of a Kid Cudi album, with Cudi taking center stage under the guiding hand of Kanye’s stellar production.

Poised, cool, and impermeable, Trouble Will Find Me apotheosizes urban romance and its discontents, where conversations are monologues, parties are confessionals, and education and analysis are interchangeable.

Full Circle is like an afternoon on the front porch listening to Lynn tell you her life story, a trajectory with an impact that no single disc could ever fully sum up.

The ten songs that make up the surprise new Mr. Misunderstood are a step back from the arena-scaled grandeur Church has been trading in for the past several years. Many of the songs feel like scaled-down counterparts to some of the best tracks on The Outsiders.

It's Dillinger's willingness to constantly incorporate new sounds--even commercial ones-- that makes Ire Works an experimental-rock touchstone. [Dec 2007, p.126]

For an artist never exactly afraid of taking risks, Dust still finds new forms of experimentation, moving beyond dance toward something softer and more reflective. Halo juggles new elements with gorgeous sparseness that gives weight to each sonic addition.

Pinegrove could have ridden a self-assured record like this to widespread indie acclaim. Instead, it feels like an act of generosity, a record lovingly crafted and intimately written, full of sounds, observations, and emotional realizations that you didn’t know you wanted in 2016, but, in fact, needed desperately.

No Shape is Hadreas’ longest album yet, and even moreso than its predecessor, it feels like a complete conceptual project. Taken as a whole, it’s a real thicket, imbued with the innocence and horror of fairy tale.

Ultimately, what makes Excavation such an awesome and absorbing listen is precisely its indifference to the listener.

His deceptively fragile vocal style and skewed lyrical genius were already evident at age 22 in these 13 acoustic songs recorded over two nights at a Michigan Episcopal church.

Even more dense and brutal than Burma's early records. [Jun 2004, p.103]

Last year's Merriweather Post Pavilion, SPIN's 2009 Album of the Year, forwent such formlessness, but the haze returns on this five-track EP. Fortunately, Merriweather's hummable, techno-indebted delirium also returns.

Fiction is less nervous than its predecessors but emotionally knottier. [May 2005, p.103]

AC are all about the sometimes blissful, often uncanny intermingling of song and space. [Nov 2005, p.98]