Überzone's constant changeups in style and tempo breathe fresh life into a stale genre.

Can Our Love... is a minimalistic jewel, a soul wonder and an anomaly in a pop world.

Make no mistake about it, The White Stripes are the real deal, and if they can continue to kick out the jams as they do on White Blood Cells, everyone else would be well advised to get the fuck out of their way.

Remove "Girls" and "Wonder Woman" from Blowback and you'd have a solid album.

Few electronic artists working today have the balls or the skills to pull off an album as unconventional and uncompromising as Go Plastic...

Other than the last three songs, Everybody Wants to Know is an album you should know about.

I so want to hate this album.... If only the album flat-out sucked, I'd be on much firmer ground. Too bad it doesn't.

Double Figure is as instantly memorable, not to mention listenable an IDM record as you are likely to hear this year.

It is, like all the best pop music, silly, pointless and thoroughly lacking in high-level intellectual discourse. Thank heaven.

The danger that Ladybug Transistor faces in working within this retro-country-folk-pop oeuvre -- above and beyond the fact that most people are conditioned not to listen to it -- is that it's difficult to rise above the level of pastiche.

Devoid of Tanaka's usual unpredictability, Beautiful is bland, linear and frequently downright dull, with entirely too many six, seven and eight-minute songs running out of ideas long before the halfway mark.

It's blink-and-you’ll-miss-it running time and rather hefty price tag are the album’s only real drawbacks, proving that even after five years away, these kids can still write tunes that get stuck in your head for days.

Not content to rely on the same old drum machine patterns and tired beats, TRR and I-Sound have concocted a vast sonic brew that blends elements of hip-hop, jazz and techno into a seriously stinging cocktail.

The downside here will be fairly obvious to anyone familiar with Thirlwell's previous output. While Flow's integration of big band jazz and other "external" musical styles is some of Thirlwell's most accomplished work to date -- creditable not only to better technology, but to the growth of his already respectable skills as a conventional composer -- its thematic elements remain the same.

After you've listened to Rock Action for the first time, you may be hard pressed to believe that Mogwai merely wrote these songs; you'll feel as if they created these symphonies out of thin air, pulling gorgeous sounds from within the deepest recesses of the human soul. Eventually you'll come back down to earth and realize that Rock Action is by no means divine...but it is very, very good.

According to the liner notes, Dilate took more than two years to record, beating the twenty-month-plus gestation period for 1999's Set and Setting. Fortunately, it works in our favor; they've used the time to experiment a bit, perhaps in an effort to garner fans beyond the nascent (but artistically stagnant) stoner rock genre.

Aside from being tracked incorrectly (on my copy anyway) and not always being of the choicest sound quality, Sad Sappy Sucker shows that Modest Mouse’s rise to the pinnacle of indiedom started at the bottom, just like everybody else.

It's also pleasing to see that Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner want to expand their sound beyond the clicks, pops, squelches, hisses and squiggles that have become their trademark.

With a musical attack this meticulous and charged, I know I'd enjoy The Ex even if I was their target...

A powerful masterpiece of an album.

Full of solid songwriting and catchy melodies that do not pander to the cliches so often found in mainstream pop/rock albums.

Even though Lemonjelly.ky's cover looks like something straight out of Wavy Gravy’s closet, its sound owes much more to the work of '60s luminaries like John Barry, Esquivel and Jean-Jacques Perrey.

But as wonderful as parts of Old Ramon are, the spaces between the high points are at times, less than impressive.

No More Shall We Part is a beautiful, elegant record, capably fulfilling the promise of The Boatman's Call, but it exacts a harrowing toll from the listener. This is not a record to which you can listen lightly; if used as background music it will gradually darken your mood, like poison seeping slowly into a well.

The group has created an album filled not only with the timeless pop hooks you have come to expect but with the anthemic swagger that is the hallmark of many of the great rock recordings of the last 30 years.

The low points are easier to spot than the highs, which tend to peak at a low elevation.

On The Facts of Life, [Luke] Haines and musical co-conspirator cum multi-instrumentalist John Moore construct a vast sonic wonderland in which [Sarah] Nixey’s starry-eyed vocals are given free reign.

Most [tracks] work quite well with the multifaceted rhythms and constantly evolving beats that make each of the tracks here a true expression of creativity.