He may not be the first to mix the bucolic with the mechanic, and God knows he won’t be the last, but here all the symptoms of overexposure sink under the unassuming grace of his gifts.

The debut album was good, but this is better. Much, much better; the kind of record I will happily and willingly return to long after this review is dead and buried.

Color me unimpressed.

Wainwright exhibits a rare talent as a confessional singer/songwriter; her album is an impressive, not to mention emotive, first LP from an ambitious artist unwilling to cling to her family’s famous coattails.

As an album, WIW seems to have sprung fully-formed from a single night’s restlessness; often more organic than much of his debut, but still with a steady electro-backed pulse, its pacing and sequencing flow like water beneath a frozen creek, barely seen and mostly imagined.

It's an album that has far more potential for emotional resonance than musical discovery. The arrangements contain few surprises, and the handful of simple acoustic performances quietly outshine the more elaborate productions.

[Levi] has an impeccable ear for a hook and packs his album full of them.

Luckily, his affable spunk grounds much of the exploration, yet, at some point, the line between circumstance and good songwriting becomes suspiciously blurred.

Street’s Disciple reveals Nas at a new peak, finally comfortable in the post-millennial hip-hop world.

The Wedding has some slow tracks, but they’re greatly outnumbered by winners that leap over a baffling range of musical styles.

A little bit of kitsch is important... Begin to Hope has enough of it to stand out, and enough ethics to keep the whole thing grounded.

A terrific and thoroughly enjoyable effort.

The Greatest isn’t perfect, but its stumbles are neither intrusive nor damning.

Over the course of eleven songs of grim predestination, virtually no modernizing or even identifying signposts are allowed to disturb the terrain.

PROG, like all their recordings, is another collection of professionally played and well-produced tunes that present themselves to a potential mass audience with hectic grace, sober whimsy, fluent navigation of chaos and without the slightest shred of pomposity.

Too exciting for the underground (maybe), too weird for the overground (hopefully not), he deserves to be heard by both.

What remains is a sometimes cold, sometimes confusing collection of epics that are more intricate than anything GYBE have ever created.

The record is very innocent on the surface, but it’s in the lyrics (again) of Alun Woodward and Emma Pollack that make it cold and dark, even though their vocals seem to make it all sound safe.

Newman has created a record bearing all the traits that make him such an engaging musical personality in the first place: elliptical wordplay, unusual delivery, and obscenely catchy songs.

Building on his unassuming alternative icon status, this great debut (under his own name) is sure to bring him that bit nearer to the awareness of the mainstream.

This is more like their "Give ‘em Enough Rope," a perfectly fine extension of that first energy burst, one that deserved to be milked a bit.

The Libertines don’t even try for a good album; they sound like four blokes lucky to be jamming in the same room again, and their joy in each other’s company redeems the enterprise.

It's tightly focused, beautifully written, and totally without filler.

And though the album sags a little towards the end, with a few shorter instrumental numbers, it’s still an invigorating journey, a caravan of cavorting musicians, careening through the countryside, stopping only to play festivals and funerals.

13&God represents less a marriage of rock and rap than it does a meeting of weird with slightly-less-weird.

One of the biggest surprises of the year.

The pared-down moments of The Con seem to long for the clusterfuckedness of the album’s meatier tracks, and for the most part, rightly so.

Citrus is an outstanding record because it doesn't fixate on what makes great shoegazer music but what makes great pop music.