This is no passive listen -- it is Trace rendered impressionistically -- but it has many rewards among difficult and unsettling stretches.

The songs left over from the original, non-Matrix album form the emotional core of Liz Phair and make it worth hearing.

Hawley emerges as a fine manipulator of studio-driven baroque pop.

Black Cherry strips away almost all of the film score drama of Felt Mountain. This would be a bigger disappointment than it is if the album's dance-oriented, neo-new wave were less successful than it is.

If Hayes had let her disparate styles duke it out a little more, some of the material that tends to run together might have been thrown into sharper relief and become more memorable for it.

Beyond the musical unevenness of an album whose finer qualities interleave those mounting miscalculations, a rising suspicion that misery is of more comfort to her than happiness makes the tenor of Williams' songs increasingly hard to bear.

A masterpiece, regardless of hype.

A little blood and dirt and humor might have catapulted this album into greatness.

Where Shall You Take Me? brings Jurado back to familiar, minimalist territory.

Emphasizing colorful vocals over the average playing benefits the band enormously.

Jaunty, rambunctious, and youthful.

The impact is inconsistent but stronger.

Teems with all the life that the band omitted from Oui.

The group's masterpiece.

A magnificent, epic take on American history and mythology.

[A] blindingly good debut.

Wildly experimental and unique, Melody A.M. belongs in the collections of fans of lush keyboard instrumentation, '70s soul, new age and Boards of Canada-style strangeness alike.

[The opening] quartet of tunes blows the band's wad, leaving the rest of the album scattered with only moderately cool mid- tempo metal, all of it delivered with gusto but not enough serious hooks to make anything stand out.

The sound is fuller, the arrangements more complex; most importantly, the songs are just a whole lot better [than Parachutes'].

The songs are not as strong overall as on her previous albums, and the tempo neither flags nor picks up over the course of the album.

An exciting mix of audacious punk rock stammering held together by such disparate art-rock nomenclature and tendencies as vocal transmutation, discordant climaxes and ironic herky-jerky rhythms.

Positive energy and enthusiasm go a long way here.

To their vast credit, even if the songs resemble a greatest hits package of indie rock, each guitar break, each bridge comes alive with experimental toughness.

A strong batch of Dylanesque songs.

More time spent in the songwriting lab might have yielded material more suitable to the evident studio effort invested and brought Wilco closer to making a truly great album.

While hardly bad... the album too often sounds as if the ceaseless invention that made Nixon so vibrant has been replaced by self-consciousness of the wrong sort.

Whereas Music Has the Right to Children's pastoral atmospherics were airy and open, Geogaddi is faintly claustrophobic and tense.

The three- guitarist approach brings back the spark and rush of their 1988-'94 peak.