A rewarding, resonant album, Neon Bible ranks among the best indie rock recordings of all time.

An energetic and original statement.... Essential.

A masterpiece, regardless of hype.

The album navigates effortlessly from peak to peak.

The group's masterpiece.

This music has the serene lilt of pop and the hope of sentimentality but also the gravity of unconventional responsibility. Rather than roaring, this music sears.

Skinner seems both edgier and more contemplative.

An impassioned, angry and devastating document.

Phenomenal, with nary a bum track.

This is The Coral at its best: tight and stimulating, earthy and radiant.

A second disc which recaps some of the prior singles and B-sides resonates wonderfully, and provides a contrast for the new material, which is the same only better, faster and harder.

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.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is worthy of the attention, as it reveals a band of great ability and confidence brimming with ideas.

The propensities for treacle and brimstone are cut by the realism of his portraits and the certitude in his voice. A Nick Drake-like wonder here, it is sonorous, even-keeled and assured.

The production is lush and detailed but the songs are strong enough to withstand all the fuss, making this a most ambitious and accomplished record.

You in Reverse is a tremendous record -- engaging, enveloping, engrossing.

It's like everything that has always been great about the Red House Painters made a notch or two more exciting in the studio.

The album is ingeniously constructed; many of the songs play off each other while seeming off the cuff and loose-limbed.

A stunning return to form.

[A] blindingly good debut.

While at times the album becomes so lightheaded it threatens to evaporate into nothingness, it is yet another dazzling achievement for the band.

The songs on In Exile Deo are her strongest yet.

An album’s worth of excellent songs performed with gusto.

A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure is many things: inevitable, insane and their finest album.

What may be the most confident and cohesive Silver Jews album yet is shot through with urgency and gravitas, but tempered, of course, with liberal doses of dark humor.

A magnificent, epic take on American history and mythology.

Throughout, the joyfulness and invention, a marvel of pop craft, make Here We Stand hit the spot.

Cathartic and essential.

The instrumental "Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners" showcases Grohl's acoustic guitar chops, while the piano-driven "Home" provides a lovely ending to an excellent album.

When the music is fully operational... the potential for greatness is obvious.

The band's audible confidence in its music gives it the ability to negotiate sudden shifts of tempo, volume, distortion and tone without fussiness or confusion, demonstrating what Franz Ferdinand might sound like if the Scots were a little less together.

Perfectly arranged and one of the best of 2004, it's an ideal starting point for newcomers.

Bloc Party may not have arrived first in the retro-'80’s sweepstakes, but this great album stakes their belated claim to it.

Mostly acoustic, with flecks of jaunty snares and loping bass work, his singing is the best so far -- confessional, inspired and bracingly touching.

Stevens' most personal and focused album.

Antony and the talented Johnsons brilliantly evoke the grandeur and dolor of cocktail hour ennui.

The Robinsons remain a fascinating couple on Get Yr Blood Sucked Out, burning through more inspiration and ideas in one album than any band has a right to.

The gap between expectations and delivery, the contrast of emotions that go into real life as opposed to pop fantasy, makes this brief but satisfying album a pointed delight.

MGMT's first long-player may have included catchier singles, but Congratulations is the better album, trading Oracular's deceptive superficiality for psychedelic grandeur. Of course, like all psychedelic things, that grandeur is pretty deceptive, too.

Favourite Worst Nightmare is a surprisingly significant improvement on an excellent debut.

More than any rock album in recent memory... this is a producer's creation.

It's hard to imagine any other band with as much indie cred that could succeed with this material; it would be too audacious.

A calm triumph.

Garza’s assault on the skins, much tighter than any Bonham comparisons could possibly describe, gives the album much of its strength and character. The rest can be attributed to creative, post-modern lyrics.

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

Feist offers diversity and charm.

A strong batch of Dylanesque songs.

The album glistens with supple melodies, chameleon-like stances towards the history of rock and orderly, accomplished instrumental prowess.

Although the record shows scant evidence that over a decade of rock music has passed, the band doesn't sound anachronistic or out of touch alongside its younger competition.

In Rainbows is a richly textured and resonant record. In a career marked by dramatic reinvention, Radiohead’s latest phase — growing old gracefully--is going quite well.

Producer David Bottrill (King Crimson, Tool, Muse) gives Battle for the Sun a lean, sharp sound, stripping away a lot of the synthetic weight that bulked up the group's last few albums.

Architecture in Helsinki's penchant for simple, driven melodies and gentle, nurturing jam sessions underscore one essential truth about this type of glossy, polyrhythmic music: the thin, bittersweet textures are always anchored to a syncopated bass line.

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

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

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

Dylanesque is a winner, succeeding both for its incongruity and its sympathy.

Cave has hinted at a more mature sound on the last few records; here, it comes across in richer, bolder arrangements, the result of his band's more active role in developing the songs.

A deeply moving record that is greater than the sum of its individual songs, The Libertines achieves near-tragic grandeur.

Brimming with confidence and good humor, Don’t Do Anything is another high point in a career that threatens to become overstuffed with them.

The only complaint to be lodged against Bachelor No. 2, other than its partially duplicated track listing, is the mid-tempo groove from which Mann rarely extricates herself.

Leo's singing (showing a few traces of a soul side) has never been more confident or convincing.

Every song is compelling.

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

A prototypical Damien Jurado album, this is a quietly excellent, straightforward collection of songs performed without much muss or fuss but with great empathy and feeling.

Still quietly bombastic and still occasionally in search of an author, the spacey, haunted music bounces from the ethereal to the grounded dirt that our shoes kick away on imagined dance floors.

Cedars is a keeper.

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

While not as edgy as The Process of Belief, it is more complex and better produced.

Some of the songs are immediately engrossing... Others mostly carry the story forward while allowing Mann to indulge her career-long taste for vintage keyboard orchestration, coolly elegant pop arrangements and displays of tart wordplay.

More of an expansion than a breakthrough.

By the end of this brief guilty pleasure, the verdict rings clear: The Killers may have made better singles, but The Bravery made the better album.

A shambolic, blues-based record that will repel purists of the 12-bar form but delight anyone who brings a six-pack and a cockeyed sense of humor to the party.

The imperfections in Farrar's singing can be distracting at times, but the implacable force of his delivery trumps wobbly pitch every time.

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

Noel provides the best songs on Dig Out Your Soul, although his bandmates certainly can’t be accused of slacking in their efforts. The problem with this one is that it’s front-loaded with Noel’s songs, which makes the proceedings start to drag a bit.

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.

The slower numbers (“Ha Ha High Babe,” “Shade of Blue”) rely less on showy atmosphere and more on loose guitar accents, which makes the whole affair earthier, rawer, more real.

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

Clicks in all the places his failures did not.

Rise to Your Knees doesn't sound exactly like either previous incarnation. Those expecting a return to form will find this one decidedly mellow.

Positive energy and enthusiasm go a long way here.

The Best Little Secrets Are Kept is a blast, from the past and otherwise.

This mainstream update to the unvarnished directness of Sweet Old World starts slow and flirts with blandness but sparks to life about halfway through.

A dandy little 36-minute album of simple pop tunes with all the right moves and no real motion.

Introduces a delectable bit of shoegazery energy and distortion to sharpen up the lulling Ivy groove.

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

Parts of the album feel overly familiar, but it’s good to have the band back in circulation.

The expansive palette of the debut has been shorn of its tumult and restlessness.

Some of the bridges still get hazy, and a few songs sound like each other, but for the most part, the guitars revel in their unleashed electricity and the rhythms are layered, propulsive and paradoxically so anchored they seem free.

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.

This song cycle is less about a particular state than it is about Stevens' elegant façade of cleverness.

While nothing here fails the consistent artistry of his work, neither does any of it make the direct connection to a soul and heart.

Weezer (red album), co-produced by Rick Rubin and Jacknife Lee (who has worked in the studio with Snow Patrol and R.E.M. and was a guitarist in Compulsion), is slight and flimsy (10 songs, 42 minutes), but finally returns the band to its peak entertainment level.

If this collection weren't intended as a nearly comprehensive catch-all, it could have benefited from being pared down to two discs. Nevertheless, it offers a convincing alternative overview of Cave's work, covering all the stylistic points and diversions on his epic journey.

The songs are catchy and listenable, but Samson's lyrics lack the depth of songs like 'Benediction' or 'A New Name for Everything' on its predecessor.

Has muddied sound in spots but careful, detailed and varied playing.

Takk... resembles the movie The Aristocrats: a narrow selection of material given killer performances.

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.