There's not a groan-worthy song on this standout rock/pop/folk/blues album.

Here he shows more quirky imagination and inventive musicianship than on any of his earlier efforts.

On their third album, a major-label debut with one of rock's great titles, the trio wears a newly polished sound proudly, while not coming close to straddling the sell-out ledge.

It's what Sigur Ros might sound like if they came from Arizona, and it's truly excellent.

Hersh has also masterfully tamed her potent vocal quirks here, using them to tease one moment and hypnotize the next.

Ozomatli serve up a rhythmically seething musical mélange that serves as virtual mirror to the dizzying cultural contradictions at the heart of their Los Angeles hometown.

Oral Fixation Vol. 2 finds Shakira reclaiming some of the bite she showcased on 1998's smashing Donde Estan Los Ladrones?

The band socks away the adventurous experimentation that dogged some of its most recent records to investigate a post-September 11, war-ravaged world overflowing with urgency and significance.

A tight disc that skitters from track to shiny track with imagination and a renewed sense of rap's widened boundaries.

His most consistently compelling release in decades.

Hersh has made great personal strides since branching off on her own.

Most songs keep well away from a standard verse-chorus structure, with lyric and instrumental passages stitched together like some indie rock Frankenstein, but Minus the Bear keeps the melodies potent and the emotion high enough to prevent Planet of Ice from drifting into impenetrable shoe-gazer territory.

His performance throughout is solidly heartfelt.

The limitations of Lanois’s vocals lend an engaging frailty, leavened with bleak, lonely, instrumental interludes.

Her sing-songy tunes are honest and earthy, her diction intense and mannered but never pretentious.

Her third album continues her clear-minded, open-hearted lyricism, though with a ripeness that comes from years on the road and years more to reflect.

This destined-to-be-classic release will please a wide variety of his fans.

At once new and old, familiar and fresh.

He sounds rushed, like he doesn't have time for too much tinkering. This is a good thing.

An arrestingly epic and assured debut. [Amazon UK review]

As intoxicating as a Brazilian breeze and ironic as a David Lynch night in L.A., the Los Angeles duo the Bird and the Bee make a soothingly hip, deliriously cool blend of pop.

Few bands in bluegrass can match the virtuosity of Union Station's interplay, but the artistry of Alison Krauss transcends genre.

It’s just a shame that the lack of soul in his rotating rap deliveries tends to undermine his masterful storytelling capabilities.

Worthy of more than novelty status.

Intelligent, interesting, honest, diverse and ever so slightly screwed up--what more could you want from a rock 'n' roll record? [Amazon UK review]

Once J.A.C. is in your player, it may be awhile before you take it out.

While the trio hasn't managed to outshine their spectacular debut, Hello Love is a CD filled with cross-generational charm and musical riches.

Credit producer Brendan O'Brien for the wall of sound that backs 'Girls in Their Summer Clothes,' which sets the atmosphere for one of the great vocal performances by Springsteen.

Even with its share of jangle-pop gems, the disc also offers a few bland strummers that never quite take off.

Dark, dusty, and ever bittersweet, Burnett's musical archaeology here is something considerably more than merely "O Brother Redux."

Live at the Fillmore showcases her raw wound of a voice and the rough edges of her band in all their unvarnished glory, as the music cuts across conventional categories of country, blues, folk, rock (and rap) to strike a distinctly personal chord.

Little here finds McGraw in a feel-good mode.

By mixing sweet with sour, E's warm and fuzzy mope rock sounds great whether it's blasting out of a convertible on a sunny day or playing in the background on a rainy night.

Sure, Get Rich could never have lived up to the hype, it’s nowhere near Biggie's Ready to Die or Nas's Illmatic, but there's no fast-forward material here, a near miracle in these times.

For all of the music's surface catchiness, the writing is some of Moorer's deepest to date.

The Else, another collection that ranks with any in their memorable discography.

A return to their former glory days, Snakes and Arrows shows this seminal prog rock band reclaiming some of the sonic territory that they'd lost over the past few years.

More D12 than 50 Cent in terms of quality, Cheers should have been way more than simply the sum of its notable parts.

The Pixies' alter ego alludes to Brood either candidly or implicitly in all 11 songs, veering far from the Nashville-and-Memphis tones of the last two Black albums for a return trip to his raucous roots.

Over the course of the album, too much of the midtempo material sounds too much the same, more inspired lyrically than musically, failing to sustain the momentum of the opening tracks.

Some of their best work in nearly two decades.

It's certainly the group's most cohesive album in ages.

The album is a showcase for Cash's trenchant, soul-baring songs about love and mortality.

Whether Finding Forever surpasses "Be" is a matter of individual, song-for-song taste: At worst, it's on par--a laudable accomplishment for a veteran now 15 years into his career.

As a player, his bold, midrange-heavy tone complements his most nuanced vocal performances.

You'd buy this album for the same reason you buy Robyn Hitchcock, for the observations, sardonic-ism, and sarcasm--not to mention Eef's singular, strained voice.

Nocturama feel[s] messy, unpredictable, and even a little dangerous--qualities Cave's music hasn't had in far too long.

Reverberate[s] with the wistfulness and introspection that have forever been his trademark.

Slideling is McCulloch's best solo offering by a distance.

Seven's Travels features some of Ant's most adventurous and assured production.

It's this lumpy consistency that ultimately lets them down, but this is a laudable effort from a band on a decade-long roll. [Amazon UK]

A fabulous collection of delirious, dizzy alt-pop.

Nearly thirty years after her debut with the Banshees, Siouxsie can still sneer and storm as fiercely as ever.

Say what you will about influences on sleeves, this is pop music at its best: nostalgic and angst-ridden, but ultimately life-affirming. Shout Out Louds have found a winning formula.

[A] provocative, if slightly uneven, album full of quirky lyrics and some irresistible melodies.

It doesn't even matter much that he's a B minus rhyme spitter, or that he spends way too much studio time name dropping.

The group has balanced its studio ambition with just the right amount of real world restraint, coming up with a disc that actually improves on the first while maintaining the trio's wry quirks.

Keyshia Cole proves for a second time--for sure and way beyond the shadow of a doubt--that she's headed for Mary J. Blige-style hugeness.

Although not quite as towering an achievement as 2002's Grammy-nominated Walking with Thee, Visitations keeps Clinic at the tip of modern popular music's shrinking creative vanguard.

His most straightforward country music to date.

[Dulli] treats them all with the same ravenous intensity.

It’s an unpredictably bipolar record with plenty of mood swings and emotional shifts that will ultimately leave listeners with feelings of euphoria.

The singer's gentle vocals and Spanish-meets-classical guitar style make a quietly compelling match, especially so on his sophomore CD In Our Nature, easily the best work--either as a solo or contributing vocalist--that he has released to date.

Some of the dreamiest pop to emerge on the U.S. side of the pond in recent years.

On first listen, Taking the Long Way seems too somber--in need of a bit of levity and more than a couple of uptempo songs (like the sexy, '60s-flavored "I Like It") to resonate for the long haul. It also seems to lack the writing quality that Darrell Scott, Patty Griffin, and Bruce Robison brought to Home. But on repeated plays, those concerns dissipate.

The Purple One has reconnected with that deep vein of funk after experimenting with his splendid and messy excesses since the cusp of the nineties, and turned out his best album since 1987's "Sign of the Times."

While the raw, raging blues of 'Red Is the Color' ranks with Earle's most powerful music, 'Satellite Radio' could well be the slightest (as well as perhaps a plug for Earle's own radio show), but the artist's willingness to take chances attests to a restless creativity that refuses to be corralled.

Features the kind of envelope-pushing fans have come to expect.

For a group with one of the most unmemorable band names ever, it's funny that it's their way with words that elevates them from wannabe status.

The nine tracks run a tad samey-same, but that's at least part of their charm. They and assert Boeckner anew as a prescient, skeptical voice, coarsely toned and draped in machine-sounding music even as he inveighs against the post-modern world--technology and urban living and traffic and so on.

Disciplined, varied, and often mind-blowing playing.

Another Day on Earth is a more personal album from the ambient avatar, a recording of rare and meticulous maturity.

As unlikely as the collaboration [with Tim Armstrong] looked on paper, it works perfectly because the Pennsylvania native has always brandished a punk sneer beneath the corsets, gaudy hair color, and naughty girl demeanor.

Get past the more pedestrian fare like "Yes/No" and "Return of the Berserker," and the full scope of the Futureheads' ambition reveals itself, particularly in the poppiest track, "Skip To The End."

Carpenter reestablishes herself not only as a world-class poet, but as an artist of the first order.

Brazilian Girls maintain the same kinetic thrust and hook-laden melodies as before, but they've turned up the rhythmic aggression and electronic squelch to 11.

Imagine the Long Winters if they were far more in love with the synth and guitar textures of the '80s than the precious pop sounds of the '70s and you'd have this, a hard to pigeonhole album which greatly rewards multiple listens.

Ten years later, they've regrouped with Norton for a disc that's more sophisticated and diverse, if a tad less rockin'.

A moving, eloquent gift to Jackson's entire audience.

Seldom do you get to see an artist exorcise her pain in public with such poise and fearlessness.

As with all great country music, exquisite execution, splendid sound, and depth of feeling combine to create a cathartic, redemptive result.

His limber voice and way with a lyric serve him well.

It’s hard to remember that he once wrote well-crafted ballads of romantic infatuation.

Elements of rock, folk, and blues pervade, and producer George Drakoulias (Black Crowes, the Jayhawks) stays out of the way, allowing Merritt’s voice to embody the songs, all 11 of which flow from start to finish, uninterrupted and primed for full-on stardom.

There's an undeniable, infectious energy at work here which is put to great use with the self-deprecating humor and immense pop chops.

Another Public Enemy album is always good news for hip-hop fans, and How You Sell... carries the torch.

For the most part though, One Step Forward is more self assured and richly textured, nicely refining a winning formula that will no doubt enchant the many fans of its predecessor.

Less immediately ear-grabbing than the previous disc, this self-titled record nonetheless sinks in deeply after a mere handful of plays.

As with the band's other releases, the music inspires clear feelings of love and hate.

There's something here for everyone, to be sure--but closer to Ween's antic hearts, something to annoy everyone as well.

The black-clad New York quartet still sounds inflexibly menacing, grasping tighter than ever to its doomy post-punk influences and delving further into frontman Paul Banks's emotional unrest.

He's an expert at creating mesmerizing, sophisticated pop.

It's as if they peeled away a layer or two in order to reveal more of the pop band beneath the off-kilter country-rock trappings.

In a sea of pretenders, the Kills are capable of providing some genuine competition for the White Stripes.

His richest and most consistently satisfying release since the late '80s.

Free to Stay is loaded with complex harmonies and awesome distorted keyboard sounds (hey, this is what Quasi were supposed to sound like!).

Most of Light at the End of the World works within the familiar confines of the vintage Erasure formula, drunk on everyman synthesizers, listing through painfully vague and obvious rhymes.

Where this translates, then, is with those willing to man up and embrace what makes Pink Pink: her spellbinding ability to render rebelliousness in all the many colors of the rainbow.