Joyous and limber. [Mar 2007, p.136]

This is 21st-century lounge with a Manson heart — music for unwinding, or maybe plotting crazed revenge.

Because of his no-frills persona, the smallest suggestions of personality make a charismatic impact. [Jan/Feb 2007, p.89]

Despite a new set of producers... this vivacious, club-friendly sophomore set merely tinkers with her old recipe. [Jan/Feb 2007, p.83]

It's ghetto viciousness as literary exercise--an episode of The Wire with a better soundtrack. [Nov 2006, p.142]

This is Love’s ultimate achievement. A band long broken up, and so majestic they’ve been relegated to history books, has been refashioned in a way that makes a fresh and startling presentation of songs as familiar as the Ten Commandments.

The jumble of stuff that spills out -- from Delta blues to nineteenth-century ballads to spoken-word rambles -- is surprisingly consistent, at times transcendent, and not just for people intimately acquainted with Waits’s honeyed craziness.

Brand New took a huge step forward in 2003 with Deja Entendu, tossing away everything predictable about emo. But the leap on their third studio album is even bigger, and gutsier too: using rock’s earthly forces to amplify the heart’s greatest loves and fears, and in the process summoning the kind of grandeur that blows minds in bedrooms and raises fists in stadiums.

A throwback to his trunk-rattling G-funk heyday.

The emotional peaks are so sharp, the wordplay so juicy, that all excesses are redeemed.

Satisfyingly sloppy.

The bullying production threatens to obliterate what’s good here: A half-dozen gentle seeker’s songs with meditative acoustic textures and lyrics advocating reasonableness among humankind, which was always Cat Stevens’s domain.

Even when he tips the sensitivity scales too much... Rice’s innate, anti-lite-FM intensity saves him.

Though she seems to be done with rapping, her hip-hop loops and restless genre-mixing still save her from vintage-dress purgatory. [Jan/Feb 2006, p.94]

Even if the high-minded concepts prove elusive, no worries. [Nov 2006, p.138]

Once Again sets out to rebuild the dramatic storytelling and redemptive power of soul music on a hip-hop foundation.

They've created the Sgt. Pepper of screamo.

This orderly collection of messy leftovers suits his disheveled talents. [Nov 2006, p.137]

Scabrous, overdriven spallter-punk. [Nov 2006, p.136]

It is very good.

[Finn] tells better stories than anyone else in music these days. [Oct 2006, p.131]

The most tightly hook-larded, colorfully produced, listenable Decemberists record to date. [Nov 2006, p.138]

Denser and more scuzzed-up than Fallen, the album amps everything up to gloriously epic, over-the-top proportions. [Oct 2006, p.129]

Gorgeously understated. [Nov 2006, p.138]

The music follows in the ruby-slippered footsteps of the first album. [Oct 2006, p.134]

Proves they can do just fine without the foggy-hollow reverb they've always used to make their meandering sound mysterious. [Oct 2006, p.139]

A rare case of one step back, two steps forward. [Nov 2006, p.144]

On their lush major-label debut, the haunting Peter Gabriel-esque yawlps of singer Tunde Adebimpbe are punctuated by singer-guitarist Kyp Malone, whose raspy falsetto provides a sense of deadpan panic. [Jul 2006, p.103]