Cardinology lays even deeper into the language of rehabilitation, grace and renewal.

Skeletal Lamping is a new high for this long-running yet just-peaking band.

GGD’s career has been a gradual climb out of primordial noise muck and toward beats, and album four is their most propulsive.

The Dears’ breakthrough was 2004’s "No Cities Left," a post-apocalyptic expedition through emotional and political wreckage, and they’re still mining that barren landscape, trying to rebuild.

This Austin trio makes a uniquely wigged-out noise, like genuine Lone Star lone wolves, mixing psychedelic boogie and spastic punk (á la ’80s titans the Minutemen) into shifty, sharp songs that whirl by like tornados with ADD.

Despite the metaphysical yet conversational “Knowing” and a sexed-up title track that begins with his come in her hair, she doesn’t offer enough evidence that her new love is any realer than all the others she’s exulted and struggled through in eight albums going back to 1979.

If David Lynch were to direct a remake of the Victorian romance Wuthering Heights, he wouldn’t need to commission a soundtrack; Secret Machines have recorded it.

On this eight-song EP--available for free on his Web site--the amiable 42-year-old lends his peach-cobbler drawl to songs about maimed soldiers and power-drunk bullies, a doleful cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 'Fortunate Son' and 'Mission Accomplished (Because You Gotta Have Faith),' which deploys a Bo Diddley beat to excoriate a leader who “drove us off a cliff and told us we were flyin’.”

Production by Bjork’s longtime collaborator Valgeir Sigurosson paradoxically plays up the transparency of Brun’s music, floating ghostly string arrangements and vocal harmonies nearby without ever making her sound less alone, or less mournfully serene.

Despite all the players, these lush songs are transitory, not bombastic or cluttered. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.78]

This music is better hazy, its messages garbled and out of reach. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.82]

They're intensely twee indie rockers, prone to brisk, even jittery, grooves, and with his pinched voice, Reyes sounds as though he's grasping at something just out of his reach. [Nov 2008, p.75]

Where the last Streets record was mainly about coming up with new words to describe cocaine, the fourth is surprisingly expansive and often quite deep.

OH (Ohio) ends with a straight-faced rendition of the hokey country standard 'I Believe in You,' with lyrical mush about dogs and babies, but Wagner sings it like he wants to believe every word.

The craziest moment on this debut LP is 'Fucked Up,' where they beg to have their pussies eaten one second, their teeth smashed the next.

The Pretenders’ ninth studio album is a pleasant roots record.

Retro-atmospherics guru M. Ward and grizzled guitar genius Marc Ribot leave their dusty fingerprints. Holland leaves behind a trail of her own.

The eighth volume of the erractic and fancinating Bootleg Series, exhumes his unreleased music. [Nov 2008, p.80]

Her music is exhilarating, enigma-packed and, despite the unceasing noise barrage, winningly sweet.

Here, they combine hardcore punk’s combat-boot side with its tortured-noise side, layering what sounds like scores of tsunami-distortion guitars over an atomic-speed drum blitz to attain rarely witnessed levels of obliteration (think Black Flag reincarnated as psychotic yetis).

The sonic and theatrical muscle it takes to project to 50,000 people who've paid to see another band adds a sense iof purpose that can't transfigure the superb material but does give the music its own charater. [Nov 2008, p.81]

El Guincho has only himself to get along with, but you'd never know it just listening to his album. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.78]

T.I. boats one of gangsta rap's most mellifluous voices and more polysyllabic lexicons, and when he combines the two, he's dazzling, hypnotic, virtuosic. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.82]

The recording quality on their debut album is admirably scuzzy; the drums sound like somebody’s banging a cereal box on the floor, which is part of the immediate charm.

Throughout, atmospheric ennui tugs against upbeat synth-pop--this band is best wehn it's got a beat. [Nov 2008, p.73]

A DJ is only as good as his taste, and Girl Talk is immaculate. [Sept 2008, p.78]

When Caleb evokes God's wrath on the "crucified U.S.A." or describes lost-highway lonelines, the batter-fried U2 atmospherics and portentous Dixiefied grunge makes his worry as real as Brimstone. [Oct 2008, 2008, p.80]

They've toned down the distorted-guitar squall and ash gray skronk that blanketed their first two albums, the rhythms are friskier, more vigorous; the hooks accessible and easier to love. [Oct 2008, p.77]