Sometimes they're tossing salad, with predictably sappy songs about sainted all-stars Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson, yet theyre funny throwing chin music at cult figures Fernando Valenzuela and Harvey Haddix. [Sep 2008, p.76]

This album is luxuriously, fantastically gay, a nod to the origins of disco, when the music was known for its queer fan base as much as anything else. [July 2008, p.73]

Creatively cast, bonkers as ever--it’s a bright spot in the Bobby Digital series.

Viva La Vida still manages to seem downsized compared to the band's gradiose early work. [July 2008, p.69]

Arcade Fire never babbled about “horse-shaped fire/Draggin’ stereo wire.” These guys make it seem like an Olympic sport.

Perry’s creative-writing-class punch lines don’t always justify her self-congratulatory drag-queen tone. But she hiccups quirkily enough, and myriad big-name producers (from Dr. Luke to Glen Ballard) keep the new-wave synth hooks hopping

Pacific Ocean Blue [is] a moody, groovy and deeply congenial solo album. The earthier Banbu. regularly rises to the Malibu heights of the first album. [July 2008, p.79]

They go for punk rock at the most physical level, until their rhythms feel almost like a rave, as in the seven-minute 'Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came From an Angel).'

She still goes into circles sometimes, but you might too if you could roll a phrase around your tongue the way Wainwright can. [July 2008, p.77]

The resulting monster is alternately charming and schizo. [July 2008, p.71]

There's an exhilarating, disorienting sense of freedom tot he album, the ruse of rules being ignored. [Aug 2008, p.79]

Treading his father’s path, he’s never sounded so comfortably himself.

On this produced-in-Paris gem, they beef up chilly synth-pop tunes with elegantly distorted guitar, German-industrial drum loops and plenty of goth gloom.

With its stories of faithless lovers, broken relationships and speed-dealing suburban doctors, @#%&*! Smilers almost seems to feed off the stagnation. [Aug 2008, p.88]

None of the album rocks, or gets particularly rootsy. [July 2008, p.72]

[Meiburg] applies this Audubon-ish enthusiasm to his songs, too, crafting a rich, occasionally macabre, fantasy world populated by starlings, gulls and solitary falconers.

Prog was rarely as songful as the brutal beauty here.

The result is music that is excitingly in and out of time. [Aug 2008, p.88]

Beyond Green’s wriggly, giggly, purring-to-screaming magnificence (as well as two smoking support vocals by young acolyte Anthony Hamilton), this is an album of intricate groove.

Lauper hasn’t sounded this relevant since her 1983 debut, when she celebrated female masturbation.

Not all connect, but a bonus disc, the soon-vanished 2002 full-length Nothing to Fear, compensates. Buy this before it vanishes, too.

His second solo album (which he dedicates to Pimp C, his partner in the pioneering Houston rap duo UGK who died of a codeine overdose last December) features blunts, ho's and Caddy-shaking beats galore--but also elegantly constructed takedowns of corrupt politicians, covetous ministers and crooked police.

This LP, which matches "Transatlanticism" as Death Cab's best. [June 2008, p.71]

The concept is basic and brilliant: a song for every bitter month of a year of off-again/on-again romance, from splitting the record collection in January to “A token e-mail/ A drunken text/A sorry go-round of cell-phone sex” in October.

Feuled by a ninth-grader's nausea they refuse to grow out of, they take their skateboards and chase down the horizon. [Mar 2009, p.64]

The moody disco on Couples is both sleeker and spookier than the sexed-up indie rock of th Blondes' promising 2006 debut, "Someone to Drive You Home."

Since avant-punk often has more “limits” than its creators recognize, respect and then some to No Age for keeping theirs interesting.

Here, he seems more comfortable in his pasty skin. [May 2008, p.76]