With drums, strings, pianos, amps and backup singers, this is the biggest sounding record ever for a band that used to consist of one guy on acoustic guitar. [Apr 2008, p.81]

On his solo debut, Bradford Cox sinks, phantomlike, into lush, highly processed arrangements of organ, drum machine and (evidently) whatever instrument is laying around. The disappearing act really can be magical.

This album about the seamy, scary side of Bushland, conceived after Davies was shot in New Orleans in 2004, is a mixed bag of pointed personal reflection (Good Ray) and facile social critique (Bad Ray).

Doughty’s fourth and best solo album gives up two keepers: the semi-absurdist 'More Bacon Than the Pan Can Handle,' with Stephanie Bischoff’s guest vocals sexier for sure than any synth weirdness Soul Coughing ever confabulated, and the mournfully understated Iraq opener, 'Fort Hood.'

Things get almost crushingly heavy, but he fights through his nightmares like he's one spastic stab in the dark from flicking on a night light. [Apr 2008, p.77]

Album three aims for maturity, but the results are stunted.

Even as they cherry-pick from seemingly incongruous sources (deep house, hard rock, smooth R&B), there’s a newfound decisiveness, a move toward heavier beats, meatier grooves and warmer sentiments.

For all its ambitions, Detours aims too low.

On record five, their lovely, surging melodies suggest a minor-league Coldplay, while singer-guitarist Matthew Caws recalls a lost golden age “when I could fix anything with sound.”

The more you listen, the less soothing his songs become; this is drifty music about living a rootless life where satisfaction is elusive.

There’s an exhilarating and ruthless intensity here, mingling the grimness of country murder ballads with the simplicity of girl-group pop.

Never before have these kings of experimental metal sustained such pulse-quickening energy, honing their tricks--cryptic lyrics, cliffhanging cries, spine-twisting rhythms--into a screaming arrow of sound.

Vampire Weekend’s version of globalization is too tightly and smartly woven to be mere dilettantism, and at times Koenig is emphatic, even desperate, about escaping white-bred familiarity.

Veteran producer Phil Ramone helps Lynne emphasize the loneliness of 'You Don't Have To Say You Love Me' and linger in the sensual transgressions of 'Breakfast In Bed' until this drastically rearranged but delicately rendered tribute feels like a candid self-portrait painted in watercolors and tears. [Apr 2008, p.81]

Bedingfield’s second U.S. release sticks mostly to love odes and peppy self-help bromides, which occasionally veer close to Colbie Caillat’s lake of goop. It would be irksome if not for the uniformly strong pop and R&B songcraft.

Even the otherworld instrumental 'Oceans of Venus' can’t counterbalance Venus’s ballad-heavy bottom half.

More diabolical and daring than the band’s shaggy 2005 debut, Future peaks with the primordial 'Bright Lights.'

But there’s a fine line between subtlety and listlessness, and while Marshall’s purr excels at postcoital melancholy or numb disaffection, other times it’s just a bore. Her blues aren’t nearly as vibrant when they’re drenched in gray.

Though less dynamic, the weary mid-tempo arrangements embody the album’s crushing hopelessness, tempered only by John Neff’s elegant pedal steel.

This successor improves, sonically (recording in a studio with a producer will do that) and in its energy and sharp writing.

Even when he tries to make a connection between pickup lines and international tension, in “Made of Codes,” Peñate never forgets that even quasi-protest songs need a good beat.

Every instrument here distorts, giving tearjerkers like 'I’ll Dream Alone' complementary grit.

Her story-songs about crushes gone wrong and nerdy social skills are like late-night IMs set to coffeehouse guitars. [Mar 2008, p.100]

Much of the CD feels as though it could have been made anytime in the last 15 years.

The CD is loosely tied together by a browbeating concept that condemns the glorification of Scarface-style violence and disposable pop-rap, but the moralism is as trite as a Tony Montana reference.

Some are endearingly autistic... And some are sublimely idiculous. [Mar 2008, p.97]

Despite the odds, their fifth album is arrestingly, chillingly good.

Filling the shoes of Jay-Z and R. Kelly--collaborators on two albums--is no easy feat, but thanks to slick production and stay-in-your-head melodies, the duo nearly rises to the challenge.