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.'

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

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

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

The result is a happy souvenir, best experienced among 12,000 of your closest, Ecstacy-popping friends. [Dec 2007, p.144]

Fresh off his triumphant "Fishscale" series, the thinking-thug’s MC once again shows why he’s the alpha Wu-Tanger: palpable street authenticity, classic taste in R&B (Stax, Motown) and the breakneck rhyme virtuosity of hip-hop’s golden age.

This compendium of pop standards is as good an introduction to the great American songbook as any.

With Simon LeBon sharpening his typically abstract lyrics and everyone bolstering the contrasting, constant hooks, Timbaland perfects the rock-techno fusion his solo album fumbled, while Duran emphasize their willfully plastic extremes. They’ve never sounded this pretty and severe.

The music is dizzying, even mesmerizing.

The album works as an ambient whole, its fog-bank synths, yearning vocal slivers and stoic basslines filling the room with melancholy.

The sonics beneath Buck's deadpan rhymes are too often more subdued than the dense collages he started out in the late 90s, but jazz keyboards and conga poly-rhythms keep the backing from sinking into mere soundtrack. [Nov 2007, p.146]

Spears’s fifth studio album is her most consistent, a seamlessly entertaining collection of bright, brash electropop.

Pete Doherty remains the British tabloids' pinata of choice--but at least his music is looking up.

But vintage doesn’t mean nostalgic. 'Dirty Old Man' is the pissed, hilarious antithesis of his wide-eyed ’70s signature 'Old Man,' and it rivals Nick Cave’s 'No Pussy Blues' (see Grinderman) as the year’s best song about a deranged, horny graybeard.

This is mostly music to zone in and out of--periodically, new sounds and rhythms croip up and coexist in rough approximation of grooves, catching the ear; other times songs drone in the background, either beatifically ot forgettable. [Nov 2007, p.146]

Coheed have found their sweet spot.

Cheery and unassuming, Underwood is a pleasant oddity: a pop star whose central belief is her own powerlessness.

He's screaming louder than ever on his solo CD, but what's notable is how all the titanium riffs and loud-soft-loud dynamics now feel personalized, a little cozier and multihued than on SOAD record. [Nov 2007, p.157]

When it comes to creating nuanced and irreverent, yet oddly touching, pop and rock simulacra, no one really touches pseudonymous Pennsylvania duo Gene and Dean Ween, still together after 23 years.

Even more surprising is how dynamic the duo sounds, as their voices both blend together and draw each other into fresh territory.

The result is a mess but--thanks to Bemis’s passion, humor and knack for inserting multiple hooks into a single song--an exhilarating one.

Their sixth album sticks close to what they know best. [Nov 2007, p.153]

In Rainbows is far more pensive and reflective than its predecessor.

The dramatic arc of these songs is built around the way instruments lurch into place and dance drunkenly around one another before staggering off once again.