This album is truly affecting -- it is an instant, irresistible, bounce-in-your-step morning cup of coffee of an album.

Much like Orbital, they have the ability to synchronize ideas without over-saturating their songs.... Unfortunately, at 19 tracks, there is plenty of ambient trickle filling in the gaps.

She has conjured the dirty rawness of funk and the smooth, hyper-articulation and commanding, ass-shakin' beats of hip hop and coated them with her own strange, space-age gloss. It is brilliant.

Weezer have faced their challenge with confident, easy-going nonchalance, offering one hell of a tight little record.

Where most rock bands that try to play pop forget that pop music requires pop songs, Sefchik and Laguana are constructionists in the classic pop tradition.

If anyone's making radio-worthy rock 'n' roll nowadays, it's Guided By Voices.

A richer, more confident manifestation of their languid dysfunction than their previous work.

Standards is disarmingly stunning and instantaneously consuming. Tortoise are unquestionably skilled artisans, electrocuting the framework for the typical rock song and reconstructing the fragments into a wonderfully surrealist space mission soundtrack.

It's made up of some songs you think you shouldn't like, some you weren't ready for, and some you'll have to rewind to make sure you heard correctly. It is an album with no peers. And that, my friends, is a recommendation.

The voices are front and center throughout, but the trio has wrought its most elaborate frames for them yet: brass, strings, and distorted guitars amplify the songs' sentiments and reinforce the cumulative strength of their melodies.

It's the sound of a man finding a new place for himself, liking it, and reveling in it.

It's everything we say we want in music: gutsy, introspective, innovative, bold, real in a way that few other albums even try to be...

More interestingly, it gives a peek into Yo La Tengo's working methods. It's been a long time since they brought finished songs to the practice room; instead the combo jams together and lets the improvisation mutate over time into tunes which sometimes become the basis for songs.

If you usually enjoy pop music made by young white males with guitars, you'll almost certainly like Parachutes.

Almost every song here seems unfinished, and while the The Sophtware Slump sounds great -- misfiring machines duel elegant pianos, guitars chug and grind, ancient synthesizers burst through the top end - it never goes much of anywhere.

Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars, despite a couple of missteps, is brimming with life.

Scattered among the jewels are shiny bits of glass that aren't as valuable as they might be.

Chiming, richly textured and potently rhythmic, this is starkly, explicitly rock n' roll, and the back-to-basics approach beautifully frames Polly's tales of fear, love, sex, sadness, ugliness, and beauty.

These songs are sonically interesting and pretty as Mom on Easter, but they don't really ring true...

For an album that apparently grew out of the band trying to get away from melody, there's a lot of it here. They can't help themselves. They try to do a song with a robotic dance beat, load it up with bleak phrases like "laughing till my head comes off" and "take the money and run" and "this is really happening," call it "Idioteque" for chrissake, and what stands out are not the beat and not the phrases or the apparent concept of dance music being silly when horrible things are happening in the world, but the seven or eight different heartwrenching vocal lines and the amazing way they intertwine.

Akin to a perfectly plotted soundtrack to an unplanned psychedelic journey - multi-dimensional and anything you want it to be.

This record is just a party from beginning to end.

For the most part, Richard Ashcroft's debut solo disc delivers.... an album full of soulful and genuine expressions of hope.

A fundamentally unselfish record, as simply enjoyable as a day off or a light beer buzz.

What SFA have done here is beautifully sublime, and they've done it without ploy or pretension.

It is a strange album for Sunny Day in that it lingers in an abstract realm that the band previously only hinted at.... album is SDRE's most mature work to date. It is so musically dense and complex.

The music on The Moon & Antarctica is as lonely and desolate as the title suggests...

There are echoes of every good movement in rap history on Quality Control, from old-school to Def Jam to Native Tongues all the way to Wu-Tang...