What makes this album special is that it's a big wet kiss to music.

Yet another emotion-evoking masterpiece.

It's the sound of musicians realizing how good they are at what they do. And then doing it.

It's a kaleidoscopic ode to the joy of music, and it's the most exciting debut album since Mos Def's Black on Both Sides.

The aged authenticity of these songs comes so easily that you'd be forgiven for thinking that they discovered the formula.

Universal Truths and Cycles has got something for everyone who's ever liked Guided By Voices even a little.

Ridiculously catchy melodies, driving synths, sharp, snapping drums, and super lo-fi bass and guitars churn out straight up dirty rock'n'roll, some twisted pop, and the occasional ethereal mid-tempo composition.

An uncommonly moving singer whose deliberate delivery extracts volumes of yearning and melancholy from her own material and the work of other writers.

Harkens back to the European pop of the '50s and '60s.

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.

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

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.

Their disparaging wails and hums are strangely magnetic?

All in all, a really great debut for this quintet.

Gorgeously melancholy... mid-tempo grooves and hushed ballads dressed up in dreamy keyboards and liquidly reverberant guitars.

One Part Lullaby's songs are the ones a man writes when he realizes he doesn't have to be bummed out forever, the music a person makes when he can afford to trade in his four track for a home studio complete with Pro-Tools and some swanky electronics. Most of all, this is the kind of record a guy makes when he spends a lot of time tooling down the freeway with Beck on the stereo and the sun in his eyes.

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

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

Where Kraftwerk, MC5, and Miles Davis used to tempt them to excess, here the production unites their diverse influences, every track attacking the speakers like an angry lunatic thrashing against the walls of a poorly soundproofed room.

We Are Science is striking, very bold, and very sexy.

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...

The reason to get excited about this release, the reason to wake the kids and call the neighbors, is the second disc, Mono.

Closer than any previous mass-market Sonic Youth album to the avant-garde sound that's always popped up in their extracurricular work.

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.

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

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

It's pretty much just a silly, goofy, fun record.

Whilst Daft Punk's elaborate practical joke of an album, Discovery, reeked of childish trying-too-hard elitism, Felix's party is both exclusive and enjoyable, sharing a sense of humour and musical ethos with Scouse synthesiser aficionados Ladytron.