The songs on WWSFTC all hint at loss, limitation and aging, with Spektor's poetic sensibility and passionate singing giving the LP a wrenching sense of vulnerability. [No.88 p.59]

It all comes out pure, 100-proof Godfathers, as hard-rockin', contemporary and fresh-sounding as ever. [No. 139, p.55]

Sexsmith doesn't succumb to a single false move or note. [#51, p.112]

The members of Fugazi exercise a controlled intensity that exudes grace, their concise-yet complex songs experimenting wisely. [#52, p.87]

A staggering masterpiece. [No. 125, p.55]

Alone's as good a Pretenders record as has been made. [No. 137, p.59]

Takes a baby step toward the mainstream. [#69, p.108]

A brilliant pastiche of styles. [No. 125, p.57]

Even when he's pouring on the lushness, the producer keeps Fay's gentle, weathered voice and arresting lyrics front and center. [No.91, p.54]

Major comes across as the next logical chapter for one of music's most-unique and positive forces. [No.90 p.56]

This album is magnificent. [No. 109, p.54]

Vocally, Gordon is reborn, baptized in fire. [No. 102, p.53]

The results are both vintage QOTSA and something unnameable at the same time. [No. 146, p.58]

Sparkles with glittering innovations. [#68, p.102]

It's neither better nor worse than any other Clientele album, but it's an excellent primer. The real treat for fans, though, come sin the deluxe edition which includes a 10-track "lost album" from 1994, The Sound Of Young Basingstoke. [No. 125, p.53]]

Through the dark, Cohen smartly questions everything from the prickly possibilities of future romance to, quite possibly, the sacred Zen Buddhist religion where he once solidly and stoically placed his faith. [No. 138, p.51]

Let's face it: Group Sounds is shit. But it's pure shit, which makes all the difference.... Everything is overdiven and mixed to within a decibel of ear-shattering heaviosity. It isn't just monstrous, it's gleefully, unapologetically monstrous. [#49, p.88]

America is both a progression and a departure for Deacon: an album rife with danceable party music, but also a deeply political gesture. [No.90, p.56]

Three cheers aren't enough. [No.99, p.59]

They produce an extraordinary palette of tone, color and sound as they range through the worlds of rockabilly, early R&B, blues, folk and punk. [No. 146, p.61]

[A] consummate artistic triumph. [No. 125, p.56]

The playing is imaginative, the ideas vibrant and shimmering and the band's considerable melodic gifts sabotaged by either willfully obtuse compositional tricks or outright punk bratiness. [#55, p.84]

Splinter offers a hammering continuum of some of Gary Numan's most stunning synth rhythms to date. [No. 103, p.59]

No one made damnation as appealing as Ira and Charlie Louvin. [No. 82, p. 57]

Musically, there's nary a bad track. [No. 107, p.54]

Snaith lets his wanderlust steer, and the album is better for it. [#68, p.91]

The noise that's here is lovely, heartbreaking, expansive and raw. [No. 97, p.58]

Labradford continues to make music so quiet and haunting that, like falling leaves, creaking floorboards or the gentle flapping of bird wings, it seems to exist on its own terms... [#50, p.97]

Essential listening for any heavy-music fan ... or youngsters wondering what that whole Seattle fuss was all about. [No. 138, p.61]

It is, in a way, a dad-rock opus, the songs imbued with the residue of a man pondering not just the intricacies of family but the greater implications of existence that come with it. [No. 93, p.51]

This heady mix of stratospheric rockers and inventive, smart and slyly revolutionary lyrics yields Les Savy Fav's best album yet. [Fall 2007, p.101]

In control, indeed, and not just of scathing language. His command over his songwriter's rainbow, from pop sprite to pastoral sage to rockabilly goat gruff, redlines on "Hegira Emigre." [No. 103, p.56]

Taken all in one sitting, the dashing Mole City is both way too much and way too little. [No. 103, p.60]

It's as raucous and vital as their first three. [No. 93, p.52]

Surprisingly, Dylan has never been more deliberate or so overtly savage. [No. 93, p.54]

Her first solo LP in a 40-year career is as diverse as it is good, and plenty of Bagsian punk fury is in evidence. [No.133, p.53]

It's still heavy as fuck, but it's also textural, emotional, diverse and defiant as fuck, too. [No. 148, p.52]

The Blow is full of those breathy moments, minimalist percussive and vocal stimulations that send shivers and sparks from the headphones to the brain to the heart to the feet. [No. 103, p.53]

Everything Ever Written falls right in line with the great records the combo has produced 2002's The Remote Part. [No. 117, p.57]

There is something effortlessly contagious and opulent about her melodies and cozy rhythmic kink. [No. 109, p.57]

This is an album with a lot of parts to fall in love with. [No. 117, p.58]

These new arrangements--mostly piano, trumpet, upright bass and pedal steel--lend the songs a deeper loneliness, a richer tragicomedy, as if they really belonged in a concert hall, and maybe they do. [No. 119, p.55]

It's a denser, darker album than 2011's S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT, spending more of its time gazing outward, intent on gleeful subversion and taking delight in making noise for the hell of it. [No. 98, p.52]

One of 2000's most consistently compelling listens. [#48, p.95]

As fine a record as you're likely to hear in 2016. [No. 132, p.54]

The active present Human Voice takes advantage of each of Dntel's original promises. [No. 114, p.54]

It's freeing and inspiring and a wondrous odyssey of class-consciousness. [No. 109, p.58]

Warning may not only be the most beautiful Green Day LP but also the bravest. [#48, p.93]

Aside from a few fleeting moments of watery prog and lumpen rock, the album's 15 songs have a slow-growing charm and understated grace, something that gradually becomes powerful in its own right. [#60, p.102]

This is they type of sublime, maximalist treasure that should kick positive inspiration downstairs into the emperor-in-his-birthday-suit, for-the-sake-of-it, substance-free charlatan safe room that the experimental/abstract realm of contemporary underground music can sometime seem like. [No. 148, p.55]

Blood Oaths Of The New Blues has us realizing, possibly for the first time, what an amazing, enrapturing voice the dude has. [No. 95, p.61]

Endlessly moody and surprisingly versatile, this record moves by its own secret logic. [No. 144, p.61]

Perfect finds a singular band doing its thing in the way that only it can. [No. 128, p.57]

Bitter Honey hits like a series of heart punches, and the quality of the writing is such that it doesn't get old even after multiple back-to-back spins. [#71, p.87]

Bestial Burden works because of its methodical execution--a calculated piece of catharsis that towers over all other bedroom power electronics tape-peddlers. [No. 114, p.59]

Although one of his most accessible, it's not constrained to formula. ... It was worth the wait. [No. 134, p.54]

There's no flashiness here, but a slow-burning passion makes this record smoke. [No.99, p.56]

Not only essential, Love And Distance is like nothing you've heard this year. [#64, p.95]

It's the best album Fulks has ever made, period, and even if you can't quite make out the twister that swept away all that old anger, it's easy to hear the sweet, sad emptiness it left behind. [No. 102, p.56]

What a glorious sound it is--the highs and lows (sonically and emotionally) are crisper and better defined. [No. 150, p.50]

Sonically, visually and thematically, this double disc is grandiloquent, like the great progressive music statements of rock history. [No. 145, p.61]

The production has kept the focus exactly where it should be: on the longing of his voice... it's given him a deeper, haunting sense of quiet that strips these melodies to their essential, fragile beauty, delivered with joy, grace, and a wounded wisdom. [No.89 p.60]

Enthralling music that embraces you like your mama never did. [#69, p.87]

The long held notion of Stone and Co. as purveyors of funky pop (or poppy funk) touched by harmonic roar of choral vocals and the lyricism of sociopolitical consciousness is all here. [No. 122, p.61]

Criminal Heaven is an infectious, off-kilter, damn near perfect indie-pop album that manages to effortlessly cover a bizarrely large plot of musical territory. [#86]

This is an album with a lot of rich, rewarding darkness in its grooves. [No. 113, p.57]

Hitchhiker is a perfectly wonderful solo-acoustic session recorded one day in 1976. .... This is a most welcome collection. [No. 148, p.61]

The treatments are smartly contemporary, balancing Amidon's clawhammer banjo with Frisell's echoing electric guitar, backed by jazz-inflected bass and drums. [No. 114, p.53]

Wye Oak just turned in one of the year's most satisfying and seductive records. [No. 109, p.51]

This portable section of the Library of Congress plays as well as it reads. [No. 104, p.56]

The wall of sound this band generates with distorted guitars, samples, industrial noise and live drums is overwhelming at times, but the message it conveys about race and class in America is an important one. [No. 143, p.53]

A rare second album that matches a brilliant debut. [#54, p.76]

Put them all together and you've got a drink that goes down hard, with a potent bittersweetness distilled by a master. [No. 122, p.60]

One of the band's best.... While 1999's Ric Ocasek-produced Do The Collapse was criticized by some for its thick, pop-radio gloss, Isolation Drills shows more restraint, reconciling Pollard's idiosyncrasies with the track-to-track consistency great rock albums demand. [#49, p.75]

Cement[s] the Truckers' status as one of the best rock 'n' roll bands going. [#71, p.93]

In plain but very powerful terms, it's one of the smartest albums ever released. [No. 111, p.61]

It's a Wonderful Life raises the bar already set high by fellow post-modern woodsmen types like Grandaddy and Mercury Rev. [#51, p.116]

White's aesthetic, as always, is grounded in the immediate and the visceral, and Lazaretto rocks. [No. 111, p.60]

Kinsella's mastery of pop melodicism in the service of heartbreakingly beautiful and unvarnished sentiment is again on full and perfect display. [No. 134, p.59]

Set Free is no rehash, simply an album whose parameters are clearly defined in order that its interiors can be brought to life. [#69, p.86]

The success of the Amazing in general--and Ambulance by proxy--is the band's uncanny ability to touch on a wealth of styles without flying any specific philosophical flag, thereby remaining unique in tone and execution. [No. 134, p.53]

The album, fun though it is, also burns with anger and tension. It's another way Spoon throws into sharp relief what there--and what's not. [No. 141, p.51]

Blood Orange moves swiftly, wipes clean his chill-pop slate and goes for stark, ham-handed topicality hop and loss as applied to menacingly atmospheric tones. That Hynes does this without losing his sense of pop and tunefulness is a sweet accomplishment. [No. 134, p.52]

The Avalanches bag production, they roller-coaster; got to be jokers, they just do what they please. [No. 134, p.51]

Wait For Love is a beautiful consideration of what comes next. [No. 150, p.55]

It's a soul-stirring collection of Real Ramona/University-grade musical mini-masterpieces accompanied by lyrical prose vignettes exuding the same nimble friskiness and wry, subversive brilliance that characterized Hersh's fantastic 2010 memoir Rat Girl. [No. 104, p.58]

Even in the more sedate moments, there's an underlying insistence that ties the 11-track set together in a typically neat package that sits comfortably and appropriately in one of rock's greatest band catalogs. [No. 141, p.58]

A layered-yet-vintage, warm, highly analog sound ensued. [No. 150, p.57]

The best moments are soft and strange. "The Corner" is a fabulous piece of folk understatement and emotional ambiguity, while the brilliant "Freefall" showcases Branan's willingness to stretch his voice to odd, ugly places in the service of transcendence. [No.88 p.53]

This is prime indie rock with all the frills excised, but all the feels intact. [No. 112, p.58]

A surprisingly mature effort. [#71, p.112]

It's all drunkenly cinematic, as prickly as a cactus and smart as hell. [#58, p.85]

Goofy and awkward, yet mature and sincere, this album showcases a band making magic from the mudpies of millennial angst. [No. 143, p.55]

The group maintains the signature controlled-chaos staples of its sound--big, dirty riffs underpinned by John Dwyer's trademark ghoulish vocal melodies--while broadening its already hyper-musical palate. [No. 109, p.55]

This may be the bleak and heavy masterpiece that BIH has been hovering around for the past decade. [No. 112, p.53]

It's best record. [No. 141, p.61]

The whole thing is ghoulishly gorgeous in the most comfortably comfortable way. [No. 121, p.60]

Supermodified is a culmination, for its operatic/cinematic soundscapes... are utterly unique. [#46, p.93]