Gone is the sweeping piano and oozing horns of previous albums. Gone too is the pop sensibility that permeated Dusk, Mind Bomb, Soul Mining, and others. Matt Johnson has never been a pop artist, but he can craft amazing melodies. However, Johnson has hit a new level of menace here, like he's become a subterranean dweller since 1993. It's musically more free form and grittier. This takes some adjustment.

Yes, nearly every track is a Jeep-worthy jam, and, yes, guest vocals from the likes of Redman, Chaka Khan, Busta Rhymes, and the Beastie Boys introduce unprecedented name-recognition, but this isn't a pop album by any stretch of the imagination.

The Night could very well be Morphine's best work to date. Sandman and company finish the thoughts of 1997's Like Swimming by adding rich, subtle layers to their trio's thick sonic weave without diluting the band's strengths.

Like any good party, it's the music and the guests that make Bridging the Gap so memorable.... Each track is so strong and willfully catchy that you may forget who's driving the soul train.

This time around, LL goes deep and scores with his most consistent, diverse, adventurous, dome blowing/SUV-bumping set of tunes since the Mama Said album...

Movement in Still Life is a wildly effervescent, effortless sonic bouillabaisse that works dance, rock, hip-hop, pop, new age, trance, house, you-name-it simultaneously and makes it look easy.

At their worst, Deftones can sound almost like a parody of themselves. But at their best, the band fashions a heavy, claustrophobic atmosphere in which Moreno spins his dark, personal tales of misery and heartbreak against a backdrop of music that careens from the ugly to the beautiful. Most of the time, White Pony finds Deftones at their best.

The slick strings and piano emphasized later in the album aren't as moving as the cascading guitar and Enigk's vulnerable-boy vanity.

Oops!... I Did It Again proves beyond a doubt that Britney Spears is The One.

Jakob Dylan and his team have fashioned an album that's longer on big guitars, crunchy grooves and cool changes than overt confessionals. All told, Breach is a subtle, seamless effort with nary a lull or misstep -- in contrast to its multiplatinum predecessor, the second half of which suffered from a series of pedestrian songs.

With "Modus Operandi," Photek blew open the possibilities of drum 'n' bass by paring the genre down to its simplest, most ominous elements. Solaris, by comparison, sounds absolutely generic.

Nearly an instant classic...one of the most convincing and refreshing debuts in recent memory.

Probably the last good album we can realistically expect from Pearl Jam.

The Platform is one of those timeless long-players, like Run-DMC's Raising Hell or EPMD's Strictly Business, where you'll want to commit every track to memory.

An absolutely amazing album....more riff-heavy and directly engaging than his former band's work...

Gone is the preciousness of Elastica. Instead we get a confident and comfortable Frischmann, her voice, ever cool, fronting a rejuvenated punk-loving band.

Trickle sounds-feels-smells like both artistic breakthrough and new millennial trip-hop watershed.

One of the better pop albums of 2000, a multi-faceted offering that resists easy labeling while extending the band's mighty grip on the popular imagination.

That's right, we're talking stadium rock.

Amid R2D2-ish cutesy blips, pretty pulsing melodies, and lackadaisical effects, David rambles on about subjects he finds interesting, like a philosophical friend who's maybe had one too many glasses of wine.

[A] tighter, indigo-deeper, more vision cohesive joint than its predecessor.

The result (smells like the blues, bubbles like funk-rock, burns like hip-hop) is some strange new kinda rock 'n rhyme stew... Eat At Whitey's is like nothing else that's happenin' right now.

Ghosts & Flowers, like Sonic Youth's landmark Daydream Nation album, forces the listener to listen very carefully for subtle moments of beauty amidst the near silence and the absolute chaos.

Rather than highbrow art-rock, we just get a really pretentious heavy metal album.... the Pumpkins' worst album to date.

This stuff is too cute for its own damn good.

Smart, funny and unabashedly feminine....a bouncy and infectious record.

Toward the end of Man or Astro-Man?'s A Spectrum of Infinite Scale there is a track called "A Simple Text File" which is nothing more than a recording of a dot matrix printer producing a hard copy of... a simple text file!... If only the rest of the album were this intensely cool.... Every great leap forward on Spectrum is accompanied by an equal and negative small step backwards...

With a heavier emphasis on funky bottom end and infectious loops, it could be said that Disco is a much more dancefloor-oriented record, and, to that end, it may very well be. However, resting atop these funky beats is some refreshingly insightful lyricism.