Mind you, Kelly Jones' voice is an acquired taste. If you warm to it, however, you'll then enjoy a wealth of simple country-tinged pop songs.

One of the most original-sounding albums in a long while.

The set works like a spun-up set of carefully collated cuts, sequenced with stuck-tape-over-the-tabs-in-the-corners mix-tape affection that makes the whole seem like a sticky-sentimented sentimental love letter to the boys' record collections.

Where Maxinquaye was both engaging and coherent, working up to a kind of weird gestalt by way of good songs and dark sounds, Blowback is hit-and-miss.

The strength Moorer has shown from first album to second album and finally to this genre-leaping experiment in self-recreation is enough to not only merit a listen, but to make sure we pay attention to the fourth album when it arrives.

Group Sounds may not be astonishingly great, but it mostly rocks with the raw, excellent sound RFTC has come to own.

It is, in such, truly great, or truly arrogant, or truly conceited, or truly preposterous, or truly confused, or truly bemused, or truly profound, or truly magnificent. Or maybe all of these things. At once. Or at times.

Yanqui U.X.O. is the work of a band that has finally become confident in its popularity and influence.

While these are accomplished musicians distilling their favorite musical influences, they fail to transcend those influences.

Fans of the group's previous recordings may have trouble accepting the fact that Lost in Revelry doesn't have the high melodic consistency of We're All in This Alone.

Amongst the bubble-and-squeak, there's much audio delight to savor...

The astonishing way in which the latest outing from San Franciscan deconstructionist darlings Matmos was put together is of such novel conceit it threatens to overshadow the final product.

Green Day have created a great punk-meets-rock album.

The chaff-to-wheat ratio remains distressingly unbalanced on Torino.

The album largely treads the same brazen minimal-electro territory; and most of the dick/tits/cunt-centric songs will be familiar for anyone who's seen Peaches' girlie-show shows in full-frontal effect over the past couple years.

Throughout Love and Distortion, the Stratford 4 convey through their music that sounding like other good bands that came before them isn't a bad thing.

They're merely using Psychocandy as a workaday aesthetic strategy and, despite loads of melodrama, they never sound pretentious about it either.

Though it's not quite the folk-pop album that some post-Head Music interviews with Anderson had foreshadowed, the ballads do outweigh the rockers, which puts the lyrics in the spotlight, for better and for worse.

Luckily, the album has an easy-going air that lifts it out of the realm of smart-guy assemblage and into sexy, summery territories.

The songs on Mama's Gun slip from one to the next effortlessly, coming together as a set of sedate, buttery-smooth grooves.

The gear is buffed to such a productional sheen that its every sound seems like a reflective surface, the compositional complexity leading to an album as confusing -- and, ultimately, distancing -- as a hall of mirrors.

His weighty messages are duly noted. Unfortunately, they're delivered so acrimoniously that the overwhelming lack of fun in the music makes his albums a chore to listen to.

His party peaks too early, though, with the gear soon settling into a middling middle, where the songs start to sound less distinct, and the changes start to become less pronounced, and interest starts to lag, and where, eventually, like a desperate host hoping to keep the party going, Hebden stacks on break after break in a gallant attempt to remind you that the disc is actually playing.

The music here tries to be as unobtrusive as possible, its plasticky tone and carefully shined finish constructed to contrast with the earnest soulfulness of Usher's singing. And it's in his words that the album finds the substance that it does have.

Auf der Maur plays the kinda late-'90s alt-rock that Veruca Salt's debut (American Thighs, the one with "Seether") hinted at (too bad this isn't the late '90s...).

Up Above Is, in such, a gentle enough jam to work/non-work in an incidentalist sense; but compare it to folk that do this sort of gear with a fearsome seriousness -- like, most obviously, the Vibracathedral Orchestra -- and T&C come up as pale as a Midwestern mid-winter tan.

An abundance of morose, meandering material in search of a hook.

Fleeting moments of genius flanked by sketchy songs... [and] curious, dense production burying Eitzel's amazing voice under layers of maudlin instrumentation.