Things don’t always gel--Marcus Mumford and Miguel turn in half-baked Zooropa moves on “Find Another Way,” and “Where It’s At Ain’t What It Is,” with fellow guitar master Gary Clark Jr. and producer Nico Stadi, feels like too many cooks in the kitchen. But when Atlas Underground works, it upgrades the RATM game plan with motivational anthems for a newly-fucked world order.

At 69, Seger is just as ruggedly introspective as he was in his heavy-bearded Seventies.

If you're a Rush fan, add two stars; if not, subtract two.

Stevens is best balancing his composer side with his singer-songwriter side on songs like "Arnika," which packs all that avant-Andrew Lloyd Webber ambition into soft, simple benedictions for bedroom-size cathedrals.

Eighties pop shine cut with pedal steel/fiddle poetry, Texas swing, cantina blues and achingly-crooned nostalgia that generally doesn’t feel hard sell, even when things gets treacly. Which of course, they do.

Banks... raps each verse as if his entire career depends on it. [5 Aug 2004, p.113]

Some more uptempos would have been nice, but Seventh Tree still makes for good post-party chill- out music.

The trio shape folk, gospel and blues influences into straight-ahead roots rock somewhere between the Lumineers and Lady Antebellum.

The group's attempts to evoke Age of Aquarius utopianism are suffocated by self-consciousness; the record feels like an art-college thesis.

X may be their niftiest since Adrenalize.

Sometimes the humor verges on camp (the title track), or the poignance drowns in Barry Manilow-isms ("Still Fighting It"). But mostly, Folds' songcraft is a winning mixture of the plush and the prickly...

The special-guests duets record is a famously fraught exercise, one that’s almost predestined to be bogged down by its own attention-grabbing premise. Threads hardly escapes that predicament, but it’s filled with enough solid songcraft to make one hope that Crow isn’t, in fact, truly done with record making for good.

House of Spirits isn't exactly urgent, but there's pleasure in its slowness.

Overhead's moaning gets tiresome, but their guitar-driven numbers evince both impressive shoegazing atmospherics and a prclivity for nicely fey songwriting. [27 May 2004, p.82]

Most of Spiritualized's ninth LP comes off intricate, elastic, and soulful. [Mar 2022, p.71]

Seductive though Linkous' cushy, narcotic patter can be, his slower songs... feel like they're floating in an ocean of sleepiness.

Even without the ecstatic melodrama of Robyn's best work or the momentum of Röyksopp albums like 2009's Junior, this is a worthwhile peek into three great electro-pop minds.

With help from Dr. John and guitarist John Porter, Faithfull, like New Orleans itself, proves hard times make for very good music.

Alas, if you're looking for Slowhand to ignite the pyrotechnics, forget it.

Things loosen up on older material (a thrashing "Aqua Dementia"), and the band do a punishing cover of the Melvins' 1996 psych-sludge gem "The Bit." Replacing the original's sitar with Hinds' 12-string guitar roar, Mastodon again prove themselves broad-minded headbangers.

Cackling, croaking, and cracking up through vocal processors, he sounds like he’s having a blast. And you will too, even if you don’t remember any of it by morning--which also seems perfectly in the spirit of thin

Us struggles to consistently reach the vertiginous heights of “When I’m With Him” or Me, but at the album’s best, Rodriguez’s revealing narratives of fractured relationships and lonely adolescence strike somewhere deep, to the point that, if you listen close enough, her warm, whispery voice almost begins to sound like your own.

Ideally, Durk would have cut five or so songs and tightened Almost Healed into a clearer portrait of his struggle to leave his pistol-scarred past behind. Instead, he offers his fans a buffet of listening options, some better than others.

The most surprising thing about the record is just how blatantly a group that once skewered conformity in songs like "Suburban Home" brashly embraces nostalgia.

Mondanile's side project, Ducktails, has typically offered him space to explore more abstract guitar moods, but his latest album refines that sprawl with more concise songwriting.

This Australian pop thrush broke hearts around the world back in the Nineties with her classic karaoke weeper "Torn," and Male has that same lying-naked-on-the-floor vibe.

There are a few whiffs, like the foul "She's a Hot One" ("She might be a mess, but she's a hot one"), but Bryan truly excels when he's all nostalgic for the uncomplicated ease of a summer fling in "Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset" or subtly acknowledging the beauty of all types of love in the gently uplifting "Most People Are Good."

In typical Tori fashion, there's way too much conceptual malarkey surrounding the songs, but if you can ignore her fake posse, you'll find this is Amos' best album in many years.

The surprisingly loungy results are unusually daring for these two.

Though it's admirably consistent and pretty darn OK, it lacks a knockout track to counterbalance the complaints about the King James Bible and swine toothpaste.

Though the fatalistic title number sticks, there's a reason Ellis shares his most memorable copyrights with James Brown.

Kells' voice remains one of the most flexible and inventive instruments in pop, but, even for him, Panties veers too frustratingly between horny and corny.

"Make better music," he wills himself on "Bolo Tie." And sometimes he does, especially when the beats turn soulful and artists like Leon Bridges and Chance the Rapper swing by for assists. With the exception of the exuberant "Downtown," coming up with "Thrift Shop"-style catchiness is rarely the goal here.

He can say far more with molten noise jags and spiraling, convulsive solos than he can with mind-clearing Beat poetry like the seven-minute "Mohawk."

For tuneful, middle-of-the-road rock, The Silver Lining ain't bad.

Australian synth-pop quartet Cut Copy do the Eighties eerily well. Too well, in fact. Cue up the band's third album, and you find yourself playing spot-the-influence.

Usually, though, Chino Moreno's lyrics go for cathartic images (shaking coffins, fading faces) set to chopping riffage, whirlpool distortion and dark, soaring melodies that sound more like the Cure than Korn.

Jeff Lynne's production on several tracks puts a Tom Petty-ready spin on laid-back California rock and has Walsh sounding less isolated from modern times than he thinks he is.

At last, new metal has its answer to Depeche Mode's Black Celebration.

The results are much better than his 1993 sci-fi shark jump, Cyberpunk, and so it automatically counts as the best thing he's done since "Cradle of Love."

Timberland gives the Fab Five a sleek funk track on 'Nite-Runner,' which could have been a leftover from "FutureSex/LoveSounds." Justin Timberlake even arrives to gloss it up--as far as Duran Duran are concerned, the union of the Timber-Snake is on the rise.

Now solo, she's rocking the current micro-vogue for Eighties shoegaze pop: guitar-synth swirls, paper-thin New Wave bass surge, space-waif vocals like a spring breeze that barely billows your window curtains.

The massively influential Smiths guitarist finally makes the solid solo debut he should've recorded a quarter-century ago.

Nicole Atkins' second album is an exercise in what you might call brunch blues: Dreamy, vaguely melancholic, thoroughly pleasant.

By twisting the features of various stylistic forefathers - the Velvet Underground, early Pink Floyd, Can, Wire - they've created a new hybrid of bratty garage rock and whimsical sonic experimentation that delights in its own mutant energy.

Although there's plenty of Lamb of God's trademark guitar chug and Olympics-level drumming, the eerier moments (see the jailhouse tale "512") and unexpected guests (including members of Deftones and the Dillinger Escape Plan) show a group that's thirsty to evolve beyond its own established patterns.

The 10 songs on Sweeter, DeGraw's fourth album, are taut, efficient and hook-packed, with guitars bolstering the big choruses....He's also an incurable cheeseball.

Minus usual vocal sidekicks Isobel Campbell and Greg Dulli (who appears briefly on the vintage drum-machine jam "St. Louis Elegy"), Lanegan's chafed baritone works best with bold backdrops.

So while her voice is exquisite--a less burnished version of her pal Emmylou Harris'--it's still surprising to find her doing an LP of mainly cover

Scott Kirkland and Ken Jordan have dumbed down their sound even more - and their music is all the better for it.

Miniatures of spaghetti-western spasm and speed-of-light viscera.

The standout is "L.I.F.E.," a raw recollection of an addled childhood ("I ain't got no pictures of my mother/She was a crack fiend/Nothing like crack mother") that proves there's more to her than bubble gum.

Four discs of this kind of horseplay might be too much for casual fans, but feedback freaks will savor the nuclear noise pop.

Story is a couple gems short of excellence, but Carter has expanded her unaffected charm beyond the twang thang.

With help from producer Atticus Ross, Reznor has made a solid soundtrack to David Fincher's movie by doing what he's always done: creating grand industrial rock.

Delivered in a pure, unblemished voice, even the sad songs are comforting, occasionally to a fault.

Interspersed, however, with Campbell's finest performances are several moments that fall short on a record that occasionally feels like a forced final effort. ... Ultimately, though, it's Campbell's voice, still nimble and newly haunting in its frailty, that makes Adiós a worthy conclusion from the legendary singer.

Brazenly consistent, if unimaginative. [13 Nov 2003, p.99]

An album that can express itself only through understatement.

Casual fans, however, will wonder what all the fuss was about; novices should still get the original.

Push and Shove leans toward synthpop-flavored ballads with grown-up themes: relationship struggles, the rewards of long-term romance. The songs are catchy, but Gwen Stefani doesn't have the voice, or the gravitas, for grandiose tunes.

Recorded at Kingston's legendary Tuff Gong studios, this EP twists dancehall and dubstep into kinky new directions.

They return to vintage Sunset Strip glam metal à la "Crazy Bitch".

With its sexed-up beats, cowbell, nonsense chants and wigged-out Casio-keyboard psychedelia, Places Like This turns its sound-effect juxtapositions into sheepishly functional tunes.

It's a loose concept, but it delivers.

He’s equally rooted in old-school melody and beat-derived new-century songwriting. In its best moments, = brings together those two worlds. ... Yet as genuinely in love as he appears, his devotional songs tend to bog down in generalized sentiments and gooier melodies.

Sure, there’s a touch of hypocrisy in a guy as gloriously tacky as Al taking shots at the shameless but who really cares when it’s this much fun.

Say this for the 17 popstars who teamed with the greatest living singer of American popular standards: They're brave. Luckily, Bennett rescues most of his partners.

The play won't open until next year, so for now all the drama in these songs is internal, and all the more riveting for that.

With dubby beats, choral vocals and signature strings, it's the most haunted song on the group's second LP, a set of genteel indie pop swinging between Dirty Projectors' ornate chamber music and the prep-school dance party of Vampire Weekend.

By combining the cinematic ambition of Massive Attack with A Tribe Called Quest's soul-clap minimalism, Slum Village step forward on Trinity -- even if, at sixty-nine sprawling minutes, it could have used some serious pruning.

Each of these albums is as noteworthy for what's missing as for what's there.

Proves alluring even when the tunes are undercooked.

Their Clash-inspired punk funk bites music ideas from the Specials and the Happy Mondays, but singer Richard Archer gets his songs from street life, dead-end jobs, run-ins with the law.

That's the vibe of the rootsy music they make, too: smart and stately, full of detailed craft and unfussy intimacy.

In Machine Gun Kelly, Cleveland finally gets its very own Eminem: a clever, working-class white kid who fires nail-gun rhymes in dense clusters.

Whether Daft Punk have created a worthy soundtrack is for filmgoers to decide. As for the album they've made - it's so-so mood music, full of dramatic, string-suffused sounds that are sometimes moving and sometimes just there.

The originals feel like old standards. But the cover of OutKast's 'Hey Ya' is the zinger: It's Southern race-mixing party music come full circle.

What the Brit singer does have is a bunch of shiny, propulsive electro-pop songs.

Simple Math is more intimate and more massive than Manchester's previous sets, as the Atlanta group supersizes the kitchen-sink approach of fellow Georgians in the Elephant 6 collective to depict a panoply of crises: spiritual, marital, chemical, whaddya got?

These four Scots sound like the depressed cousins of the Flaming Lips. [6 Feb 2003, p.62]

Some cuts have strong hooks and others don’t, though the duo’s chant of “I need medical” on “Medical” stands out. Eventually, it starts to sound like an 18-track blowout that’s taking a bit too long to wrap up. All in all, The Voice of the Heroes isn’t bad.

The album has a rushed feel--a likable but low-personality version of her familiar bubble-pop solo mode, alternating between miffed breakup plaints (the Amy Winehouse tribute "Naughty") and gushy new-boyfriend songs.

Four singer-songwriters tag-team in a folk-rock vein, and the high points are when voices unite.

Inconsistency is like a muse here, but he seems to work best with Seventies peers like Joe Walsh, Daryl Hall and Donald Fagen, whose smooth Donald Trump parody "Tin Foil Hat" is a timely highlight.

They lose steam at times, but by the LP's end, their toga party is back pogo'ing and the neighbors are knocking.

[Oceania] is a good stand-alone record, a bong-prog take on the alt-rock grandeur of Gish and Siamese Dream.

Slow Gum is a promising beginning.

Trey Songz's sixth LP skates on the edges of modern hip-hop while remaining true to his R&B Lothario roots.

None of this feels revelatory, but sometimes it sounds pretty fine.

Even if he primarily composed on pan flute, it’d still be what it is--another edition of their signature precise, poker-faced California pop-rock. ... Though this time out the sense of irony is somewhat less blanched and the music a great deal more fun.

On the seventh Counting Crows album, Adam Duritz is still the same dreadlocked dreamer you remember from the Nineties, channeling Van Morrison, R.E.M. and Bruce Springsteen into word-zonked ballads that reference Jackie O., Elvis, Johnny Appleseed and more.

Food & Liquor II has the usual Lupe deficiencies: a hectoring tone ("Bitch Bad") and bombastic beats that pile-drive messages home. He's better when he relaxes a little: Songs like "Hood Now," a celebration of black cultural takeover, have a lighter touch, and hit twice as hard.

Ultimately Dancing with the Devil… The Art of Starting Over delivers on the promise of the first half of its title, and skimps on the second. She’s been through hell, it’s clear. But her music isn’t clear about how she wants to begin again.

His latest features his own zonked singing on tracks like the loopy, Tom Petty-referencing elegy "Feel the Lightning" and the head-spinning backwoods goof "When I Was Done Dying."

On Rolling Papers, Khalifa, the 23-year-old Pittsburgh rhymer responsible for the jersey-waving hit "Black and Yellow," manages to give life to those kinds of cash-gorged perma-baked cliches by warmly luxuriating in the space between pop's fresh-faced exuberance and hip-hop's easy arrogance--between skater and playa, Bieber and Biggie.

Drew's songs still zone out, but the focus here is on a stripped-down luster somewhere between occasional bandmate Feist and the National.

His loudest, most adolescent and downright unwholesome album since the Stooges imploded nearly thirty years ago.