A massive reissue box set has shed a glowing and loving light on this classic collection. ... Starting with the first disc, the remastered version improves the separation of the instruments and restores the warmth of the priceless harmonies that flowed from the original vinyl release. ... The box set is dominated by the acoustic wooden music on which the group built their reputation, but not surprisingly it is Stills who plugs in and cranks it up on several tracks. The tracks come in a bit jarring, but soon grab your ear.

This record recasts her unnerving spell--brooding country-pop riffs that conceal devastating lyrics. [May 2003, p.116]

Rough and Rowdy Days is a typically astounding, kaleidoscopic journey through the last half-century of American history. ... Dylan lapped us a long time ago. He’s still sprinting far ahead. And now he definitely can’t be caught.

While the novelty factor alone makes it worth the download time, it works as a cohesive album long after the initial shock wears off. [Apr 2004, p.91]

Is it essential? Absolutely. With only a guitar or piano, and a voice that is developing into one of the most expressive in rock, Marshall crafts deeply textured explorations of heartache, terror, longing, dismay, and emotions I'm pretty sure I've not found yet.... Rock will see few finer releases this year.

Pink showcases every sound Boris can make.

Not since Grateful Dead's Europe '72 has there been a live double album in which intimacy and expansiveness, guitar mess and piano reflection commingle this sweetly. [Dec 2005, p.107]

The toughest record ever made by a former mainstream country artist.... If all the songs don't rival her finest work, the arrangements pull them up. [May 2004, p.105]

Will likely be the best political album this year. [Mar 2005, p.88]

Across nine tracks, singer/guitarist Niko Kapetan and drummer Bailey Minzenberger bounce effortlessly from fragile ballads to punk rippers to chamber-pop crescendos, somehow both fully in control and barely holding it together.

The relative quietude—there are still grooves aplenty—makes you lean in, sizing up elements of songcraft and musicianship that might’ve previously hid underneath the band’s dancy, psychedelic scrim. This serves Khruangbin well, since they make music to Santo & Johnny’s level of wistfulness, and they can play their asses off. The performances are so good, in fact, you sometimes want to divide them into stems.

Heartfelt guitar rock capable of punching you in the gut and patting you on the back. [Aug 2003, p.114]

Feel Flows is an absolutely essential document that takes the first steps toward rewriting the story of a band that managed to persevere against overwhelming odds.

Beam has given us his second straight masterwork: self-assured, spellbinding, and richly, refreshingly adult. [Apr 2004, p.89]

On this generous double album (with Lloyd on sax and flute, Jason Moran on piano, Larry Grenadier on bass, and Brian Blade on drums), he draws on impressionism, post-bop glory, and gospel-soul. Passages sparkle lyrical here, spark with friction there, always marked by depth and humanity, inventive and engaging and always illuminating.

Instead of the pleasing pop potpourri of their last album... the 13 songs on And Then Nothing . . . flow together subtly, all texture, mood and shade.... Yo La Tengo's tenth collection of warm, tiny songs is by far the finest in their careers...

Even more dense and brutal than Burma's early records. [Jun 2004, p.103]

"Sister Ray" comes across like a medley has so many shifts in speed, volume, and energy that it seems more like a medley than a concentrated take on the White Light/White Heat epic. It's the brightest gem among many in the collection, which consolidates all of the group's many faces into one cohesive opus.

This is Lage’s statement, and as both player and composer he seamlessly connects Django Reinhardt to Joe Pass, Charlie Christian to Bill Frisell, all the way forging his own paths, his immense talents given voice by his joyously open spirit.

The lyrics explore suburban everyguyism, but the choruses explode like fireworks over a church picnic. [Jul 2003, p.109]

A bruisingly great collection of demented 1988-style boom-bap. [May 2004, p.107]

They channel experimental noise, acid-drenched riffs, and live-show spontaneity into a record of brilliantly crafted nuggets of lysergic rock that is easily their most consistent effort to date.

A warm and deeply engaging snapshot of fractured relationships and existential dread. [Aug 2003, p.116]

This is a record that creates tension from the cryptic and release from the inexplicable. [Jul 2003, p.105]

Half expansive, burnished radio-rock, half swampy Delta hoodoo-hollerin' that reeks of Brock's Southern sojourn. [May 2004, p.103]

Lstenability is the difference between the majesty of this 79-minute behemoth on paper, and the songs it needs to succeed. So let's give it up to the astounding thicket of music here, the best-produced rap since the dawn of Drake.

Mostly great. [Jan 2005, p.96]

Ultimately, Fearless Movement bolsters Washington’s prowess as a jazz bandleader engaged in cultural and musical curation. Rather than transforming the actual language of composition or harmony or improvisation, he stacks his influences and relationships to form an ensemble sound that is monumental, and thoroughly his own. In or out of jazz, that means so much.

It feels more like a band playingto a multitude of strengths than the formal wrestling of Kid A. [Jul 2003, p.103]

After only a few spins, The Greatest sounds like another [masterpiece]. [Feb 2006, p.84]

Barring "Blade Runner," the best pop art by a former adman. [June 2008, p.119]

Funeral For Justice represents another step in decentralizing the public discourse from Western normative standards, hopefully allowing for a better understanding of others and ourselves.

It’s not only Vegyn’s curation of shifting instrumental sound, from jazzy and transcendental to glitchy and trip-hop symphonic, that showcases his dexterity. At the album’s centerfold, three tracks (“Everything Is the Same,” “The Path Less Traveled,” and “Makeshift Tourniquet”) repeat the album’s title in three different tones: one a scratchy, insidiously inhuman voice, the next a distant human echo that feels like a fading memory, and the last that’s closely spoken like a self-reminding mantra. Its meaning morphs and settles like a redemptive exhale and inhale.

This is not garage rock; this is art rock. And that's a compliment. [May 2003, p.107]

Unlike many rockers who cherish childlike ideals only to fall prey to amateurism or whimsy, Ze is aware that kids are both complex in their inventions and earnest in their intentions. [May 2006, p.93]

This is music to play in dark, velvety, womblike bars; this is music to play while buying cigarettes; this is music for well-dressed poor people. [May 2003, p.109]

There is no more transportive band working in music. [Oct 2005, p.140]

With her deft band, the New York-raised, New Orleans-based musician (on cello, banjo, and guitar) pairs music from her Haitian-American roots with threads of its Caribbean, Latin-American, and African family tree. .... It’s the most engaging, dynamic and, crucially, personal of her five solo albums.

Simultaneously joyous and joyless, all downloaded beats, downhearted lyrics and down-the-hatch daring. [Aug 2003, p.113]

While Essence was lyrically spare, World marks Williams' return to the painful sensuality of the specific. [May 2003, p.109]

The Von Bondies' calling card is the urgency of [Jason] Stollsteimer's voice as it sands down the shop-worn chord progressions. [Mar 2004, p.92]

Pig Lib is both the loopiest music Malkmus has ever made and the most direct. [Apr 2003, p.104]

Mix[es] xylophones, spaghetti-Western trumpets, and quirky trick guitars to sweeping effect. [Jun 2003, p.109]

A raging, ragged Behind The Music--15 coal-black odes to the casualties that art leaves behind and that life can't avoid. [Aug 2003, p.111]

The album shuffles and grooves like Fela Kuti sloshed on gin and tonics. [June 2003, p.100]

Wildflowers is very much a showcase for Petty as a solo artist. At that point in his life Petty was a songwriting machine and this reissue has the demos to prove it. ... He was still displaying extraordinary ambition and, most importantly, still speaking to and for his very large audience. ... Tom Petty had the miraculous ability to write songs almost anyone could identify with and enjoy. Wildflowers & All the Rest is the most revealing window we have into his process so far.

Frances explores an explosive groove Comatorium only implied. [Mar 2005, p.83]

Delicate Casio-toned anthems. [Mar 2005, p.91]

In spite of all their stony sonic exploration, they never let Z turn into Zzzz. [Oct 2005, p.133]

The Jane's Addiction album Jane's Addiction should have made last year. [Jun 2004, p.108]

An atavistic orgy of recycled riffs and lifelong obsessions. [Sep 2004, p.120]

This is the album Metallica lifers have been waiting for: an inspired return to the complex savagery of old. [Jul 2003, p.109]

His grinding blues buitar/aggro piano and her Bonham-bashing coalesce in a sound as heavy as his soul. [Apr 2006, p.91]

Scarily intimate and irresistibly beautiful. [Mar 2005, p.92]

Like Elliott Smith after ten years of Sunday school. [May 2004, p.108]

A perfect album, except perfect is the wrong word for a band so dedicated to kitchen-sink oddness. [Mar 2004, p.96]

What it sounds like to be sucked into doomed romanticism rather than aspire to it. [Jun 2005, p.108]

This time, the band lug the still-smoking amps from their lightning-strike live show into the studio and let the noise chase the midnite vultures away.

AC are all about the sometimes blissful, often uncanny intermingling of song and space. [Nov 2005, p.98]

[A] cosmos-goosing masterwork. [Jul 2005, p.104]

Lets you better appreciate his knack for weaving glorious pop songs out of change-ups and mixed signals. [Jul 2004, p.109]

She's become masterful at painting in the blues and grays of everyday emotion. [Feb 2005, p.92]

Whether Eleanor echoes her grandmother or provides a less mature counterpoint, her gravity melds with Sarantos' gusto for a dissonance that's never entirely discordant. [Nov 2005, p.100]

The best record they've made. [Apr 2003, p.107]

Is Dark Matter that different from immediate predecessors Backspacer, Lightning Bolt, and Gigaton? Not really. But is it somehow Pearl Jammier, in an ineffable sense? Yep—in fact, it’s something special.

It's not gallows humor, just the most natural thing in the world. [Oct 2003, p.113]

They sound like they're too busy tearing their limbs off and hitting one another over the head with them to think about what the songs actually mean. [Apr 2003, p.102]

There isn't a tune on No Cities Left, the Dears' gorgeous second album, that's not pitched at a minor state of emergency. [Jan 2005, p.99]

A fresh, literate blast of nuanced screamers and mid-tempo heart purging. [Aug 2003, p.119]

Sounds as informed by middle-American community theater, church choirs, and John Adams' American operas as any canonical "folk rock" it may resemble. [Jul 2005, p.102]

There's a nifty kind of egolessness about the NPs: They're team players in a way that few other bands are right now. [Aug 2005, p.93]

Years of gradually opening up their minimalism have imbued Low with the wisdom to make every new layer count. [Feb 2005, p.91]

Finds these thoughtful Brits exploring even more emotional territory. [Mar 2004, p.96]

Savage punk rock that shifts and shakes like the bleachers during a homecoming orgy. [Jan 2005, p.98]

Both sucks the air out of Dixie legend and revives it. [Sep 2004, p.122]

For the juke-joint blues of “Jimmy Mathis” and the breezy mountain song “Comin Round,” he takes old-school-as-the-hills song forms and gussies them up for the club.

[A] more toned-down, at times strikingly sincere, follow-up. [Dec 2005, p.104]

They're better at evoking turbulence than talking about it--efforts to cop '80s-pop vocals are overshadowed by the cascade and rumble of the instrumental long-players. [Apr 2005, p.102]

The flow is straight-up alien: chilled-out and frantic at the same time, slightly breathless. [Feb 2004, p.95]

A Kleenex-grabbing, chain-smoking, staring-out-the-window, in-bed-for-days breakup record. [Jun 2004, p.106]

A dark, emotionally intense record, best experienced on headphones. [Jan 2004, p.97]

Repulsion is like The Wild Bunch seen from the outskirts of Edinburgh, a European reflection of the stylized American West. [Aug 2005, p.99]

Few bands this side of Wilco float along so easily on little more than diagonally rendered elegiac noises and severe anxiety disorder. [Mar 2006, p.95]

His characters feel like individuals, not archetypes. [Sep 2004, p.114]

They do it better [than the Postal Service]--catchier songs, chillier production and more sophisticated beats. [Nov 2004, p.118]

They clearly prize improvisation and spontaneity; the songs always sound like they were written this morning, refined over lunch, and recorded in time for happy hour. [Jan 2004, p.103]

His loosest, most inspired set yet. [Mar 2005, p.86]

Even when the music flags, Common's remarkably hungry raps push it along. [Jun 2005, p.102]

Stuff this simple can turn into art that's fantastic or a fantastic disaster. Coachwhips walk the line masterfully. [Feb 2005, p.91]

Gut-wrenching, foot-stomping punk. [Feb 2006, p.87]

He's one of the four or five best MCs breathing. [Aug 2004, p.103]

[Death Cab] have never made the truly great album that their best songs promised. Until now. [Nov 2003, p.112]

The surprise here is less that an album about emerging, stronger, from sorrow’s all-encompassing shroud somehow goes down like a goblet of spiked sunshine. The surprise lies more in how much more emotional power the guitarwork—fluid, generous, measured—brings to bear, how much weight it carries this time.

Daniel's bump-and-grind synth lines are all campy humor. [Mar 2005, p.92]

A richly rewarding passage through the last five decades of American music history. [Aug 2005, p.99]

With his knack for extracting humor from the mundane, Skinner’s the perfect poet for this snooze of a topic.

Bright Yellow is the soundtrack for a small town, like New york, where everybody knows too much about everybody else. [May 2003, p.112]

Their best by a mile. [Jun 2003, p.100]