Skinner seems both edgier and more contemplative.

A dandy little 36-minute album of simple pop tunes with all the right moves and no real motion.

This song cycle is less about a particular state than it is about Stevens' elegant façade of cleverness.

[A] blindingly good debut.

An energetic and original statement.... Essential.

This music has the serene lilt of pop and the hope of sentimentality but also the gravity of unconventional responsibility. Rather than roaring, this music sears.

The only complaint to be lodged against Bachelor No. 2, other than its partially duplicated track listing, is the mid-tempo groove from which Mann rarely extricates herself.

[The opening] quartet of tunes blows the band's wad, leaving the rest of the album scattered with only moderately cool mid- tempo metal, all of it delivered with gusto but not enough serious hooks to make anything stand out.

As music for airports, the album hums along like a tension-age sedative, but if it was meant to be a grand artistic statement by an acclaimed band with a distinctive vision, it's pretty much static.

Where Shall You Take Me? brings Jurado back to familiar, minimalist territory.

In Rainbows is a richly textured and resonant record. In a career marked by dramatic reinvention, Radiohead’s latest phase — growing old gracefully--is going quite well.

Cave has hinted at a more mature sound on the last few records; here, it comes across in richer, bolder arrangements, the result of his band's more active role in developing the songs.

Antony and the talented Johnsons brilliantly evoke the grandeur and dolor of cocktail hour ennui.

This is probably as close as anyone has yet come to achieving the visions of revolutionary global pop once advanced by the Clash and Afrika Bambaataa; it's equally enlightening to urban street kids and university eggheads.

Beyond the musical unevenness of an album whose finer qualities interleave those mounting miscalculations, a rising suspicion that misery is of more comfort to her than happiness makes the tenor of Williams' songs increasingly hard to bear.

When the music is fully operational... the potential for greatness is obvious.

A rewarding, resonant album, Neon Bible ranks among the best indie rock recordings of all time.

More time spent in the songwriting lab might have yielded material more suitable to the evident studio effort invested and brought Wilco closer to making a truly great album.

Stevens' most personal and focused album.

A second disc which recaps some of the prior singles and B-sides resonates wonderfully, and provides a contrast for the new material, which is the same only better, faster and harder.

Phenomenal, with nary a bum track.

Their worst album so far.... Too much of the album ("Expecting," "Aluminum," "I Can't Wait," "I Can Learn") wallows in an odd, crusty hard-rock haze.

The production is lush and detailed but the songs are strong enough to withstand all the fuss, making this a most ambitious and accomplished record.

By so clearly rejecting the terms and expectations of rock and pop, The Drift asks fairly explicitly to be taken as a serious work of art. However, for all its highbrow aspirations, it seems to fall between two realms, lacking the innovative reach that would make it a credible presence among contemporary avant-garde compositions.

It's hard to imagine any other band with as much indie cred that could succeed with this material; it would be too audacious.

Two albums of E musings is a bit much, but, on the whole, Blinking Lights does stand as a resounding return to form.

It's like being stuck in the seat next to a chatty, batshit backwoods pixie for an 18-hour plane ride.

The propensities for treacle and brimstone are cut by the realism of his portraits and the certitude in his voice. A Nick Drake-like wonder here, it is sonorous, even-keeled and assured.

Whereas Music Has the Right to Children's pastoral atmospherics were airy and open, Geogaddi is faintly claustrophobic and tense.

The impact is inconsistent but stronger.

Takk... resembles the movie The Aristocrats: a narrow selection of material given killer performances.

It's like everything that has always been great about the Red House Painters made a notch or two more exciting in the studio.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is worthy of the attention, as it reveals a band of great ability and confidence brimming with ideas.

The album navigates effortlessly from peak to peak.

Brimming with confidence and good humor, Don’t Do Anything is another high point in a career that threatens to become overstuffed with them.

A calm triumph.

The gap between expectations and delivery, the contrast of emotions that go into real life as opposed to pop fantasy, makes this brief but satisfying album a pointed delight.

Mostly acoustic, with flecks of jaunty snares and loping bass work, his singing is the best so far -- confessional, inspired and bracingly touching.

Cathartic and essential.

The group's masterpiece.

Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not manages to celebrate and mock its cultural milieu simultaneously with genuine affection and sarcasm balanced so well that the scale never tips too far either way.

Favourite Worst Nightmare is a surprisingly significant improvement on an excellent debut.

This mainstream update to the unvarnished directness of Sweet Old World starts slow and flirts with blandness but sparks to life about halfway through.

Bloc Party may not have arrived first in the retro-'80’s sweepstakes, but this great album stakes their belated claim to it.

Hawley emerges as a fine manipulator of studio-driven baroque pop.

Not everything clicks on Get Behind Me Satan -- sometimes it’s too timid and freaky -- but enough of it is so unique, even within the Stripes' own canon, that it succeeds regardless of its faults.

While nothing here fails the consistent artistry of his work, neither does any of it make the direct connection to a soul and heart.

You in Reverse is a tremendous record -- engaging, enveloping, engrossing.

Wildly experimental and unique, Melody A.M. belongs in the collections of fans of lush keyboard instrumentation, '70s soul, new age and Boards of Canada-style strangeness alike.

What may be the most confident and cohesive Silver Jews album yet is shot through with urgency and gravitas, but tempered, of course, with liberal doses of dark humor.

Often irresistible yet occasionally irritating.

A Ghost Is Born is a textbook example of an album created to fulfill expectations the band doesn't necessarily share.

Jaunty, rambunctious, and youthful.

This fine album contains several striking songs (notably “The Dark Is Rising” and “Nite and Fog”), but it suffers in comparison to the artistic breakthrough of its immediate predecessor.

AwCmon is the stronger of the two, with a trio of outstanding instrumentals acting as the backbone for a suite of typically moody songs.

Cedars is a keeper.

A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure is many things: inevitable, insane and their finest album.

Has muddied sound in spots but careful, detailed and varied playing.

The sound is fuller, the arrangements more complex; most importantly, the songs are just a whole lot better [than Parachutes'].

A deeply moving record that is greater than the sum of its individual songs, The Libertines achieves near-tragic grandeur.

Garza’s assault on the skins, much tighter than any Bonham comparisons could possibly describe, gives the album much of its strength and character. The rest can be attributed to creative, post-modern lyrics.

For the most part it succeeds quite well in its single-minded pursuit of disco euphoria, but there’s definitely a whiff of flop-sweat emanating from it.

It's pure BTS, but without enough sparkle or rough-hewn beauty to be memorable.

This is not perfect music: the observations seem to easily gained; the faster songs mere replicas of previous monuments; and no matter how graceful the notes' elisions, an unskillful denouement on many of the songs' endings.

Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes is diverting, short (47 minutes), atmospheric and contains exactly one truly memorable song.

Leo's singing (showing a few traces of a soul side) has never been more confident or convincing.

Sexsmith is incapable of dishonesty, insincerity or cliché in his writing or performance, but none of these melodies soar and the lyrics reveal nothing new for him.

Ultimately, The Campfire Headphase shows continuity with the duo's previous recordings but fails to replicate the sheer beauty and awe-inspiring quality of past material, sounding at times like the work of very good Boards of Canada copyists.

NoYouCmon is more eclectic and less focused, with fine moments to be found.

Feist offers diversity and charm.

The songs aren't bad, but there’s a loss of personality in the grooves.

The harder U2 tries to rock out with wild abandon here, the less spontaneous they end up sounding, making How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb more like an incredible simulation of a punk-influenced album rather than an actual punk-influenced album.

While hardly bad... the album too often sounds as if the ceaseless invention that made Nixon so vibrant has been replaced by self-consciousness of the wrong sort.

Teems with all the life that the band omitted from Oui.

This disappointing album is infectious and literate, but erratic compositional fortitude and lack of daring is a drag, as each clever step is followed by another clever step.

Emphasizing colorful vocals over the average playing benefits the band enormously.

More of an expansion than a breakthrough.

Even through patches of mediocrity, QOTSA still offer something healthy and respectable to the hard rock world, but too much of anything can be bad for you.

The album is ingeniously constructed; many of the songs play off each other while seeming off the cuff and loose-limbed.

The Robinsons remain a fascinating couple on Get Yr Blood Sucked Out, burning through more inspiration and ideas in one album than any band has a right to.

The band's audible confidence in its music gives it the ability to negotiate sudden shifts of tempo, volume, distortion and tone without fussiness or confusion, demonstrating what Franz Ferdinand might sound like if the Scots were a little less together.

There's nothing about the quintet's second album that audibly acknowledges the impact of its debut.

Still quietly bombastic and still occasionally in search of an author, the spacey, haunted music bounces from the ethereal to the grounded dirt that our shoes kick away on imagined dance floors.

Perfectly arranged and one of the best of 2004, it's an ideal starting point for newcomers.

An impassioned, angry and devastating document.

An exciting mix of audacious punk rock stammering held together by such disparate art-rock nomenclature and tendencies as vocal transmutation, discordant climaxes and ironic herky-jerky rhythms.

Positive energy and enthusiasm go a long way here.

Individually, the tracks are every bit as good as anything else he’s ever written; as a whole, however, the album is too much of the same thing, as one glum tale follows another.

A magnificent, epic take on American history and mythology.

The expansive palette of the debut has been shorn of its tumult and restlessness.

While at times the album becomes so lightheaded it threatens to evaporate into nothingness, it is yet another dazzling achievement for the band.

More than any rock album in recent memory... this is a producer's creation.

A strong batch of Dylanesque songs.

This may be a more mature effort, but in places that sound is ordinary and unadventurous.

The songs are catchy and listenable, but Samson's lyrics lack the depth of songs like 'Benediction' or 'A New Name for Everything' on its predecessor.

A record which adheres closely to the formula but fails to generate any sort of spark from it.

While the depression accompanying a relationship breakup comes through, several tracks lose their quirkiness in the studio setting.

The performances are all good, but E’s voice is alarmingly scratchy.