Get past Roth’s pinched-sinus tone and penchant for overpronounced internal rhyme and he is a different animal [than Eminem].

The contrast between Pearl and Natasha isn’t always crisply drawn, but a central conviction animates both.

If she's trying to skewer empty luxuries, her delivery is too disengaged to register as ironic or feisty. [Apr 2009, p.63]

The closest his polite bum comes to tearing loose is when he gives his music-hall skiffle a Dixieland bounce. [Apr 2009, p.80]

The Hazrds Of Love is a medieval romance that feels like homework. [Apr 2009, p.80]

On their debut, this trio of fashionably dour West London lads crafts wildly overwrought goth-pop weepers with choruses that would make excellent Robert Smith High School yearbook inscriptions.

Fist delivers a gut punch of awesomely distorted synths and raw, kicks-and-snares percussion....But maintaining a fist-pumping pace can be exhausting.

Their collaboration suggests a nice philosophical dissonance, but only in theory. In practice, Scream is nearly awful.

Congrats, boys, you’ve made Warped’s one millionth girls-suck album.

The Prodigy’s renewed commitment to first principles portends a future as the techno Ramones. There are worse things to be.

It's a perfect set for folks who think Oasis are too humble, that Pink Floyd lacked ambition. TSOOL lay down Stonehenge riffs and cosmic mumbo jumbo so earnestly and expertly that nearly every outfit they raid from the classic-rock closet flatters them.

They’re closer to turning monstrous dexterity into gut-wrenching metal, but for now, the oblatory goats and virgins are safe.

When he’s in command, Barzelay seldom feels the need to be so subtle. But don’t sweat the details and many of the tracks will fall into place eventually.

Some sublime songs prevail over the adornments.

Album No. 5--their first for indie stalwart Epitaph--amps up the band’s aggro guitars, cookie-monster yells and proggy ambition.

Their sixth album enlists Michael Bay levels of volume and grandeur in the service of alarmingly generic, hookless power ballads and plodding prog etudes.

Isbell’s recitation--defiantly unexciting in its averageness--doesn’t help. But the thing is, the guy can really write.

These ringers are lively, and complement one another surprisingly well. So why is the record so underwhelming? That’d be the men at the helm.

Keep It Hid is guitarist and singer Dan Auerbach’s affirmation of ragged principles, self-recorded with blunt, squawky ax-picking and loving lo-fi grit. The sentiments can be snoozily familiar.

These dozen R&B songs boast all the verve and sex appeal of a busines plan. [Apr 2009, p.61]

The Denver foursome is spectacularly anonymous: poignant enough to bring out the waterworks, but generic enough not to get in the way of someone else’s story--making them the perfect soundtrack for prime-time melodrama.

The end of the working day, the mark of Cain, to win, darling, we must pay--these phrases, variations on ones he's used previously, arise on his fifth studio album in seven years, until it seems his uncharacteristic prolific streak comes partly from lazy songwriting, maybe done with a set of Bruce Springsteen Lyric Magnets.

Album four is especially monochrome gut-check metal, so flourishes of mellow pianos or cargo-shorts funk are as welcome as a bag of Skittles in a pack of combat rations.

His flat baritone suggests he’s still new at this whole “getting angry” thing, but the dude’s got the damaged part down.

ven the weaker material is nothing worse than pleasant, but it outweighs and obscures the better-than-pleasant; the middle of the album dissolves into an anonymously sweet haze.

Recorded in Matt’s childhood bedroom with their trademark teenage palette (a Casiotone, Matt’s nasal whinge and Kim’s bubbly punk beats), their sophomore album plays like the indie-musical version of one of those yesterday-I-was-a-teenager-but-now-I’m magically-an-adult ’80s movies.

It’s hard to listen to Already Free without thinking: Visine. Need Visine. That’s how redolent of pot-smoke-and-jam-band mud fields this music is.

Glasvegas are often compared to the Jesus and Mary Chain, another great Scottish band that worshiped Phil Spector and the whammy pedal, but Mary Chain’s appeal was a chilly remoteness. Glasvegas make it cool to care.