As with much of her past work, it’s almost embarrassingly human, sometimes sounding too close to you to believe it’s not your own.

For a band who has struggled to make themselves heard and understood, God Save the Clientele may just be the Clientele casting some burdens to the wind, channeling all their adoration for Love and the Television Personalities with clear eyes, clear minds, and louder voices than they ever have before.

No Shouts, No Calls isn’t just their most song-based work, it’s also their most romantic.

I’m tired of being simply “satisfied” by the Sea and Cake.

[It] continues with the middle-of-the-road, ambient pop approach that marked his last few efforts.

You’d hardly expect songs as strong as these to be in anyone’s wastebasket, but with only a few exceptions the material assembled here is just as, if not more, intimate and honest as anything on those proper albums.

It is an energetic, powerful, and enjoyable album where occasionally pretty invention is marred by the suspicion that a hit-making producer is on deck.

The boys deliver the same sort of agreeable Britpop they've made their name on, wisely realizing that ambition's really not for everyone.

PROG, like all their recordings, is another collection of professionally played and well-produced tunes that present themselves to a potential mass audience with hectic grace, sober whimsy, fluent navigation of chaos and without the slightest shred of pomposity.

A wild and beautiful ride.

Adding a set of young female characters to this drab mix only accentuates that a concept is needed to bolster the actual music.

Despite Beyond’s tendency to feel like a career retrospective in spots, it contains plenty of songs that rival Mascis’s best work.

The Reminder is rarely exciting or thrilling, and never revolutionary.

It is simultaneously the most resplendent, accomplished record the band has made, with all kinds of songs... that retain the worst, most self-indulgent aspects of one of underground rock’s most consistently imperfect bands.

Because of You mostly reminds us of the Ne-Yo Problem. He wants to be bad, but chickens out at the last minute.

Miranda Lambert is at a very rarified place right now, turning her songs into vehicles for a persona that transcends background narrative and personal history. This is Jagger, Bowie, Debbie Harry, and early MJ territory.

While I’ll stop short of saying that [co-producer Neil Michael] Hagerty ruined this record, I can definitively say that I’d love to hear what it would have sounded like before he got his hands on it.

Remember that concept album Tori Amos did that was supposed to reclaim all those male-oriented anthems from their blowhard XY carriers? Smith paints over Amos’ tedious version and executes the idea so much better, without even bragging that she’s doing it.

Favourite Worst Nightmare, a demonstrative record of small deviations, may pale before its predecessor but is better.

It’s a little disjointed, more enigmatic, and more confounding than its predecessors: a gentle, mysterious giant of an album that could only have been created by a father.

Pullhair Rubeye isn’t awful, but it could’ve been great.

There are no great songs to speak of on Dumb Luck, and in fact there are just a few that I would hesitatingly call “good,” or more important, “memorable.”

While the music is all over the place the vocals feel pinned down and flat.

This record is the first time the Fucking Champs have actually managed to capture the actual emotional colors of their own banality, rather than trying to piss a whole two-minute solo all over the place.

It’s a loud and cacophonous affair—where previous efforts doled out their noise in judicious restraint, Breaks responds to their need to unhinge their fractured pop.

It’s enormous, senseless, superficial, selfish, and cocky past the point of absurdity, but it’s never wrong.

Let’s Just Be is as poppy and willfully idiosyncratic as Arthur’s older work, but is both more conventionally arranged and more loose-limbed than ever before.

This is one of the most forward-thinking “rock” albums to come down the pike in some time, playing with the genre in both form and function while showing off Reznor’s ridiculous resevoir of ideas in fine fashion.