Full Reviews Index

Definitive Albums: The Pixies 'Doolittle' (1989)
With over two decades of impressive influence in its wake, dare we ask: is 'Doolittle' alternative music's high watermark?

The Flaming Lips 'Embryonic'
For most, the double album is a place to harness one’s conceptual ideas. For Wayne Coyne, it's a chance to deliberately lose the plot.

Definitive Albums: The Flaming Lips 'Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots' (2002)
'Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots' is the Flaming Lips' ultimate tribute to living life in the face of the inevitability of death.

Christmas on Mars
The Flaming Lips' first-ever feature film is a low-budget oddity that has more to do with underground cinema than underground music.

The Fearless Freaks
An intimate portrait of the Flaming Lips' bizarre quarter-century of ridiculous rock'n'roll.

Clues 'Clues'
Alden Penner's post-Unicorns outfit debuts with an album of dense, dark, distorted, '90s-ish alt-rock.

Fool's Gold 'Fool's Gold'
This Los Angeles-born Afro-Islamic-Hebrew jam-band is the music world's digitized global village made manifest.

Michael Hurley 'Ida con Snock'
The latest LP for the progenitor of the New Weird America is familiar Hurley: simultaneously wacky and touching.

Kings of Convenience 'Declaration of Dependence'
After five years apart, Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe are back on record together, writing a love-letter to each other.

Devendra Banhart 'What Will We Be'
Unlike recent Banhart records, here the ambling, genre-dabbling, pastichey feel isn't a product of lazy happenstance, but written into the album's ambition.

Definitive Albums: Michael Hurley 'Armchair Boogie' (1971)
40 years ago, the New Weird American Folk Underground was essentially just one guy: Michael Hurley.

Built to Spill 'There is No Enemy'
Doug Martsch and co sound like there’s nothing they’d rather be doing than making this record.

Definitive Albums: Built to Spill 'Perfect from Now On' (1997)
Perfect? Well, yeah, almost.

Dead Man's Bones 'Dead Man's Bones'
Clearly the greatest nightmare-doo-wop-with-children's-choir soundtrack to an imagined monster movie recorded by a Hollywood celebrity ever.

Megapuss 'Surfing'
The debut disc for Devendra Banhart's side-project is an in-joke made public.

Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions 'Through the Devil Softly'
Where the Mazzy Star starlet's every whisper is as tangible yet elusive as the breeze.

Definitive Albums: Boredoms 'Vision Creation Newsun' (2000)
It's the most unexpectedly influential album of the '00s: the percussive noise orgy that rewired and inspired Gang Gang Dance, Black Dice, and Animal Collective.

Definitive Albums: Animal Collective 'Sung Tongs' (2004)
Tapping into the freak-folk times, Animal Collective's acclaimed fifth album spearheaded a sweeping movement of 'new primitivism'

Vetiver 'Tight Knit'
'Tight Knit' plays like the musical equivalent of building a model aeroplane: precious and painstaking.

Definitive Albums: Vashti Bunyan 'Just Another Diamond Day' (1970)
Lost in oblivion for nearly three decades, Bunyan's magical debut has been granted an almost holy status by smitten listeners.

Definitive Albums: Radiohead 'Kid A' (2000)
Radiohead ushered in the new millennium with a radical reinvention that crystallized the unease of the era.

Meeting People is Easy
Grant Gee's soul-crushing chronicle of life on the promotional trail methodically tears down the myths of the bon-vivant touring band.

Why? 'Eskimo Snow'
The master of the lyrical overshare, Yoni Wolf views the world as his "lit confessional marquee."

Definitive Albums: The Feelies 'Crazy Rhythms' (1980)
The Feelies preferred coffee over beer, precision over swing, and, most notably, tension over release.

Definitive Albums: Young Marble Giants 'Colossal Youth' (1980)
Recorded in three days in a studio in North Wales, the one-and-only album for Young Marble Giants achieved a perfect kind of simplicity.