There are few high or low moments--which might put some listeners off--but texture and content, rather than pulse-raising histrionics, have always been Q-Tip specialties.

Her second album is rowdier and less well-behaved, and thus better, although the template is the same: breathy coos and lush strings intermittently blown apart by distorted guitar blasts.

This album takes major steps beyond its predecessor, "Love Is Simple." It adds a streak of joyful African funk, with sputtery rhythms and guitar curlicues.

Ever since he figured out how to write tough-buzzard songs, on his 1997 comeback Time Out of Mind, he’s been knocking them out of the park. This one leans hard on ready-made blues in the citified-country-ways style of Chess Records.

Walking on a Dream initially sounds as familiar as montage music in an HBO midday movie, but it will haunt your dreams.

You could roll your eyes and complain that these guys are still pimping teen angst in middle age, but really it sounds more like it’s matured into the longest-running mid-life crisis ever--30 years and counting.

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

With this foulmouthed, backsliding rock, Hull and his flock do Dixie real proud.

Their full-length debut--anchored by sunny ’60s-style pop festooned with strings and heavy-handed synths--also includes a Portugese track, a classical-music interlude and (enough already!) a tap-dance routine.

The fourth disc from her Toronto foursome Metric adds brawn, finesse and grandeur to their new-wave drive and Morse-code guitar scrapes.

Aubert’s dude-sings-like-a-lady tenor conjures false hope for a relationship he knows is doomed. SSPU salute misery as a kind of ideal, the opposite of love but just as beautiful.

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

Micachu has made one of the strongest debuts of the year.

Pragmatically exploiting his sure tune sense, his saving falsetto and a command of the political facts well exceeding that of Living With War, he’s turned out the first great protest album of the new dispensation.

Junior Boys’ immaculate synth-pop comes with a heartsick afterburn, even such unrobotic elements as a wandering saxophone or gentle acoustic guitar.

On their fourth record, the tempos are slower, the guitars thick and meaty, the rants kinda melodic, the thoughts impressionistic.

It’s Blitz! is the sound of a band reborn with new momentum, and on an album that requires dancing, the message is clear: It doesn’t matter where you came from. Just keep moving.

Parish brings out Harvey’s crazy, arty side, pushing to extremes as she works her long-established territory of sex and death.

The sound matches lyrics about isolation and despair, achieving a freeze-dried catchiness in the opening songs. But by the end of the album, cleverness gives way to the bleak and the drab.

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

Their final album is no solemn headstone. The languid beats are hazy with heat-distortion organs and porny electric guitars; the spirit is carefree.

The diversity isn't as effortless, but the pushier, poppier beats dislodge A&M from their polite safety zone. [Apr 2009, p.58]

Andersson’s lyrics are often tricky to make out--can she really be singing, “We talk about love/We talk about dishwasher tablets”?—but almost every song incorporates shrewd production details, like the clog-dance percussion that kicks 'I’m Not Done' forward.

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

He's a master of sweaty hyperventilation, but it's his less frenzied moments--the techno equivalent of circular breathing--that keep the party from collapse. [Apr 2009, p.59]

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

Through it all, the machines sound as juicily alive as the human beings. [Apr 2009, p.63]

Mastodon present a prog-metal concept that would make Stephen Hawking bang his head.

She's been kicking around the industry a few years--she cowrote Britney's 'Gimmee More'--but she still comes across as fresh on her long-delayed debut.

The sound quality is appropriately assy, and guitarist Ira Kaplan has fun playing a pissed-off leather-jacket pimplehead. But Yo La’s gentle side naturally peeks out.

His new take scythes through the original, revealing growls and guitars long obscured—sometimes it’s distracting, but often it lends the songs a newfound jolt.

Lush and languorous, velvet-robe decadent and soft-focus steamy, Histoire is a make-out record and a gross-out record.

Scored with ramshackle grandeur by scribbly guitars, fat horns, poignant keyboards and ragtag sing-alongs, Benaim’s lyrics narrate the anxieties and optimisms of New York City’s young, educated and underemployed.

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.

Over skeletal guitar and drums, An Horse balance scruffy musicianship with offbeat melodic beauty as Cooper narrates the day-to-day drama of a flailing relationship.

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

On her third album, Clarkson finds a Third Way: She makes nice with the pop machine and takes back the mall while keeping her integrity and personality intact.

Face Control is a small triumph of intoxicating claustrophobia, full of crumbling, poignant melodies spurred along by thecold, unfeeling whip-crack of a cheap drum machine.

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

Kasher is back to the microscope and black light, using willful musical twists to tear apart his own thirtysomething hypocrisy on this ambitious, kinda-grossly-titled sixth CD.

Perkins freewheels through American music traditions—Haight-Ashbury folk ('Hey'), New Orleans brass ('Doomsday'), junkyard blues ('I’ll Be Arriving')--with arrangements as rich as a pawn-shop display.

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

Her dream-cinema tales can meander, but Case’s voice will lay you flat, sure as any storm.

No Line on the Horizon is U2’s third killer in a row--by now, it’s bizarre to remember that just 10 years ago, everybody thought they were headed toward the dinosaur band tar pits.

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.

Whether he’s lamenting immigration hassles or imagining himself a depressed American kid fighting in Iraq, this Muslim fan of Biggie and Bruce Lee has a common touch. He’s a universal soldier, not an exotic novelty.

Suffer through some over-eager violin and flute solos early on, and by the time Morrison hits the guttural blues moans of the bonus track 'Listen to the Lion,' the songs have opened up like a source of eternal life.

Black Lips make the same album over and over. If that album sucked, this might be a problem. But it doesn’t.

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.

The familiar-sounding song structures are an artfully crafted misdirection.

Ward still sounds most himself when he gets lost in his own world.

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.

Wordman Lillian Berlin murmurs more than he declaims and prefers to share vocals with members of a shifting communal entity dubbed the “Living Things Choir,” and if that fuzzes up the lyrics, well, like most bands, Living Things are more into emotions than ideas anyway.

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.

Everything here, from the restrained pedal steel and drifty organ to the lyrics, reflects a gentle informality that has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with following the flow.

She offsets an assault of cheekiness with confessions so intimate, they could have been drafted during an A.A. meeting.

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.

With steel guitars, fiddles, banjos and newspaper-scrap reports of floods and desolation, The Mountain is as fierce as any past Bastards recording, just more honed and hellbound.

As usual, Franz Ferdinand pack a greatest-hits album’s worth of melodic tricks into each tune, while Kapranos purrs the sort of pick-up lines that would earn a lesser man a gimlet in the face.

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.

This is their sunniest, most likeable record, leavened by hints of light-footed dance music.

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.

Some songs are all middle, stuck on what might be mere bridges by, say, Rufus Wainwright or Paul Simon. Yet Bird’s open-field poetics do let a wider world creep in, from the corruption of ecosystems to the isolation that can afflict a touring musician or a declining leader alike.

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.

They're not just churning out electro-scuz-soaked romps, they're reclaiming music's right to drop the verse-chorus form, set out on weird five-minute electronic benders and end up somewhere strange and exciting. [Oct 2008, p.80]

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.

The mellow rethink helps Cook get over his sweaty ’90s heyday, and his buddies sound equally liberated.

This is the brightest, breeziest, giddiest record Fall Out Boy have ever made.

Anything involving a string section is disastrous, but a couple of choruses are suitable for both raucous fist-pumping and rampant pouting.

After contributing smart songs and sly vocals to Al Green’s 2008 Lay It Down, Anthony Hamilton seemed poised for a breakthrough. This isn’t it.

The MC turns largely to the Neptunes for music, and their lithe, bombastic space-porno sonatas provide a vitality and playfulness he’s still capable of matching. But a string of increasingly awkward and thoroughly ludicrous sex jams finds him slapping asses, and may leave his devotees smacking their foreheads.

Her wispily aspirational singing tugs hardest on 'Fall,' cowritten with Natasha Bedingfield, where escapism and realism do battle and her pretty pony of love rides a beautiful rainbow that may or may not lead to the glue factory of hobbled dreams. Stay tuned.

Trying to express her actual feelings, instead of inhabiting a fantasy, she leaves us looking for an authenticity and vulnerability that isn’t in her skill set.

On album three, he tests out heartbreak, and his emotional wiring doesn’t cooperate.

It’s a modest record, but also the first Byrne album in decades to feel sprung from outside the ex-Head’s head space.

They’ve upped the sonic oomph a notch, leaning on the piano, violin, xylophones and perfectly mangled Pavement-style guitar mess.

The 808 features just 16 sounds, but Kanye works wonders with this limited palette, turning lo-fi kick drums into an austere artistic statement.

Punch line for punch line, Luda is still the best in the business (e.g., promising to get ladies “wetter than Michael Phelps”), but these sex jams and hater disses feel too flat and perfunctory for his thousand-watt personality.

Mood enhancers like 'Blind Confusion' and 'Blister on My Soul' set tart melodies to a guitar punch that compensates for a shortage of coherent content. But from there, things slow down and bloat up.

The trilogy signals a deep strangeness in this tour through his psyche. Fortunately, it has a fairly shredding soundtrack.

This is all folded into a weirdly ambitious disco-rock record (Madonna collaborator Stuart Price produced) that occasionally takes on fun topics like desert-motel nooky, but more often gets bogged down in ruminations on Why We’re Here, not to mention What It All Means.

Generally, they’re smart and musical enough to turn rhetorical gestures into convincing rock & roll. But when they subtitle the whole schmear “A Love Vision!” you wonder who they’re trying to kid.

Chinese Democracy's non-existence is so well-known and ingrained, the source of so many jokes, that its actual existence can only be a letdown. That is until you hear it. Then, somewhat astonishingly, 5,475 days, at least $13 million, fourteen studios, twenty or so musicians (including five guitarists and a harpist) seems just about right.

What’s revealed is...well, what we’re used to. Beyonce is still a beauty-shop feminist, quick with the smack-downs, and she still describes the rattling rush of love with preternatural poise.

It’s a steadfast assault, whether he’s brooding over dust in the wind ('If Today Was Your Last Day') or idealizing a girl (“She ain’t no Cinderella when she gettin’ undressed/’Cause she rocks it like the naughty Wicked Witch of the West").

Dido should let her socks go unsorted for a while; genuine sorrow sounds good on her.

As overblown as he is oversensitive, reaching toward the rafters whether his jumbled platitudes about wounded relationships warrant it or not, Cook is more like Michael Bolton in a T-shirt.

Since his 2005 debut, T-Pain has seen his Auto-Tuned swagger jacked by everyone from Kanye to Lil Wayne, but he has kept his sound fresh with a bottomless bag of hooks and a grainy rasp that the computers can’t buff away.