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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

After 25 minutes, they close with five worthy remixes instead of the typical filler—a startup rarity, knowing how to quit while you’re ahead.

The first few songs on their fourth might fool you into thinking they have a future.... But it's downhill after the highpoint: 'Sirens in the Deep Sea.'

It's delightfully wacky and right in character. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.80]

Here, they simply sound jittery, putting romantic complaints to studio-worked music that's oddly brisk and busy, with a dissonance that drowns out the emotion. [Nov 2008, p.73]

The bigger the gamble, the stronger she feels. By the end of the record, she’s lassoing the moon, getting through her loneliness the way she got past teen pop: by sheer force of will.

Prince made sexual audacity a trademark ages ago, but Legend is just too cautious to put it over--he sounds like a CPA on his first trip to the Hustler Club.

Reborn, the track leads off the sardonic sextet’s fifth album of apocalyptic buffoonery shot through with metal, new wave and disco, all of it hilarious, none of it a joke.

While their new album never thrashes, it at least keeps its pretty bare feet on Mother Earth.

Half of their new truckload feels typically phoned-in. But sometimes they surprise you, nailing the signature sounds of their '70s boogie-metal brethren. [Nov 2008, p.72]

Despite its boldness, Perfect Symmetry is as swollen with corny grandeur as a political convention, guided by the delusion that a pompous speech somehow becomes fun if it’s accompanied by a balloon drop.

Too often, though, Pebble is like a falsely vintage digital photo with specks, grain and worn edges Photoshopped in--it’s convincing on the surface but crumbles under close inspection.

Overall, Dig Out Your Soul is a dark, heavy, chart-snubbing record that acts Oasis’s age (main songwriter Noel Gallagher is 42) and is their first in eons that doesn’t seem desperate to please. Oasis have their devil back.

The album splits the difference between smart and smarty-pants: The articulate arrangements occasionally overdo the left-field instrumentation, and Richard Edwards’s empathetic short-story tales flirt with fussiness.

At its best, the echo-chamber soup of flute trills, infinitely cascading drums and fuzz-ball stoner riffs does seep into your head and expand the contents. But the jams often drift when Ejstes wants them to glide; his singing, all in Swedish, is a touch whiny; and his ear for melody can be painfully flat.

Every white soul traditionalist from Hall & Oates to Duffy demands catchy, impactful songs, yet that’s where Thicke is thinnest.

The protest ballads plod, and even the song about praying for God to drown the president sounds more weary than pissed. The Nightwatchman is that rare crusader whose secret identity is more exciting than his alter ego.

Throughout the album, haunted-saloon piano and reverb-choked guitar conjure a murky, wobbly misaligned version of old R&B.

Where past albums documented a litany of bummers, cascading melodies now airbrush moments of depression or kinkiness--even the horny groupie of 'Natural Disaster' sounds like a girl you could take home to Mom. Higgenson’s new outlook is surprising.

They fluctuate between those two poles while their by-the-book hard rock continues to split the difference between Black Crowes and Guns N’ Roses--though no longer with the wit that fueled their coke-y 1999 breakout, 'Lit Up.'

[McCoy's] delivery is laudably cool for a Warped Tour MC. But it’s gunk on the gears of this dancing machine.

Sadly it's undercut by music that tirns Brian Wilson into merely another Brian Wilson imitator. [Sep 2008, p.85]

Finding new targets for their thrashing contempt, Slipknot make ugliness sound just a little bit pretty.

Endearing hints of '60s pop glow faintly beneath the frictionless surfaces of Gane's loops, chirps and austerely percolating rhythms. [Sep 2008, p.84]

Their sixth album is shambling and empty, spiked infrequently with a good bassline or an almost-good chorus, and even the jokes founder on the band’s contempt.

Julian Raymond's production gives the good-timey guitar-and-bajo sound a sharp kick in the butt. [Sep 2008, p.78]

Sometimes the sumptuousness feels a little excessive, like an ice-cream headache. But most of these love songs are uncommon, illuminating and elevating, just like the real thing at its best.

On the album’s best moments, he pours his hopeless longing into sweaty, inebriated celebrations of love’s boundless optimism.

By now he's decided he'd rather be Bob Dylan--recent Dylan, that is, devoted to phlegm-clogged blues-codger grumbles about how he's ready for his pine box. Producer T Bone Burnett proves a willing accomplice. [Aug 2008, p.88]

He tries to atone on the bluesey and somber 'Cadillac on 22's Part 2,' but--like much of this album--the sequel is a downgrade compared to its wrenching and confessional original. [Aug 2008, p.82]

Unfortunately, it translates into kohl-eyed pantomime, rather than cathartic music, with lyrics so hopelessly trite they sound like a feel-good tract for preschoolers.

She’s more geeky than queenly anyway, ­jazzily singing and breezily rapping over buoyant reggae and soul throwback beats sculpted by a guy named Adam who previously worked with American Idol finalist Elliott Yamin.

These gothed-out Chicago yeomen relish a catoonishly dark lyric and if they eke new inspiration out of anything on their sixth studio album--which bounds along, as though bunny-powered, on a pop-punk beat--it's war. [July 2008, p.70]

Her voice was made to rip, and when she lets go just a little, the coyness turns sultry--proof that she might just have a life after high school.

On this clamorous, relentless album, a violent death lurks in every bar (“Rider Pt. 2”), licentious catcalls have replaced slinky come-ons (“I Like the Way She Do It”) and guns seem to fire of their own accord (every other song here). In doses, it’s rousing. Over the course of a whole album, it’s exhausting.

Its penitent but hopeful mood still suggests a Catholic equivalent of corporate Christian rock

Their Fire Songs can seem a little thin-boned--the twins’ intertwined voices are lovely but ethereal, the steel guitars melting into the horizon like a mirage.

At his best, Berman used to refract sage-with-guitar tropes into dryly perverse insights; but this time he's just smothering them in weird phrases. [July 2008, p.76]

Producer Guy Sigsworth (Seal, Björk, Madonna) adds a touch of Eurodisco to her infatuation-junkie rambles.

They’ve buried those strengths deep to make way for a humorless new approach that borrows the turgid bleariness of Oasis (“Living’s much too easy and dying will be some kind of bore”) but misses the Gallaghers’ pomp and glory.

Williams' rapping is thankfully peripheral and the music is a fantastic, distracting mess. [Aug 2008, p.90]

A party band to the core, the Ting Tings can't leave the dance floor without stumbling. [July 2008, p.76]

Weezer dwells on his well-documented obsessions with bad girlfriends and geek nostalgia, but without the usual giddy, mathematically precise songcraft.

Rossdale still has that sexy catch in his throat, but his new songs are ass, evoking a mealy-mouthed, cliché-ridden, bombastic Chris Cornell solo joint more than Bush, and whoever Auto-Tuned the vocals has some explaining to do.

The melodies are often limp, the rhythm section disappointingly friction-free, and Cumming’s main lyrical M.O. is to name-drop coke constantly, like the doofus at a party who mistakes a key bump for a badge of cool.

Usher has called Here I Stand his “grown and sexy” album, and he’s half right. Apart from a couple of A­up-tempo tracks by Danjahandz (“Appetite”) and Scandinavians-of-the-moment Stargate (“What’s a Man to Do”), the production is cocktail-lounge crunk, full of splashy cymbals, jazzy electric guitar and tinkly pianos.

A&E is generally more subdued, but, like Pierce’s earlier work, it’s best at its most theatrical.

Sonically, it's a tour de force.... But the success of this record depends on Johansson and she's not up yo the task. [June 2008, p.73]

Fervent and fierce, with a half-earned world-weariness that can recall Johnny Rotten himself, the Dresden Dolls mean to make goth theatrically smart. Quite often, they do. [July 2008, p.71]

On their self-titled fourth album, one colon-blowing mid-tempo after another shows the strain.

It's sweet. And dull. And, OK, excruciting. [July 2008, p.74]

There's a complancency about this record. [June 2008, p.73]

Rhett Miller’s lovelorn lyrics remain respectably literary, while his pretty singing and his pals’ pretty playing turn increasingly wan and half-cooked.

Pondering his parents divorce or describing intricate and delicate sex acts, Mraz's tasty tenor remains a modestly classy pleasure. But he's lost crucial cool. [June 2008, p.75]

The duo fight back with song after song full of cutting takedowns and brotherly wisdom--they get petty, they get mean, but aided by Arcade Fire orchestrator Owen Pallett, they turn their bitchfests into grandiose melodrama.

There’s a happy messiness throughout: At heart more jazz improviser than control freak, Hebden sounds happiest when things are just about to slip through his fingers.

Though there’s slick, occasionally dynamite production from the likes of the Runners and Scott Storch, the lyrics rarely rise above defensive boasting (“One Hit Wonder”), frigid sex raps (“What It Is [Strike a Pose]”) and rote autobiography (“College”).