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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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]

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

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.

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.

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").

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.

Swift has the personality and poise to make these songs hit as hard as gems like 'Tim McGraw' and 'Our Song' from her smash debut, and, once again, she wrote or cowrote them all.

Credit four supportive guys rolling out unkempt riffs at tempos so punky they reveal the guitar line of Joy Division’s 'She Lost Control' for the pop hook it is (with saxophone icing).

They've been compiled to death, but this two-disc set is the most comprehensive survey yet of the Mancunians' brief, tear-stained blaze through the mid-'80s indie-pop firmament. [Feb 2009, p.67]

The Renaissance hints at newness, but its cushy boom-bap grooves, airy soulfulness and rhymes about struggle and redemption recall rap’s Edenic “golden age.”

With his buddy Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age, Hughes gets the details right all over Heart On.

Amid the frenzied melancholy, there’s filler and a histrionic misstep or two, but for those willfully lost in the perpetual adolescence Smith has always documented, here’s the new soundtrack to Saturday night.

Scary. And at times, scary good. [Nov 2008, p.73]

Cardinology lays even deeper into the language of rehabilitation, grace and renewal.

Skeletal Lamping is a new high for this long-running yet just-peaking band.

GGD’s career has been a gradual climb out of primordial noise muck and toward beats, and album four is their most propulsive.

The Dears’ breakthrough was 2004’s "No Cities Left," a post-apocalyptic expedition through emotional and political wreckage, and they’re still mining that barren landscape, trying to rebuild.

This Austin trio makes a uniquely wigged-out noise, like genuine Lone Star lone wolves, mixing psychedelic boogie and spastic punk (á la ’80s titans the Minutemen) into shifty, sharp songs that whirl by like tornados with ADD.

Despite the metaphysical yet conversational “Knowing” and a sexed-up title track that begins with his come in her hair, she doesn’t offer enough evidence that her new love is any realer than all the others she’s exulted and struggled through in eight albums going back to 1979.

If David Lynch were to direct a remake of the Victorian romance Wuthering Heights, he wouldn’t need to commission a soundtrack; Secret Machines have recorded it.

On this eight-song EP--available for free on his Web site--the amiable 42-year-old lends his peach-cobbler drawl to songs about maimed soldiers and power-drunk bullies, a doleful cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 'Fortunate Son' and 'Mission Accomplished (Because You Gotta Have Faith),' which deploys a Bo Diddley beat to excoriate a leader who “drove us off a cliff and told us we were flyin’.”

Production by Bjork’s longtime collaborator Valgeir Sigurosson paradoxically plays up the transparency of Brun’s music, floating ghostly string arrangements and vocal harmonies nearby without ever making her sound less alone, or less mournfully serene.

Despite all the players, these lush songs are transitory, not bombastic or cluttered. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.78]

This music is better hazy, its messages garbled and out of reach. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.82]

They're intensely twee indie rockers, prone to brisk, even jittery, grooves, and with his pinched voice, Reyes sounds as though he's grasping at something just out of his reach. [Nov 2008, p.75]

Where the last Streets record was mainly about coming up with new words to describe cocaine, the fourth is surprisingly expansive and often quite deep.

OH (Ohio) ends with a straight-faced rendition of the hokey country standard 'I Believe in You,' with lyrical mush about dogs and babies, but Wagner sings it like he wants to believe every word.

The craziest moment on this debut LP is 'Fucked Up,' where they beg to have their pussies eaten one second, their teeth smashed the next.

The Pretenders’ ninth studio album is a pleasant roots record.

Retro-atmospherics guru M. Ward and grizzled guitar genius Marc Ribot leave their dusty fingerprints. Holland leaves behind a trail of her own.

The eighth volume of the erractic and fancinating Bootleg Series, exhumes his unreleased music. [Nov 2008, p.80]

Her music is exhilarating, enigma-packed and, despite the unceasing noise barrage, winningly sweet.

Here, they combine hardcore punk’s combat-boot side with its tortured-noise side, layering what sounds like scores of tsunami-distortion guitars over an atomic-speed drum blitz to attain rarely witnessed levels of obliteration (think Black Flag reincarnated as psychotic yetis).

The sonic and theatrical muscle it takes to project to 50,000 people who've paid to see another band adds a sense iof purpose that can't transfigure the superb material but does give the music its own charater. [Nov 2008, p.81]

El Guincho has only himself to get along with, but you'd never know it just listening to his album. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.78]

T.I. boats one of gangsta rap's most mellifluous voices and more polysyllabic lexicons, and when he combines the two, he's dazzling, hypnotic, virtuosic. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.82]

The recording quality on their debut album is admirably scuzzy; the drums sound like somebody’s banging a cereal box on the floor, which is part of the immediate charm.

Throughout, atmospheric ennui tugs against upbeat synth-pop--this band is best wehn it's got a beat. [Nov 2008, p.73]

A DJ is only as good as his taste, and Girl Talk is immaculate. [Sept 2008, p.78]

When Caleb evokes God's wrath on the "crucified U.S.A." or describes lost-highway lonelines, the batter-fried U2 atmospherics and portentous Dixiefied grunge makes his worry as real as Brimstone. [Oct 2008, 2008, p.80]

They've toned down the distorted-guitar squall and ash gray skronk that blanketed their first two albums, the rhythms are friskier, more vigorous; the hooks accessible and easier to love. [Oct 2008, p.77]

Lively and loose, cut with collaborators including her talented Scottish boyfriend Johnathan Rice, spooky folkie M. Ward and actress-singer Zooey Deschanel, the 11 songs (many of which she has performed live for years) encompass Southern-gothic folk, Appalachian blues stomps and 'The Next Messiah,' an eight-minute, Who-style rock mini-opera.

Singer-guitarist Eric Earley accesses the haunted Americana Wilco nailed on "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," with big nods to mid-'60s Bob Dylan, early-'70s Neil Young and the country Grateful Dead. [Oct 2008, p.78]

The result is severely mellow, but too sensuous--the basslines thick with libidinal tug, the vocals steeped in contented, coital afterglow--to ever get boring.

THe British balladeers have returned after a long layoff as elegantly miserable as ever. [Oct 2008, p.83]

The album is crisper than the band’s early-’08 EP, thanks to Spoon producer Mike McCarthy, who let the fury bounce around every inch of a cinder-block space in Austin--where, appropriately, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" sound effects were recorded.

Saadiq is a romantic who stays true to the deliberate simplicity of such titles as 'Sure Hope You Mean It' and 'Just One Kiss.' But his adaptable baritone is always crisp and cocky--he never threatens to assume the fetal position if he doesn’t get the extreme cuddling he craves.

Rubin pointed the direction, but credit goes to the band-which, for the first time on record, includes new bassist Robert Trujillo-for recapturing their old sound and reconciling it with what followed.

The music, coproduced by M.I.A. confederate Switch, warps and wanders too, from rock-rap to dancehall to new wave to folk.

From the way gently twanging guitar builds to toxic fuzz on 'Man Made Lake' to the whistling in 'El Gatillo' that nails the stranger-in-town vibe, the band’s best stories are in their music.

Sheff straddles the line between precious and brilliant, warbling twisty, appositive-packed tales about life on the road and crumbled relationships over cranked-up, vaguely folkish rock riffs.