With a push from Nas and a whoosh from Santigold and new life from their chorusing kids, the beats spritz and submarine in signature Beasties style as the rhymes claim contexts high-living and low-life.

Creating a suite of well-turned if unnecessarily understated antiwar songs, she's a gifted, strong-willed minor artist bent on shaking England in particular.

The four humanist protest songs she rolls out just before an unnecessarily dreamy closer seem so unforced you feel for all those who have striven so hard to do nothing more. Ari, Viv, Exene‑-because sisterhood is powerful, this one's for you.

As they add the quaver of age to Andy Gill's slashes and modernize Jon King's animadversions with cellphone photos, comparison with the 20-year-old Mall quickly reveals how blessed the mainstays are in drummer Mark Heaney, who in the great tradition of Marky Ramone has both the musical sense to respect Hugo Burnham's simplicity and the historical savvy not to attempt an anachronistic replication.

The hoarse, throaty voice knows its consonants, and the lyrics are full of the everyday breakdowns most of us survive into midlife and beyond.

It's a punk album with a difference, which at this late date is the only kind you can count on for a thrill.

She deploys her superb music to address an issue so pressing few can stand to think about it: who kills who?

Euro synth duo, tuneful and sometimes haunting, always droney fun‑-textured, beaty lines under an unnaturally high-voiced girly-woman singing lyrics of no importance when you can make them out, which isn't often.

The poppers keep on coming right through the bonus tracks of porn-lite funk-lite that's quirky and clever front to back.

The music is the mild, irregular folk-rock he's explored for decades, graced with global colors that sound as natural as that guitar.

Beautiful, especially if you like your beauty grand. And beauty is good.

Saigon don't play. He's a social realist and a realist moralist who makes his seriousness work for him.

This array of whomping exotica reflects its creator's appetite for any Third World dance movement he can get his ears on, including such new ones on me as kuduro, barefoot, and -- from the mysterious depths of the District of Columbia -- Moombahton​!

They have mouths on them, yes they do. But their mouths are connected to their hearts and minds, and amped by loud guitars.

the doting Vasquez love song "Blue Eyes," the lyrical Dawes lost song "Thanks for Nothing," and the clippety-clopping Replacements road song "Portland" all augment the deep craft and acrid wordplay of the guy who's why you heard them‑-in fact, who's why you heard this varied, consistent, tune-conscious album.

Lynn still owns the songs, but she's pleased as pie to lend them out, and they come back to her lovingly countrified even when the borrower is Hayley Williams, of Paramore and Franklin, Tennessee, who acts naturally over an acoustic guitar and should give Jack White lessons.

Atmospheric. Play loud anyway, so it won't be.

Whether she's singing it for her penniless sisters or her affluent self is impossible to tell. That's why they call her provocative. Also, um, controversial.

These 13 excellent songs are sufficiently specialized to make you realize how classic Volume 1 was--and what a theme statement "Past Time" was.

The quirky murmurs, yelps, and coos of his head voice, a high end of unequalled softness and give, sound responsive where Jackson's sound willed. There's a girl there, or just as likely a grown woman. And whether or not El seems manly to you, he's turning her on and vice versa.

A little too decisively to instill much hope for his love life, the rowdy songs are deeper than the thoughtful ones.

A song band and proud, they turn down the boogie so we're sure to get the lyrics, which except for the two Eddie Hintons are laid out as well in a booklet so handsome the habitual downloader may want one for himself (or herself, I wish).

Although overdoing the soulful melodrama doesn't beat overdoing the suave cool as decisively as the retro-nuevo believe, the songwriting here is a big extra difference maker, with enough pop moves to lighten the overall mood.

Given his limitations, his famous friends are a mixed benefit, because they show him up.

Soon Hammond's "You Smoke Too Much" is fitting right in. As together as can be expected, and as Miller requests with a hint of desperation, "Please Hold On While the Train Is Moving."

If the verse-chorus-verse of these gorgeously understated, quiet but hardly grooveless artsongs makes your teeth hurt, Grizzly Bear will give you something to suck on any year now.

Even in their overwork, however, they evince an effort that bears a remarkable resemblance to care‑-that is, to caring in the best, broadest, and most emotional sense.

There are stories proper galore, plenty more than the three tracked as such, and every one is worth hearing‑-always as narrative and usually as music, where Snider's acquired drawl provides a species of musicality akin to that of prime rapping, especially over a vamp.