Congrats to Baldi for getting one right.

Elsewhere it's just sweet sensation. Succumb‑-succumb.

The physical and even mental diminution enriches the music.

This is a pop record because its shamelessly hedonistic barrage of proven dancefloor tricks will obviously be more fun at home than in a club.

Musically, this is pop without shame‑-her hookiest and most dance-targeted album.

He nails three [songs] flat-out....The rest tend more, how to say it, evocative.

Chugging, grinding, crackling, swelling, bubbling, babbling, these tracks don't sound like part of the natural world, but they do sound cognizant of the natural world.

Insofar as she pretends her willful pose is the holy truth, she's annoying. What saves that pose is the willful power of a presentation less Courtney Love or Chan Marshall than PJ Harvey.

Give it its long chance and you'll find that Cohen's sense of humor alive and kicking from the first words.

His romantic laments are models of texture, respect, and profound loss, their beats subtle, seductive, weird, and seized like time.

As fresh as Lisa Lee at the top of the key.

This is how the pleasure principle feels to an alienated unbeliever resigned to engaging the world on his own perverse terms.

What kept me on it was the ingrained musicality of a bunch of jokers who've evolved into a sonic organism even though they never see each other anymore.

Their synthbeat-meets-comi​x concept got over as pop because it found a mildly playful and pleasurable way to enact well-meaning self-effacement.

The snatches of Scott-Heron's voice, cracked for sure but deeper than night nonetheless, delivers it from callow generalization and foregone conclusion.

There's more distortion, less naturalism.

With four-on-the-floor dance music the nearest the actually popular pop world came to mindless rocking out in 2011, I only wish it had a few "I Gotta Feeling"s.

It's less surefire than Culdesac. But it's more satisfying emotionally.

He surveys his doubt-ridden world with uneasy resolve and disillusioned, self-deprecating wit.

What I get from the album as a whole isn't a feel for the fictional Redford Stephens. It's the pop refrains, Euro orchestrations, and simplified drumming absorbed by a sound that shows no sign of standing pat.

The lounge feel is shored up by sometime guitarist Bruce Edwards, who if he ain't Ulmer at least ain't Jim Hall.

Every mean word delivers, and with cameos from Tyler the Creator to 50 Cent it's as if he never went solo.

The three strongest tracks on Waits's most rocking album ever all feature not just Keith Richards but Tom's drummer son Casey.

This does wind down into your basic quality country album.

Chirping their expertly executed tunes, scorning the guitar swagger good old boys think makes them so sexy, they're a pop cartoon worth more than gold.

What we're hearing here is the Temptations turning into the Delfonics--the way his midrange gives up the verse and his falsetto takes the chorus is as nice as his boyish sexism.

He's worth the shot Jay couldn't resist giving him. But he's still not comfortable enough or clever enough.

Unlike Woody Guthrie, Williams is loved more for his singing than his lyrics, and boy does some of this retrofitted doggerel lack character as entuned and delivered.