Just play it a few more times than the fools who clocked dollars for the job and you'll get your money's worth. And I do mean on all 16 new songs‑-three of the four bonus tracks are upper 50th percentile for sure.

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

Seth Lorinczi provides the right shades of darkness‑-sometimes enticing, sometimes engulfing‑-as Sleater-Kinney fans long for a bright and cleansing breakout. They get one as "Handed Love" goes out, when Corin shouts her desperation and rips off a riff, then tops the outburst with the even more rousing "Doubt."

Cataloguing the perks of power he sounds as geeky as Mark Zuckerberg, and because grandiosity doesn't suit him deep down, the sonic luxuries of this world-beating return to form have no shot at the grace of The Collede Dropout or Late Registration. But because he's shrewd and large, he knows how to use his profits profits to induce Jay-Z, Pusha T, the RZA, Swizz Beats, and his boy Prince CyHi to admit and indeed complain that the whole deal is "f***in' ridiculous."

Half rapping and half singing, half bragging and half kowtowing, brazening a "punt" rhyme here and proclaiming commonality with "girls that never thought they could win" there, she's proud to be shameless, with the hooks to back it up.

Gillis's vision becomes less orgiastic and more humanistic.

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

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

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

Not afraid to be funny because they're having so much fun, Arve-Ahlund-Ahlund are one more electrobeat-wielding​ Swedish cartel bent on proving that rock and roll proceeds from enlightened capitalism like we had in America before our plutocrats started expanding the national income gap up past Colombia's.

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.

"Come to our shows and they're clapping again/Thank you my friends" isn't sarcastic, which doesn't mean it's devoid of irony or should be. "There's a brand new dance/Give us all your money/Everybody love everybody" is sarcastic.

The first three songs on this EP are strong, the fourth misty, the fifth sweet and slight, but all know melody and all fill out a portrait of a young man your daughter should only bring home to mother.

Now 74 and short half a lung, he's not making the best music of his life, just the best albums.

There's more distortion, less naturalism.

Congrats to Baldi for getting one right.

he's scored a full album's worth of new material that remains completely in a character unique to him while adding something new to that character.

The music suits because it's also dissociated‑-beaty enough to keep your foot tapping and your subconscious involved, but devoid of the escapist joy that is the miracle of so much Afropop produced from equally horrendous daily struggles.

With one or two exceptions, this CD never lets up, epitomizing his biz-wise mastery of rhumba boogie and the second line. The two pop hits lead. The gris-gris tracks are songs not shtick.

After he goes down on his knees and prays, as he promises he will, this album will be Exhibit A on his application.

Quick-tongued, lascivious, catchy, and delighted with itself, there hasn't been a more pleasurable record all year and probably won't be‑-not even by her.

In vivid contrast to the sanctimonious musicianly overkill of Springsteen's Pete Seeger tribute, Young's overkill leads with its middle finger by ignoring the catchiest tune of the 19th century, the traditional melody of "Oh Susannah."

Until the last two songs, whose overwrought drama I don't have to like just because I trust its verisimilitude, they hit every time.

Matthew E. White's horn charts are the musical development Darnielle has in store for us. But the dealmaker is Jon Wurster's spare, inescapable drumming.

Two melodies reach back centuries. Strong-voiced frontwoman Amy Sacko delivers the word. And although the ngoni is a mere lute, Kouyate gets more noises you want to hear out of his strings than any two jam-band hotshots you can name.

An exciting, multivalent Dreijer sibling showcase. Karin provides saving shades of humanity by exercising the vocal cords nature gave her. But Olof's imagination, sense of humor, and bent rebop carry the day.

Near as I can hear, all that marks these terrific songs as outtakes etc. is that they're slightly less produced and dramatic.

Consider me converted, at least until Bradford Cox lurches off in yet another direction.