Features a more worldly sound and outlook.

What Clones proves, beyond its certain hits, is that the Neptunes have to be considered alongside the handful of great artists (Bowie, Prince, et al) who kept pushing boundaries as they pushed up the charts.

Always undervalued as a songwriter, Franti reassembles his familiar building blocks of rock, reggae, and vintage R&B into the funkiest, most inviting neighborhoods he's yet created.

There's absolutely nothing revolutionary about what these guys are pulling, but they synthesize a gritty staccato new wave attack with the arrogant, swaying machismo of old school boogie with an authority far beyond their few years.

Perhaps the formula is wearing just a tad thin. Nevertheless, it's always foolish not to celebrate melody.

While they still tackle the same young person themes you expect--girls, loneliness, girls--they do so with professional aplomb.

Gray's idiosyncrasies are sometimes buried beneath the syrupy strings (which may have been the intent), robbing the album of unpredictable highs as well as lows.

Recall[s] both Fugazi's punk slam and early Santana's psychedelic sheen.

The pair simply revert to the beats and concerns that made them an institution in hip-hop's golden age; except for the occasional cameo (Snoop Dogg, Jadakiss), The Ownerz could have hit the streets a decade ago without raising eyebrows.

Everything Must Go is another great Steely Dan album, a hardy inclusion to their splendid canon.

Unfortunately, the album is a bit of a downer from a lyrical standpoint, making something like Jackson Browne's Late For The Sky seem almost upbeat in comparison.

It's better than Souljacker, though not quite as good as Electro-Shock Blues and Daisies Of The Galaxy.

Highly recommended.

In the end, the disc is less odd than it is charming with more than enough twists and turns to keep it interesting.

The biting but insider-ish humor sometimes limits the potential audience, as Paul ironically marginalizes himself before the business and its politics can.

Newcomers will be shocked by his natural ability and old-time fans will just nod the same knowing appreciation and file the album next to the ever-growing mass of excellent if unspectacular releases.

Beautiful, sparkling folk-pop reminiscent of Velvet Underground's Loaded era, but with distinctive swooning melodies.

Even without Timbaland, who filled G's first two outings with some of his finest future funk, Ginuwine has a game plan as solid as his abs.

World Without Tears... is the singer-songwriter's rawest album to date -- it's often closer to all-out rock than it is to either alt-country or the singer-songwriter tradition -- and it's also her best release so far.

Not terribly exciting for a long-awaited comeback, but a sensitive collection of songs for people traveling down life's lonely highway hand in hand with themselves, for sure.

An elegant masterpiece of unabashed Anglophilia, all slow-motion shoegazer guitars chiming like beautiful bells of doom and icy, disaffected vocals that sound like the Psych Furs' Richard Butler minus the three-packs-a-day larynx damage.

Full of juicy hip-pop hooks in the grand P. Diddy tradition.

The group's innate intelligence and almost shocking ability to forge something new and thrilling out of typical garage-rock influences always shines brightly through the thick Guinness fog.

The older, wiser BLACKstreet rides a sweet suite of slow jams to a level no teen quartet has seen yet.

Occasionally, things are dumbed down by the naive politics you’d expect from any teenager.

An extremely organic sounding album that can stretch throughout genres (reggae, blues, hippie rock) without letting the bong smoke escape.

On Slow Motion Daydream Everclear proves that it's still quite capable of delivering solid, rocking songs with memorable hooks, and frontman Art Alexakis still has plenty to say.

Impossible to pin down to a single genre or slavish style, Echoboy references everyone from David Bowie to Thomas Dolby to Roxy Music to nu electro, yet its sound, at times basking in cathedral drones, other times rent with oddball choirboy humming, is its own.