Only after being overwhelmed by the sheer visibility of her warp-speed relaunch did I realize how enjoyable and inescapable her hooks and snatches had turned out to be.

Ratcheting his reticence up half a turn, he opens with his bleakest new song, and only if you follow his chronically noncommittal lyrics will you notice his emotions opening up along with his tunes, his attitudes along with his structures.

On this reassuring piece of big-bottomed exotica, the "Sahara swing" they concocted with Karl Hector is the tipoff. They love the continuity bass-and-drums lay below; I love the content koto and flute and malletophone add on

The fourth and best-by-a-mile folk-rock album from sometime Shin Eric Johnson and his cud-chewing sidemen is a message to the freak-folk from "a broke-legged paint in a herd full of unicorns."

At his worst, Lewis can be a wise-ass scold. At his best he's a vulnerable master of the humorously ineffable and a tribute to the humanism of a SUNY education and the Lower East Side.

This is literary rock as it should be.

Songs are his job, and his reserves are apparently inexhaustible.

I still prefer 2004's disreputable "Winchester Cathedral." But this is a proper guitar fix nevertheless. [Feb/Mar 2007]

The emotion fueling her pretense is cathartic nevertheless.

The result is an exceptionally melodic reggae album that's intensified by rapping devoid of dancehall patois and a hard edge unknown to roots revivalism. The result is also an exceptionally political hip-hop album that's most convincing when it doesn't multiply Afrocentric distortion by Rastafarian reasoning.

It's more like sloshing or spewing, as intermittent love lookbacks evoke a social despair also contextualized by fabulous spoken epigraphs from Walt Whitman, Jefferson Davis, William Lloyd Garrison, and Young Abe Lincoln.

He delivers a reprise of the same B part in a more forceful, normal voice: "Why is everything a chore?/I'm too young to be defeated." So far, he isn't. Wish him luck with that riptide.

Sam Coomes is still disgruntled: with whoever he's sleeping with, with running away, with dystopia itself. But he's catchier about it, and rockier. Maturity comes in many forms.

Only two songs ring false. [Feb/Mar 2007]

Even the now-obligatory vulnerable one, where Karen tries to prove she's not only human but nice, is... well, not a cartoon, but at least a bedtime story.

Over Thurston and Lee's combustible tunings and Steve's strong beat, they've long since learned to construct memorable tunes track in and track out.

Though smarty-pants Lemony Snicket fans may get references I miss, in between there are times when Stephin Merritt's monotonous low baritone seems merely inexpressive.

Loaded with talent, heart and personality, he's an eccentric who still thinks the world is his friend, and one more sweet argument for the civilized compromises of democratic socialism.

None of it means a damn thing beyond what it is. Which is just what they were trying so hard to achieve.

The beats beat Green Lantern's. And what the finale has to say about Obama is so sane I may just check out van Sertima myself.

After what K'naan has been through, bless him for trying--the ebullience he extracts from a life much tougher than North Americans can know is worthy of soukous, mbaqanga, the highlife of Ghana's most punishing inflationary spiral.

How many great songs about rock and roll can one man write before he gets tiresome? We may find out.

"Perpetual Motion Machine" is about fish who wish they could walk so they could find out how it feels to fall down, and "Whale Song" bemoans Brock's metaphorical uselessness as it demonstrates his capacity for beauty.

This one's solider, more concrete -- even beautiful sometimes.

"Come on children, you're acting like children/Every generation thinks it's the end of the world," begins the candidly catchy centerpiece of these lost-and-found tradsters' best album.

Clipse's smarts and purity are seductive in the manner of a Jim Thompson novel, even a John Donne meditation.

There's no denying her eye for out-of-the-way details or her ear for a decent tune.

Of course she's quieting down as she grows up, plus covering her bases, so after half a dozen winners she levels off into a nine- song sequence.