What the two boil down to is that a parvenu mastering pop music for money has turned into a made man running on vanity. I find that this renders his expert trivialization of murder and such rather less piquant, and I think he does too--that an audacious formal delight has become routine.

There are three good songs on this 11-track artifact, and deeply vapid though the split-personality bit is, the trick of dividing the album into two CDs does leave a 17-minute dance disc that can be played without gastric distress by any purchaser who isn't picky about diva gangstaism or videophone porn.

If only she was as sophisticated as she thinks she is. Or as funny. [Feb/Mar 2007]

Talented lad, Turner. Not on this evidence incapable of ever writing quick, clever, cynical little songs again.

Such is the lure of his hypersensitivity that his admirers forgive and even applaud the extreme attenuation of this tastefully decorated click-and-loop.

Although Nick Urata can't match pipes with Richard Hawley, a plus in a way, he's hawking mellifluous overstatement flavored with a nostalgia far enough past its sell-by date that it stinks a little.

Buried at Track 7, the developed rhyme, unkiltered time, unsettling keyboards, and Kenny Garrett sax coda of "Abstractionisms" deliver what the flowery "Caring" and the endless "Do You Dig U?" emphatically do not: the "brand new sound" the finale only brags about.

Just when I'd made my peace with pop prog and begun to hope arty prog would prove another casualty of the age of digital instantaneity, these postrock warriors get the bright idea of adding tune and humor to their higher mathematics.

It's that he trivializes his own content--not the gangsta, braggadocio no one takes seriously anymore, but the pimp slime.

At least when the bassist ruled they livened up this overworked dynamic with beats. Now they tax it with tunes.

This is a new direction? It's not even a halfway decent collection of songs.

Eminem settles for sensationalism straight up, and, worse still, makes you wonder whether he ever truly knew the difference.