Striding forward, Cooper won't let that stop her. She hurts, but her chin scarcely trembles at all.

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.

They're still true believers in the cleansing if not excoriating power of rock and roll.

Actual musicians help -- world-beating T-Pain more than world-weary Julian Casablancas. So do other actors.

Muffling their excellent knowledge of English in jangle and reverb, four theoretical nerds demonstrate why a band is better than grad school.

They sure are spry, and Nelson is so delighted to be singing them that the band's expertise lights up.

They're too good to be true and plain as the nose on your face.

Low-tune for a pop band, low-momentum for a rock band, they stand a chance of evoking bad Elvis Costello when they take you by surprise or emote on in the background.

The painful detail and joyful exuberance are there once they get going. But in under two years this Welsh punk sextet has matured/devolved from tromping over their pan-sexual alienation like so many glockenspiel-wielding grape dancers to enacting "miserabilia" about how unfulfilling it is to get on your knees next to a urinal.

Altogether as slow, sad-ass and self-involved as reported, this is a breakup album there's no reason to like except that it's brilliant.

It's touching on a human level. Noble, even. I didn't think he had it in him.

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.

Detailing his fidelity on one track, elongating a lap dance on another, he's a decent guy in conceptual command of an aesthetic he invented.

I'm moved nevertheless by what can pass for a concept album about the romantic life of an uncommonly-to-impossibly strong and gifted teenage girl, starting on the first day of high school and gradually shedding naiveté without approaching misery or neurosis.

Tune and tempo conquer all even if love doesn't, and soon, if you listen up, you'll hear her toss her head and move on, jubilant in her capacity for jubilation.

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

Recorded July 1, 1998, a 78-minute double-CD proves how stiff and thin this made-up collective's mysteriously canonical 1997 studio album is.

These guys sure can rap and rhyme, and they do.

It's Buenos Aires' Gaby Kerpel without irony, maybe even Barcelona's Manu Chao without hooks -- ecstatic yes, escapist no.

Elegiac rather than dancey, but elegiac about the preconditions of the dance, it states, sustains, and varies a bracing mood. It even has an ending.

If you can't get with this expediently excessive piece of rich-get-richer, commercial rap albums are beyond your ken.

Gregg Gillis has plenty to say about music. What he has to say about life, which is that "I'd Rather" equals "Gimme Some Lovin'," remains more limited. Nevertheless, sequences here give me hope.

The thing about the indie-rock life is that even its depressives, not just mere realists like these guys, have a pretty good time.

Only a talent as major as Lewis could half bring it off.

He goes Motown with so much joy in one-man-band craft he'll not only convince the girl he's sweet-talking that this is forever, he'll convince you.

It's also the rare work of art that captures the dizzy infatuation that is dedicated infant care. All that's missing is a song about sleep deprivation.

Never thought I'd say this, but RZA isn't missed--the budget production enhances a master lyricist's specialty by subtraction.

This vibrato-prone romantic is the greatest melodist in contemporary mega-indie.