With an incongruent Fall Out Boy track set aside for single duty and all those rappers a dream community taking the burden off Black Thought, this is the most accomplished pure hip-hop album in years.

Terse and beaty, with Dr. Dre referral Mike Elizondo going half on the baby, this isn't a pop record, but it does avoid guitar-band shapes, sonics and truisms.

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

Fortified by his Christian faith, he lends a cracked gravity to souvenirs of cornball sentiment ranging in tone from Ed McCurdy's political "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" to Queen Lili'uokalani's escapist "Aloha Oe," which close an album that also includes the traditional title song, a Sheryl Crow number about redemption, "Cool Water," and the tenderest "For the Good Times" I've ever heard.

It's hard to imagine their music getting much better. But it's not hard to imagine their lives getting much better. Which may be all their music needs.

Here's an album where the marriage ballads are so meaty and convincing that the two exceptionally well-turned breakup songs seem like formal exercises, where a comedy number about fishing and beer would sound just dandy if there weren't so many subtler laughs on the agenda.

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

They thud rather than thunder. But what a loud and joyous thud it is.

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.

Burbling electronic ticktocks vie with a carillon of bell simulacra, and rarely have vinyl crackle or laser malfunction generated more musicality.

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

The band is on it, the backup singers are solicitous, and Cohen's husk of a voice has been juiced up by the exercise.

OK, 19 songs, gotta be filler here somewhere, and there is, only it isn't melodic -- with all music credited to the band, Shonna Tucker's muzzier lyrics and Mike Cooley's more elusive ones sound as well-turned as those of Patterson Hood, who's never written better.

The entire construction is a thing of grace -- conservative, and new under the sun.

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.

Sure enough, the first time through, too many [of the songs] had faded on me. Soon, however, even ones I'd given up on were bum-rushing my earhole.

Never have his arrangements exploited his soundtrack chops so subtly, changeably or precisely.

Buy it while you can.

He's made a novelty record that gets deeper with time.

A joyous mishmash.

They're unflinchingly unsensationalistic. But it's the beats that turn this into noir worthy of Jim Thompson. [Feb/Mar 2007]

Half associative rhymes that clock in under two-and-a-half minutes, devoid of hooks but full of sounds you want to hear again, it's like a dream mixtape.

Maybe this album is dumb on the surface, though not as much as fools claim. But sure as showbiz it isn't dumb underneath.

A glockenspiel in a guitar band? Freshens up the sound, they think. And they're right.

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

The sound is so scrawny it can wear on you, meaning their 34-minute album is probably two songs too long. But there's only one I'd scrap.

His salvation is humanistic empathy, spiritual complexity, and melodies more unfailing than back when the Holy Ghost was inspiring into his ear.

No Age too brutalist for you? Here's a heedlessly beautiful alternative.