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.

In which Eddie Argos of Art Brut (!) and Dyan Valdes of the Blood Arm (?) write second-cousin answer songs to, among others, Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Kanye West, the Mamas and the Papas, Avril Lavigne, and P.D. "Creeque Allies" is a capsule history of the Maquis.

Although I gather there's a concept here, knowing what it is might ruin the gently wigged-out dystopianism the lyrics cozy up to. More important, it might undercut the otherwise irreducible pleasures of their exploding guitars, unworldly synths, and crazy drums.

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.

Busta Rhymes and Ludacris get her back to where she once belonged for the duration of their openers. After that, it's an expensive, honorable, credible sampler of the hottest current R&B brands.

As narrative and prophecy, a less coherent response to Christofascism than you might want, but one alt needs, held together and moved ahead by its forthright hooks and beats.

This slightly progger and grander follow-up bypasses such corny stuff until Track 8 begins a closing sequence of five lyrics-enhanced lite-jazzish tracks.

Only one thing's certain -- his songwriting.

This is a speedier pop suite suitable for dancing or straightening up the flat.

He makes UNKLE and Fall Out Boy sound fresher than Tricky Stewart.

What's most remarkable about this stylistic portmanteau is that every song is an original even though you assume several are among their shoulda-been-a-hit-but-wtf-is-it? covers.

Never rousing and too often glum, the album is carried by its intelligence, integrity and terrible beauty. [Feb/Mar 2007]

As on most Go-Betweens records, the melodies take time to sink in, though not the Grant McLennan legacy retrofitted with a Robert lyric about Grant's affinity for melody.

As vision, still somewhere between narrow and ignant. Yet not a boho archetype for nothing.

The fourth Dolls album and second of their second life is the first one that's less than epochal. Not all the tunes are surefire.

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

Finer minds than mine may find these pieces worthy of continuous attention. I say they're background music, there waiting when your mind drifts speakerward, just distracting enough to change up your mood in a useful way.

These nutty kids turned DOR nostalgia act make their first album in 16 years their sex album. Eeyew, say today's normal kids. 'Bout time, says anybody old enough to know that one lure of the flesh is that it's always decaying.

White's drums duke it out with Dean Fertita's guitar, mostly below the belt. Alison Mosshart doffs her s&m drag to suffer and yelp. Jack Lawrence plays bass. Fierce.

The likes of "Little White Lies" (lost love as spirit death), "Straight Into a Storm" (found love as rock and roll life), and "Song About a Man" (grandpa) translate perfectly into their long-diddled dialect.

The clincher is how gracefully this klutz skates over the oddly rolling beats of J Dilla, Jake One and the Metal Fingered Villain... Doom (ellipsis in original).

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

This album lays it on too thick... and declines the thematic burden of "Separation Sunday." As stories, on the other hand, the songs could convince anyone that kids have a hard time.

Listen to your body tonight. They made themselves up, and they're strictly for real.

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

Every single track offers up its momentary pleasures--choruses that make you say yeah on songs you've already found wanting, confessional details and emotional aperçus on an album that still reduces to quality product when they're over.

Timelag-wise, the 1957 concept is as if some '60s songpoet had conceived an album about Armistice Day, influenza, the Palmer raids and Mary Pickford. Only that would have been a milestone and this isn't, which you can blame on heightened aesthetic expectations rather than the potency of this Canadian rapper's literary mojo.

It defines vicinity so broadly that you'll also find Beiderbecke and Reinhardt, two Ellington tunes, songs by a jazz critic and Ed Sullivan's bandleader.

Live, McMurtry can still be way too strophic and trad. But he's never made an album so loud or hard.

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

This isn't the gauntlet "Fishscale" was. It's just a good bunch of songs. [Feb/Mar 2007]

By dint of hard work, Ghost now has him a minor career as the classiest crime story writer in a genre that supports plenty of them.

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.

Though I wish the beats were less corny-orchestral, Fiasco marks his own turf in a three-song sequence that would have led the second side back in the day. [Feb/Mar 2007]

He's so psyched as he watches those houses get bigger that he invests his excellent story-songs with an emotion their excellent studio versions have never matched--though maybe now they will.

Playing at world, at heavy, at soul, [Jack White] arts it up plenty and protests a little.

In the wake of three questionable albums, shtick is a relief, not just because it's really great shtick but because after all these years we're happy to be clear about whether she's performing or expressing herself.

Slowed down and keyboarded up, these tunes make what cares they do bear seem lyrical--carefree.

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.

True, Green spends more time supplicating than celebrating, and probably fabricated the whole scenario. But he knows his subject, and he doesn't need Jesus to lay it down.

The sound is bigger too, strengthening a band that's all guitars-drums-vocals sonics -- including Molly Siegel's yelping vocables, without which the sound's faux-tween soul and wise-ass tempo shifts would evanesce into abstraction.

Just when you're ready to give up and apply to graduate school, along comes a simple band who get everything right.

If opulence can signify liberation in this grotesquely materialistic time, as in hip-hop it can, then Beyoncé earns her props with a bunch of songs she says were inspired all in a rush by her "Dreamgirls" character. [Feb/Mar 2007]

Once again its vagaries are its distinction. Doherty makes a case for flat-on-your-ass alienation in an insane wartime culture.