Her rock-oriented approach here will please some, but such a genre-hopping exercise is only occasionally provocative.

You could dismiss Teenage Fanclub as not being original, but that would be missing the point. Instead, appreciate a group that, in 2005, can create absolutely perfect songs that somehow manage to channel the magic of early-to-mid-'60s pop-rock.

More than just a sick joke, Souljacker is a rocking, thought-provoking journey.

May well be the best of its seven studio albums, one that even approaches the heights of the stellar Singles Going Steady collection.

You aren't free after all, because once you've let the album in, you may never shake it off again.

A very strong -- albeit front-loaded -- album.

The Last Broadcast is big, intelligent, irony-free music that demands an open mind -- and rewards the heart quite well. Magnificent.

Margerine Eclipse is a decided improvement upon their last three albums, discarding the dense and difficult song structures that plagued those albums.

The instant pop buzz Pulp have concocted in the past is largely missing, but each listen reveals another layer, another level, another reason to love it. Highly recommended.

There's no question Aesop Rock makes essentially no sense half the time. The other half, he's painting abstract art all over fractured soundscapes. The music is smart and progressive; it's also pretentious and challenging.

It's a disc in which Dizzee diz, lyrical wiz, is more forthright as lyricist, using the blank canvas of an "album" to sketch together a thoughtful, carefully-sequenced set in which his voice, and its elastic accent, ring clear.

Not as consistent as its de facto partner, Digital Ash still contains several euphoric highs.

Whether it's due to the backing band, or the better studio resources, Banhart seems more self-assured than ever as he sings his songs on Cripple Crow.

The album straddles R.E.M.'s past and their future, sounding fresh, assured -- and on par with their best previous efforts.

Apropa't has a tendency at first to gently wash over you, striking no particular chord. But as you pay closer attention to the music, the melodic wash of it all becomes one of its addictive qualities.

It is, in fact, what almost every other Oasis album has been: Not nearly as bad as overhyped sufferers might fear, not nearly as good as its enthusiasts want it to be.

Yes, it's fun rockin' pop. But, unlike a lot of today's pop music, Guided By Voices keep their depth.

The resulting sound is tougher and more insistent, a succession of incessant rhythms layered with fuzziness and distortion.

The album coheres; it's a full body of work intended to be heard holistically, not simply as a collection of songs. But it takes some work. You must be an active listener to appreciate it fully.

Whether you listen closely, for the sonic textures, or in a cursory fashion, scouting out the allusions galore, with each listen you'll likely appreciate something different.

Sticking to a formula -- a formula that works for them -- the band sounds fiercer than ever on Riot Act.

Brings together the best parts of metal, hardcore punk-rock and dance-y post-punk for a sound that would be otherwise useless if it weren't for one thing: The boys got "it."

His best work since 1997's Built to Spill album, Perfect From Now On.

While the dizzying mix of musical styles and absurdist lyrics is still there, Camper are a much more skilled, mature band.

Mostly downbeat, the album feels, at times, as if it were created beneath a black cloud.

Never the hardest rocking of bands, Death Cab for Cutie sound positively muted throughout Plans, Gibbard's obsession with the temporary nature of relationships and life itself receiving appropriately somber accompaniment.

No BIG message here; I Am Kloot simply made a good, heartfelt rock record and, without sounding like they had to try too hard, pulled it off.

As if its size alone weren't enough to set the album apart from his preceding Spiritualized outings, Pierce has removed all the sounds he thought were immediately identifiable as Spiritualized -- delay, phase, Telecaster, Farfisa -- and left the songs as largely orchestral numbers.

Laughter's Fifth finds Jayne tracking back to a groovier, sillier time in rock 'n' roll, peeling back the rough riffs and celebrating the peace-and-love beat.

Little Sparrow proves that 1999's The Grass Is Green was no fleeting burst of inspiration; Parton hasn't been so consistently exciting since the '70s.

The album is surprisingly consistent despite its unbalanced components.

Continuing an audio development from Dots and Loops, Sound-Dust is littered with a giddy array of hand percussion instruments — marimba, vibraphone and glockenspiel stir up a polyrhythmic stew, its busyness and complexity sounding like the product of painstaking studio assemblage.

Although surprisingly self-conscious at moments, Feels remains rife with a triumphant beauty, a bucolic sound that stirs and entrances the listener like a happy secret.

Bitter Tea offers immediacy, but little reward for return visits; offers vastness -- at a dawdling 73 minutes -- but nothing in the way of big ideas.

Ágætis Byrjun is one of the most sublimely immersive albums to come along in ages.

Let's face it, no one else today is making music as cool and original as that of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Kozelek has delivered a wondrous collection.

An odd, fascinating journey through the mind of a man who channels messages from horror movies, occult events, and other bewilderments, and turns them into songs.

Even the grand indulgence in artistic artifice on A Grand Don't Come For Free -- its self-contained narrative -- seems like it's forsaking a long shelf-life, the downside of the story's "mystery" being that, once you've heard the yarn once, it's a little like you've heard it all, and all it has to offer.

Kannberg has made an album of fine indie pop that few could have expected.

They play slow, but it's slow in the way that Low once did, a sort of punk-rock rebellion against speed and belligerence.

Cruelty Without Beauty is the sound of Soft Cell reclaiming the musical territory they staked out in their 1981 hit debut, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, offering up hooky, dancefloor-oriented synthetic soul, now jacked up into a higher gear for the clublands of the new millennium.

Out of the Shadow is a meandering musical path, but one well worth taking.

Sturdier production and straightforward songwriting make a strong backbone for someone once lauded for his mysticism.

The songwriting is self-assured and thoughtful; the album is unified as a pastiche of romantic musings.

Hate is a beautifully gilded record, thoroughly nice and thoroughly listenable, and a mark higher than a lot of pop music with lofty intentions, but it doesn't move you to extremes.

As a whole, The Secret of Elena's Tomb is a compendium of many of the things Trail of Dead have been to date: provocative lyricists, well-honed musicians, and now film directors.

It's well produced and mixed, but lacks the edge to make it really interesting.

It's easily the least convincing album from the three Banhart's offered thus far.

One Word Extinguisher doesn't shock the way Vocal Studies... did but, if his debut drew the vivid hip-hop/electronic blueprint, Herren convincingly takes his plans and constructs something big with the follow-up.

By the time the longplayer finishes playing, you realize, whilst the acoustic guitars and harmonized vocals and that awesome table-tennis-ball-bouncing-beat may've made you think this was some easy-to-love pop platter, it actually hasn't stumbled all the way towards getting-it-together.

Overall, the melodies are so tight they seem vacuum-packed, and the album delivers a platter of faultless rock songs.

My feeling is that Rehearsing My Choir is an odd, initially indigestible album that is far more interesting than most people are willing to admit.

Throughout, there's little doubting Malkmus's charisma as a performer...

This is a rare record that simply responds to the quiet masses who maybe feel just a bit to much too often, and offers them a soothing, downbeat source of comfort without preaching or apology.

What makes Thunder... such an easy-to-love affair is the schoolyard exuberance they ply their tunes with.

The conversational rawness that drove the previous albums is gone, and the band loses something as a result.

This is gloriously trashy glam-rock with an updated cybernetic edge.

Madlib's constant digressions, interruptions and little sonic jokes may make for an immersive listening experience, but The Further Adventures of Lord Quas demands pretty strict attention, and what it gives back in return is only sporadically satisfying.

In one instant, lead singer Jordan Blilie is whispering passionately in your ear. In the next, he tears into your insides with growls so piercing you'd think he'd transformed into a savage beast.

It's always pretty, but overall, the allure is almost meretricious, considering four or five songs provoke nothing beyond a pleasant ambivalence.

Cash might surprise with his choice of covers, but in nearly all of his selections, he locates some personal meaning, or introduces new emotional elements.

The disc is basically a more straight electro-pop variation on the Gold Chains angle.

Band Red spins bouncy, raw, sloppy and slightly erratic punk that can stake a claim for carving out a jagged edge of its own, complete with loveable, contagious sing-along sounds.

On this disc, which bustles with other artists' flashes and flourishes, the different personalities sometimes vie for attention.

Plaid excel at the little moments where the music breathes -- moments all too rare within the regularized patterns of most beat-oriented electronic music.

With Phrenology, The Roots have finally made an album that lives up to their potential.

A sombre, sorrowful collection.

While some of their songs deliver nothing more than noisy twaddle, British Sea Power are a formidable band when they choose to simply stop making sense.

Sumday's only real flaw is the creeping sense of professionalism that is starting to emerge in the band's songwriting and playing.

Her most direct, distorted disc since she did Helium's The Dirt of Luck a decade ago.

Jurassic 5 deliver on this, their major-label debut.

She selects songs that are somehow special, and presents them with great playing and singing, in a way that clearly means something to her. My bet is that they'll mean something to you, too.

A set doing less of the poker-faced electro revivalism and more of the palette-diversifying pop-song penning.

In stark contrast to most Nashville and alt.country products, even when the words let it down, Barricades & Brickwalls is carried by its classic sound.

Where The Blackened Air sounded haunting, Run to Ruin sounds downright haunted, and, indeed, it's got moments filled with menace and chords written to make you feel uncomfortable.

Amber Headlights fails, when it does, because it's trying to be two things at once: a personal reflection on life and death and a commercially acceptable rock record. But when the album ditches the tricks and conventions that define mainstream rock and focuses on Dulli's songs, it is very powerful indeed.

Me First is a Sunday record, a rainy-day record, a home-alone record, a lying-on-the-floor, staring-at-the-ceiling record.

Seemingly taking its cue from Congleton's willfully bizarre screaming, the band favors atonalism and discordance in its cobbled-together brand of mighty-uptighty protest rock.

With all four members taking the mic, cohesion should hardly be expected. Yet, for all the different styles the band employs on this album, all but the closing number seem indelibly stamped as this band's work, uniquely The Wrens.

This record finds a band scaling the heights of their precise craft in a way that gives upward mobility a good name.

Her most skillful and soulful work thus far.

If there's one misstep on 100th Window, it's that [Sinead O'Connor's] talent and her range are underused.

[The songs] are just similar enough to blend together in a close listen, but they also work as a diverse soundtrack behind whatever it is you're doing.

Strung with just the right amounts of room-filling tearjerkers (lilting keys and strings), the record is likely to raise a lump in your throat, or at least make you feel fuzzy inside and go "awww" at its prettiness.

It's a relaxed and ambitious collection that confirms Ryan Adams' reputation as a top-notch singer and songwriter who easily jumps styles and evokes comfortable sadness with every turn.

It's the conviction and passion within the singing -- both male and female -- that wins me over in the end.

Like a night taxi ride along a broad, lighted, skyscraper-lined city street, Happyness, the band's latest, feels wondrous, daring and slightly dangerous.

The Bay Area punk-rockers mix early Ramones with '80s metal.

Yes, the overall sound is more uniform. Uniformity, however, is not necessarily a bad thing.

The band is never so consumed by brainy showmanship that they forget to rock -- this album kicks harder in places than Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath ever did, or The Strokes ever will.

His guffawing voice makes him sound like every rhyme he delivers is a punchline.

Too much of Half Smiles of the Decomposed, however, does not rock.

Zedek is still shrouded in her aesthetic darkness, is still hungry, still driven; her music is still driven by the same ghosts that've haunted her throughout her career.

More life-affirming than life-changing, on Up the Bracket the Libertines deliver a stellar set of songs that -- both musically and lyrically -- neatly synthesizes the past 40 years of English rock.

This album more than any other swiftly dispels the notion that the trio are condemned to register wary introspection through brooding atmospheres.

What easily could have been a tired retread of rock snob classics instead makes use of the past to provide a recognizable framework in which to deal with the emotional rescue necessary after a damaged romantic relationship.

Swings like a pendulum from playful dance beats, cutesy female vocals and spacey synth effects to feedback-drenched, guitar-heavy rock fronted by a raspy male singer. And it does so with such affection that the unique power of their contagious, inventive sounds cannot be denied.