Todd... smartly allows her soaring, angelic voice to take the lead, leaving the sparse arrangement of strings and keys to take a delicate backseat. This also means her lyricism, poignant and wry, stands out.

The music here tries to be as unobtrusive as possible, its plasticky tone and carefully shined finish constructed to contrast with the earnest soulfulness of Usher's singing. And it's in his words that the album finds the substance that it does have.

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.

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

Aside from Riches' rich language, there's not much traditionalism on the album, it being more concerned with stumbling in melancholy fashion through murmured countryish balladry.

It is, at one time or another, twee reggae, hipster rock-ism, synth-pop balladry, post-Interpol gothickry. It's an inconsistency that's both noble and annoying.

Part of the fun of the Beastie Boys is knowing that they're fucking with the rhymes and you; another part is knowing that they give a fuck about what's happening in the world. Those two things don't always work well together, though, especially when they say something watered down and deliver it as though they don't buy it either.

As forward-thinking as this sounds, it just kind of makes Gorillaz an Archies/Josie & The Pussycats for the new millennium. It also makes them and their album fit in with everyone else in the progressive hip-hop canon, all of whom see fit to make slightly ludicrous concept records.

Spending much of its time suspended in hollowed-out tones smudged only by desolate beats, Aaltopiiri is probably Pan sonic's most intense listening experience.

Throughout the album's dozen tracks, the sentiment Lightbody conjures evokes real pain and real beauty.

Love. Angel. Music. Baby. has been acclaimed as a bright-and-shiny pop-music tour-de-force, but once the initial thrilling rush of the stylistic sheen and artistic conception has abated, the album seems too fragmented to be anointed as such.

A welcome return to that good stuff Gang Starr has delivered over the years.

In the end, it is musicianship that makes Duper Sessions unquestionably successful.

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.

All those instrumental colorings are clearer, and the individual qualities of the voices in their choir shine through even when they're all belting it out together.

Feels a little bit contrived, at times, an elaborate game of dress-ups unleashed under the unlikely title This Is for Real -- a claim which, if not deliberately ironic, sure seems the complete opposite of the fabricated fashion-conscious compilation-of-quotations that the album actually is.

Take[s] their haunted-house shtick to frightening extremes.

While the pair probably had a lot of fun making the record, unfortunately, it isn't the most enjoyable listen.

Daybreaker bears all the strengths and beauty of the earlier Orton CDs, but it also shows some growth.

Hiatt delivers a batch of songs that powerfully evoke certain places, certain times, certain characters, with an eye for detail and an understanding of the complexities of human behavior seldom seen in songwriters these days.

A jangly collection of contagious pop tunes made melancholy by a dark songwriting style.

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

Listening to Introduction is like viewing the world through someone else's glasses, skewed, disturbing and perhaps causing a bit of vertigo.

They've broken their own mold and achieved something unexpectedly fine and durable.

The glassy-eyed micro-manic bass-'n'-breaks belligerence on show-offy tracks on this Squarepusher longplayer is either tellingly tired or terrifically tiring, with Jenx's wicked licks of brown-note boogie either spuriously slow in the foot or a swift kick to the collective ass of a collectively ass-kissing musical community.

They don't always sound consistent on this debut, occasionally misfiring with underworked material, but overall the strengths overshadow any weaknesses, and when they truly hit their stride they're devastatingly effective.

Their inventive, experimental-leaning music dances through history, passing from blues to rock 'n' roll to pop to experimental to something uniquely theirs.

Easily the band's most consistent, tonally tight disc thus far.