Music for the Maases is standard-issue trance techno-kinetic and nice enough if you like that sort of thing, but not particularly unique or inspired.

With Sailing to Philadelphia, Knopfler has taken a break from the rootsy side projects and soundtrack work that have occupied him for the last seventeen years, and has evoked some of the grandeur of prime Dire Straits.

Despite a few feverish moments, 98 Degrees remain slightly below average.

Uncluttered but muscular production, deft samples and smart rhymes all ensure that the album's power increases with repeated listenings.

On Golden Lies, weighty midtempo rock hobbles the Pups' trademark blend of cow-punk, blues and hallucinatory instrumental rants.

With unexpected juxtapositions learned from hip-hop and a sense of spiritual release gleaned from underground disco, Oakenfold steers the ultra-European, classical-minded pulse of trance toward syncopated rhythms, drum-free interludes and actual songs.

The only significant change from their breakthrough effort, 1998's All the Pain Money Can Buy, is more expensive, expansive-sounding production and an increasingly overt Beatles influence in both the songs and sonics.

Like everything else he plays, Nelson's blues are unforced and natural.... The result is emotionally rich, musically savory and languidly blue from end to end.

Unlike Ray of Light's pristine inner-ear landscapes, Music is dirty, casually urgent, as if Madonna walked into the studio, got on the mike and let the machines bump.

An appropriate marriage of industrial clanging and symphonic melodrama... this album, although short, represents a particularly accessible career highlight for Bjork.

Photek, has shaken things up with his second full-length album, Solaris -- it owes more to techno and house than to drum-and-bass.

But there are more moments when all-too-human messes lurk beneath the veneer of producer Don Was' perfect pop tracks, moments when the relentless sunniness of the music is pierced by sober themes (the last song, "Tonight Is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel," is a graphic account of car-wreck carnage) and dark, psychological-profile assessments. In turning the snarky level down a notch, Robertson and Page haven't sacrificed the band's good-time giddiness -- they've just opened things up a bit.

Osborne impresses with the warmth and human embrace of her voice.

These are not radical deconstructions a la Cat Power -- just Jones lending her slurred, cozy drawl to material ranging from Traffic's "Low Spark of High Heeled Boys," delivered as a jazzy torch song, to a stripped-down take on Charlie Chaplin's "Smile."

This collection of mostly originals, her first since 1985's The Ballad of Sally Rose, is swamped in beauty: swooning vocal harmonies; delicate poetics; lilting Celticisms.... But Red Dirt Girl is stiflingly exquisite.

As a document, it's hard to refute; a track like "Pearl's Girl" keeps unfolding into different layers of aural spotlessness, finally tapering into silence.... But when the crowd does explode, divining the flow, the home listener feels left out of the party.

Producer Ross Robinson (Korn, Slipknot) adds some arena sheen, true. But it's not enough to smooth the edges off "Arc Arsenal," a primal tantrum against rebels "robbed . . . of their cause," or to homogenize the ragged beats and mind-bending guitar flurries of "Enfilade."

Frantz and Weymouth have teamed up with a melting pot of songwriting, vocal and instrumental talent, who have supplied offbeat but on-point, ever-changing flavors.

While memorable tunes abound, and at least one left-fielder scores (Sixties folk-pop singer Melanie returns, singing like Tom Waits channeling Lotte Lenya), the 6ths largely seem inclined to preach to the converted.

Spectacularly sullen...

As a vocalist, Teddy Thompson isn't pushing too hard at the passion meter; at best, his singing rarely heats up past lukewarm. As a songwriter, however, he can generate some burn...

Mirror Conspiracy is the perfect soundtrack for those who aspire to the elegantly roguish, Vespa-riding, Italian-soft-porn-loving international set.

The most pleasingly direct yet musically adventurous hip-hop long-player you're likely to hear all year.

The Menace, the long-delayed follow-up, finds Elastica in an unrepentant mood, scuffing up their terse, trashy guitar rock with fun-house noise while adding a handful of ambient mood pieces that sound like Aphex Twin castoffs.

G.O.A.T. glows with the heat of his rhymes.... LL's delivery is so sly and seductive, he can be as nasty as he wants to be. And he has the beats to back it up...

He's gotten the Chicago basement vibe down exactly right... What's missing are songs -- instead, we get sketches, riffs and doodles.

The handsomely produced Public Domain is so rich in history that it could do brisk business in the Smithsonian gift shop. Rather than just revisit folk gems like "Walk Right In," "Delia" and "Railroad Bill," Alvin completely reinvents them.

Although their music has gotten smoother, it remains witty, eccentric and full of left-field sonic detours.

The refrains may be featherweight ("You and me were meant to be"), but the musical touches that surround "Love Is Rare" (particularly Ross Godfrey's arching slide-guitar leads) and the dream-cloud vocals of "World Looking In" are strong enough to carry even the tired cliches - rarely has the shallow end sounded so richly appointed.

Dandies can still harmonize you into a trance, but they've replaced the dreamy drone of 1997's . . . The Dandy Warhols Come Down with more diverse atmospherics.

With Rancid, the band's mix of American thrash minimalism and Brit punk's sound and fury have transcended revivalist mimicry once and for all. The result is a brutally exuberant rock album.

[Setzer] reaches back to actual swing classics like "Pennsylvania 6-5000" and "In the Mood," as well as to vocal and jazzesque chestnuts like "Caravan" and "Mack the Knife." Foolishly, he has updated these with ungainly frills like hip-hop passages and dim-bulb lyrics.... other energetic fare works better...

It's an almost perfectly consistent follow-up to the band's successful 1998 debut - perhaps a tad too consistent.

Like Death in Vegas, Holmes is a techno boffin whose work builds upon that of the Velvet Underground rather than Kraftwerk; too bad his grooves, like the bass-line chug of "Living Room," often go nowhere fast.

A slender set of humorously coldhearted would-be club hits that celebrate hopelessness, freedom from tedious human relationships and numbness to heartbreak.

The big difference this time out is that the beats are as aggressive as Canibus' lyrics...

Songs From an American Movie sounds orchestral and homespun at once: Lustrous, fancy strings on one song give way to a slap-happy ukulele on the next. Yet it's too much of both and not enough of either.

Without being defined by any particular rhetorical or ideological position, he's made a breezy but severely eclectic record.

The problem is that Alone never peaks -- it's without a memorable riff or melody or chorus standing out from the mellow flow.

Overbaked synth funk...Golden Greats cries out for a hotshot guitarist to take charge of the music -- somebody like John Squire.

Minimizing their usual production trickery in favor of live-in-the-studio ensemble thrust, these merry pranksters swim in classic-psychedelia grooves while offering oodles of art-rock allusion.

The music is often quick-paced fluff with the retro exactness, and the soul, of a Pottery Barn sofa. But for the most part, lang's lighter musical tack encourages her to retire the galloping self-regard that can cancel the attractiveness of her voice.

The grandiose production, by Lou Giordano (Goo Goo Dolls, Live), matches the quasi-mystical visions mapped out in the songs....

White Pony ends up being more accessible than the group's two previous albums, because it's not a half-formed mess but a classic alternative-rock album, as gentle and catchy as it is dark.

Faith and Courage speaks with the jaw-clenched directness for which O'Connor is both famous and infamous.... an album of approachable pop that's both defiant and diverse and that flaunts rock's swagger, electronica's experimentalism, folk's introspection and hip-hop's social critique.

The well-named Pop Trash shows off their jaded hooks and nasty wit; it's for fans only, but those of us who still crumple at the opening hiccups of "Hungry Like the Wolf" will be glad for another fix.

What is lost in warm immediacy is gained in eclectic cool...

The lyrics are down-to-earth and positive -- almost wholesome -- but Quality Control's overall vibe is uncompromisingly intense and hard to resist.

Transcendental Blues is an intermittently twangy, often trippy and, yes, generally transcendent outing.

Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant embellishes on the coyly lavish arrangements of 1998's The Boy With the Arab Strap without forgetting to flex real heart muscles.

With Killing Puritans, Van Helden means to scramble and then reassemble house music like the Beasties' Paul's Boutique scrambled hip-hop in 1989. Like Paul's Boutique, Puritans initially seems chaotic and arcane, but with repeated dosage it starts to reveal itself as a pugnacious party album.

The History of Rock is proof that he's always been able to smell a good line from a mile away.

Now comes the sequel, which plays down Guthrie's playful leer in favor of his snarl.

Dilated Peoples are still painfully tame on the mike, especially Evidence, who hits a dubious milestone in "The Platform" by becoming the first rapper ever to utter the words "between you and I." The vocals sink the music: This is the kind of hip-hop album where the MC compares himself to Steve Howe, and while you hope he means the baseball player, you know in your heart he really means the guitarist from Yes.

Every song on Mad Season is a production mini-epic.... Under the haywire production are crafty songs.... But when the crescendos surge and the keyboards chime, he starts to sound as unctuous as 1970s cheeseballs from Lobo to Jim Croce to the Guess Who's Burton Cummings. Songs that probably seemed vulnerable as demos have turned greedily narcissistic.

He is, simply, better than any other MC in hip-hop except for Jay-Z.... The Marshall Mathers LP is a car-crash record: loud, wild, dangerous, out of control, grotesque, unsettling. It's also impossible to pull your ears away from.

These twelve songs are streamlined, uncluttered miniatures.

A warts-and-all album; it has grabbers, songs that sink in slowly and a few absolute duds?

Under the cheese surface, Britney's demand for satisfaction is complex, fierce and downright scary, making her a true child of rock & roll tradition.

Hanson's style of maturity is old-fashioned classic rock, which they attack with the zest of kids taking their first cruise down the strip in the old man's vintage Mustang. Without the Dust Brothers helping at the controls, This Time Around has more rock and less funk than Middle of Nowhere, showing off Hanson's deepened harmonies, their expanding instrumental prowess and Taylor's increasingly sexy, bluesy growl.

Despite the thematic monotony, Tucker and her band mates think louder and rock smarter than anyone in their class; a modest effort like All Hands would be another band's masterpiece.

It's an album of tuneful, intimate pop-rock songs...

White Pepper, their seventh studio album, could be Ween's most accessible release yet.

Somehow, the Primals' fury never seems misguided: This is one ball of aggression that hangs together, thanks to the band's smarts and funk.

This record demands a room full of quiet and your undivided attention. Listen to it any other way and you may be disappointed, even bored, by it. And that will be your hard luck, because Silver and Gold is Neil Young at his hushed, acoustic best: simple, romantic, direct.

For all their harmonic convolutions and tucked-away chorales, the arrangements exude modesty, without the arena-size inflation of Beatle-fan bands like Oasis...

If you liked Tragic Kingdom, you should love Return of Saturn. And if you didn't, you should still love it.

Understandably, Reed's old fascination with sadomasochistic transcendence puts off those who don't swing that way at least a little. But the music on this record, its gorgeous part, could change that.

The album's producer, Gil Norton (whose crescendos for the Pixies were an alternative-rock cornerstone), has subtly filled out the sound of the Patti Smith Group without losing its handmade, jamming essence. Guitar tones resonate through the mix, and new lines snake through what used to be hollow space.

While we await her next album of new material, due next winter, The Covers Record provides a stopgap fix of her unnerving, coldblooded voice and shaky acoustic guitar.

The arrangements typically blend lush waves of acoustic guitar with moody, cascading crescendos; it's strum-and-Drang best suited to rainy Sundays.

NakedSelf finds him returning to the slow-burn industrial grind of his best work.

The album is exceedingly strange yet scrupulously crafted and intelligent. Chances are that Air, as they fashioned this fetching and jejune and weirdly disturbing score, were also having a small laugh.

The songs go back to the basics of would-be hit singles: riffs, hooks, bridges, choruses, often with voice and guitar tossing the same short phrase back and forth. Corgan hasn't radically changed his songwriting; he still goes for anthems, riff rockers and dirges. But there are no more fantasy epics or muses named Daphne, and there's hardly a keyboard to be heard. Guitars rule: distorted electrics and hard-strummed acoustics, sitarlike drones and orchestral reverberations, tolling Pink Floyd tones, and jabbing, wriggling leads, with plenty of echoes of the Cure and U2.

What makes Two Against Nature work isn't its cerebral ellipticity but its stunning musical clarity.

the more you listen to Pieces in a Modern Style, the more warmth and affection you hear... They're not meant for classical purists; they're charming little curios for anyone who's interested in the process of reinvention -- or in just chilling out.

Kaplan and Hubley sing their most confessional, intimate lyrics ever, over whispery guitars, brushed percussion, vibes and organ drones. It's a spell of blissful, psychedelic make-out music... these songs are great - heartfelt, rugged, melodically sumptuous enough to keep unfolding after dozens of spins, full of folk-rock flesh and blood.

Smith is incapable of writing five bad songs in a row; even hopeless records (1992's Wish) sport some saving grace ("Friday I'm in Love"). But he can write four bad songs in a row, and Cure albums tend to leak filler like an attic spilling insulation. The latest, Bloodflowers, is half dismissible droning, an unforgivable ratio considering it's only nine tracks long.

[Lambchop vocalist Kurt] Wagner shares a sense of offbeat phrasing and doleful humor with his singer-songwriter friend Vic Chesnutt that is both profoundly Southern and affectingly universal.

The Night is the Boston band's most painstakingly layered and ambitious album, with cello, organ and oud expanding on the trio's original sax-y swagger.

The unabashedly crude results suggest a lackadaisical slant on the Beastie Boys' garage-funk jams.

Scattered about this engaging, enigmatic disc is a bit of Dusty in Memphis, a touch of Bobbie Gentry's swamp-country persona, a hint of Prince's instinct for making voices and rhythms sound positively libidinous, and a whole lot of Shelby Lynne.

For all Beck lifts from the Seventies, the album never sounds like a period piece; there's always something extra in the mix, stray elements that are both goofy and strangely apropos.

has the talent, not to mention the fame and fortune, to seclude herself from the big bad world ahead of her. But Fiona II makes you hope that she'll find a way to use her talent as a connection to the world instead. Because she's an artist who deserves a shot at growing up.

Rockwell and Merriweather may never sashay down Paris runways, but their How's Your Girl? has a hot style all its own.

Rock that feels like techno ... Gorgeous and wasted, THE CONTINO SESSIONS sounds like blues for space cowboys.

That's the tenor of One Part Lullaby, a CD that takes sardonic low-fi minimalism and makes it into transcendentally tinny pop. Lullaby lilts and entices without losing its smirk.

Merritt's compositions have a tossed-off, barely produced quality and are held together by sturdily constructed melodies that hark back to Eighties synth poppers like Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark.

Basement Jaxx refine their broad influences into a creative energy you can feel: The art of their noise supples as much dance motivation as their beats.

Another baffling, winning, neopsychedelic recording.

The ebb and flow of eighteen concise, contrasting cuts writes a story about Moby's beautifully conflicted interior world while giving the outside planet beats and tunes on which to groove.

The Georgia collective's second album is pop at its most playful and the avant-garde at its cuddliest -- a four-act, twenty-seven-song fantasy trip in which structure and chaos keep leapfrogging each other.

Their sloppiest, most playful set yet.

Their specialty is an undulating trance throb that shimmers with shades of rock, contemporary symphonics, dub, disco, house, spoken word, whatever. The result still sounds like Underworld, and the fiftieth play sounds better than the fifth.