Nothing here pushes power-ballad buttons quite as overtly as past smashes "Name" and "Iris," but that shouldn't stop Gutterflower's songs from turning up in a Meg Ryan movie or two soon enough.

Become You tends to err on the side of blandness, lacking a knockout single or any newsworthy experimentation. But it's also Indigo Girls' first album in ages to pass by without a head-slapping clunker or didactic, finger-wagging screed to weigh it down.

Modulate finds him bounding around various points on the spectrum to varying degrees of creative success.

Gets lost somewhere between camp and institutionalism.

While his rhetoric remains fiery, the material is weak.

Given a choice between listenable power-pop by nobodies and the same product by cult movie stars, who's going to say no to a little glitter?

Her personal revelations too often ring false and crass, and nothing undermines a confession like calculation.

Automator has described Monkey as an opportunity for listeners to journey inside his mind, but given his past discography, that trip should be a lot wilder and weirder than this relatively straightforward record.

Establishing a languorous mood right away, the album is all meandering, low-key moods and textures, with precious few focused songs on which to hang them.

Plunges right back into oppressively rigid formula.

Love Is Here radiates as-yet-unfulfilled potential, like the work of a band going through the motions to get its foot in the door.

More interesting than essential, Iron Flag may not win over those who gave up on Wu-Tang Clan around the time of Wu-Tang Forever, but the group's dedication to its own idiosyncratic path remains impressive.

Everything its predecessor wasn't: bouncy, joyful, carefree, and mostly engaging.

As always, Smash Mouth is all but impossible to hate, offsetting its bald-faced mercenary intentions with a refreshing lack of pretension.

Distinguished, eclectic, and difficult to love.... Mostly the songs beg for a rawer treatment, instead of the polite album-rock for which Jagger generally settles.

Cocky plays it safe, tinkering slightly with Devil's formula but generally delivering virtual carbon copies of its monster hits.

This Way is somehow both ambitious and down-to-earth compared to its predecessors.

It's more or less business as usual, with a few highlights balancing a fair amount of filler.

Unfortunately, most of the album's beautiful moments are cordoned off from the unbeautiful ones in ways that leave both wanting.

Lacking some of its predecessor's musical inventiveness, Feminist Sweepstakes revisits similar terrain, but Hanna's increasing bitterness makes it hard to tell whether even she believes what she's saying.

Its 38-minute run time is often marked by pleasant but static, middle-of-the-road material.

Like its predecessor, the album features flashes of brilliance interspersed with Van Helden's weak spot for frustratingly clownish contrariety.

Ja Rule's only real gift is for crafting undeniable pop hooks. That talent is underrated, but it still does little to cover up the rapper's derivative lyrics and crassly recycled 2Pacisms.

The chasm between his musical and lyrical ambitions is as amusing as it is frustrating.

The disc looks, on paper, like an intriguing exercise. Unfortunately, it sounds, in reality, like little more than an intriguing exercise: With few exceptions, it's tedious and predictable, wearing its calculated concept far too boldly on its sleeve.

Mercury Rev's ongoing foray into a strange sort of beauty overload remains a noble endeavor, but it inspires more admiration than emotional attachment.

As always, the marriage of hooks and psychological horror works well, but for the first time it also starts to wear a little thin. The album's second half is dominated by weaker songs and lyrics that really need a fuller range of human emotion.

One of the few creatively adventurous singers to maintain a presence on country radio, Krauss continues to subtly press the boundaries of her sound, but it's hard to imagine anything on New Favorite alienating the masses.

But what was fresh and provocative at the time of Eminem's debut has grown somewhat stale; at this point, hismisanthropy feels as predictable as Gallagher smashing watermelons.

An amiable assortment of summer-radio fare, its only cardinal sins being its calculated and characteristic adherence to trends and "Stay On," an ill-conceived collaboration with 311's Nick Hexum.

If it didn't follow an album with so many sweetly anthemic, sing-along classics, The Invisible Band would warrant wholehearted recommendation as a pleasant, pneumatic summer trifle. Under the weight of heightened expectations, it's a disappointment.

With Time Bomb, Buckcherry still makes the unfashionable seem fashionable, but that doesn't make it any less dumb.

Nothing here quite matches the sheer awfulness of its title track and first single, which inexplicably samples Mr. Mister's "Broken Wings," but the album is uneven throughout, perhaps inevitably, given its two-hours-plus length.

The acceptable outweighs the embarrassing.

It's all so clever and thought-provoking that it's almost possible to overlook that, in most other respects, it's not especially good.

What could have been a huge breakthrough instead sounds staid, as if he were so used to rocking the house that he didn't want to risk rocking the boat.

C has described More as more adult than her debut, and while no one is likely to mistake her for Serge Gainsbourg, it does draw on far more respectable sources than those of her TRL peers, leavening her trademark sound with disco, new wave, and electronica. At her best, C sounds like an American, more mercenary version of Saint Etienne's lead singer, Sarah Cracknell, as she lowers her already-thin voice into a breathy, evocative whisper.

The new York Blvd. settles on likably shambling, lazily paced pop, but Acetone still hasn't quite cemented an identity for itself. The reason has a lot to do with the fact that, even at its most pleasantly languid ("Vibrato," "Bonds"), York Blvd. just isn't especially engaging.

It's no small achievement that Young makes these seasoned vets sound like a loose bar band, reveling in sloppiness and barely held together by his searing guitar work.

Volume 2 features some nice experiments, notably the droning "Schram And Sheddle 262," the Krautrock-cum-punk of "Telstar Recovery" and "High Pitch Needs," and the Eno-pop of "Circulation," but the disc is too diffuse, disjointed, and (in its own sloppy way) derivative to hold together. Interesting ideas abound, though, and Volume 2's lack of cohesion could lead to a breakthrough some time soon, especially considering Warren's rapid evolution and incessant output.

Although roughly half as long as Wu-Tang Forever, The W is every bit as erratic and overreaching. If Forever was a great single album hidden in a messy two-disc set, The W feels like a good six-song EP nestled inside an uneven album that seems to take its cues from the half-assed weirdness of ODB's N**** Please.

Self-seriousness and artistic water-treading aside, there's nothing wrong with A Day Without Rain. It's just that few households need more than an hour or so of Enya music, and Shepherd Moons and Watermark serve that purpose far more effectively.

As usual in Manson's world, the goal of maximum discomfort supercedes the music, which sticks to familiar and reliably doom-laden but catchy pop-metal on "Disposable Teens" and "The Love Song."... Here, he seems entranced by his own power, which may be why his dark worldview sounds baseless even as he offers sharp hooks others would kill for.

Guests from Chicago's music scene, including Mekons singer Sally Timms and members of Tortoise, bolster the already-solid playing of the Navins' regular contingent, and while the songs aren't particularly sharp, the music (produced by the Navins, John Herndon, and John McEntire) most definitely is.... Can something be so smooth that it just slips away? For all its pleasantness, Pelo comes awfully close to this invisible ideal, an achievement in its own right but not an especially engaging one.

Sonically, Plain Rap picks up where Labcabin left off, and at its best ("Rush," "Guestlist," "Frontline"), it recaptures that album's sophisticated sonic slinkiness, if not its lyrical brilliance. Too often, however, Plain Rap sounds like what Labcabin's detractors unfairly accused it of being: mature and adult to the point of sounding hopelessly dull.

Little on Halfway is as immediately gratifying, or even as immediate, as its predecessor's hits, but that's not to say that any of these 11 new songs might not meet the same fate.... The Fatboy Slim assembly-line music machine is in full effect, and anyone looking for substance needn't bother. But to call this collection of sweet nothings half-assed would imply that there was much going on to begin with: The disc is business as usual, a big load of disposable fun and funk that's fluffier than cotton candy and just as weighty.

Tomorrow's Sounds Today returns to a more conventional approach, with 14 full-band songs replete with strings, slides, and electric guitars. As is frequently the case, however, more is less, with Yoakam settling for modestly ambling charmers in lieu of transcendent moments.

Ten albums into its career, U2's emphasis on its basics--chiming guitars, a war-themed lament here and there, the enormous choruses of songs like "Beautiful Day"--is a refreshing reminder of the group's core virtues. But in terms of execution, it splits about 50-50 between soaring hits and dispiriting misses.

The fact that Burnside doesn't play guitar provides the first bad omen, and the busy, style-jumping production does the rest.... There's a decent Burnside album buried here, with spare songs like the title track providing the strongest moments.

Like Neil Young's Silver And Gold, it feels like a thematically empty, knockabout place-holder. American Recordings, one of Cash's towering classics, was all devotion and doubt, a brilliant, raw-boned meditation on redemption and death. A loose, flat set of odds and ends, Solitary Man is merely a minor but endearing record from a man who seems to know he's given more than enough.

Everlast's pretensions and ambition still outstrip his talent, however, and the distance between the two makes Eat At Whitey's both intriguing and frustrating.... like a defensive tackle trying his hand at ballet, he's far too clumsy and limited a singer and songwriter for the delicate material he attempts.

Perhaps hip-hop's hottest production duo, The Neptunes can claim credit for many of the best moments on Let's Get Ready, from the Spaghetti Western guitar of "Danger" to the nervous sonic aggression of "Jump." Mystikal's whirling-dervish flow has seldom sounded better, but like Snoop Dogg's otherwise-excellent No Limit Top Dogg, Let's Get Ready is undermined by monotonous production from the producers formerly known as Beats By The Pound. Though off No Limit, Mystikal has brought his old team (now renamed Medicine Men) with him, and their six tracks pale in comparison to those from the album's other producers (OutKast, PA, Bink, The Neptunes).

The largely pleasant new Sing When You're Winning offers up more of the same, material for an alternate-universe Top 40 aimed at twentysomethings rather than the orthodontia crowd.

Though not exactly a bad album, when contrasted to the remarkable Graceland and Rhythm Of The Saints, it sounds as arbitrary as a collection of B-sides.

[Merritt] leaves vocal duties entirely to his guests here, an impressive group that includes new-wave forebear Gary Numan and '70s warbler Melanie alongside an all-star collection of indie-rock fixtures. Unfortunately, he's given them some of his weakest material to date, delicate but forgettable songs that often sound like discarded leftovers from 69 Love Songs.

The son of Richard and Linda Thompson, Teddy Thompson has genetics on his side, with a powerful voice and, in his best moments, the songwriting skills to match his heritage. Too bad, then, that his debut feels so tentative.

Saint Etienne has made an egregiously Cardigans-esque wrong turn, abandoning impeccable craft and Motown melodies for the breezy if aimless experimentation of its wildly uneven EPs.

"Last Beautiful Girl"... would be good enough to inspire a wholesale reassessment of Matchbox Twenty if the material surrounding it weren't so average.

But the album as a whole--which, at eight songs in 42 minutes, barely exceeds EP length--is woefully uneven, with producer Jim O'Rourke indulging the band in some truly ill-conceived whims.

When The Geometrid is good, it's extremely good... Too much of the album's remainder, however, is forgettable and lukewarm, the work of a band that's still trying to define itself.

This is Young's strongest set of songs in years, but the disc just isn't compelling.

Return Of Saturn is turning out to be nowhere near the DOA dud many had long anticipated. But it's also a dispiriting collection of some of the least empowering music ever recorded...

Arthur's shortcomings as a lyricist make his emotional palette seem as limited as his sonic palette is varied and, however layered the production, his songwriting nearly always follows suit.

As uneven an album as Reed has released, it might be easier to take if there had been more of them in the past seven or eight years. Instead, it feels like the latest in a series of anticlimaxes.

Everything about MACHINA is capital-I Important, with virtually every element delivered in gaudy excess?

Personal project or not, the pretty Pieces In A Modern Style isn't much more than a Hooked On... collection for a digital age.

It doesn't always work, and even when it does, there's no getting around the unshakable sense that Clinton is a side project above all else, with none of the transcendent moments found on Cornershop's albums.

Apple is ... crafty, covering up her rambling, dorm-friendly lyrics with sharp arrangements and sturdy songcraft.