It is her most authoritative and cogent statement.

Luna fans will be pleased.

Those vocal harmonies are used to good effect in the blue-eyed-soul tune 'Alaska.' But 'Die Die Die,' a slow and raggedy piece of psychedelia complete with funereal organ but thrown askew by out-of-place handclaps, is far too taken in by its own gloom.

If there are a few dull moments, that’s all part of recording an album that functions like one extended, magnificent achievement of a song.

It’s still too lightweight to win any hip-hop race, but at least you’ll want to add K-OS’s name to your mental checklist as you peruse those small-rock-club listings.

The Cost... captures them at their best.

If you’re not in the mood for it, Perkins’s uncut melancholy can be a lot to swallow. Still, this is one of the prettiest bummers around.

Loaded with the sort of multi-tiered melodies you find in the early work of XTC.

The son has a strong, pleasing voice and an easy facility with the sort of æthereal, filigree guitar picking that served the father so well.

The disc’s best stuff — such as the hard-rocking opener, “Can You Feel It?” — makes it easy to get swept up in his limitless enthusiasm.

Their third album sticks to the Neil-Young-meets-Gram-Parsons folk rock of their first two but finds Sykes and [Phil] Wandscher experimenting with rockier blues and psychedelia.

The songs start running together till they’re not distinct tracks so much as guitars and bass and drums and yelpy indie vocals that happen to have been recorded at the same time.

Too good to hate, not exciting enough to love, she still makes most of what’s out there sound like phony baloney.

Sure, you can wonder whether there’s a need for Youth Group with so many bands trying to replicate the success of Coldplay and Death Cab for Cutie, but Casino Twilight Dogs is worth a listen.

Yeah, the alternate/alternating track sequence is screwy for the first seven songs or so — Deerhunter build momentum only to lose it. But it gives the album’s backside something of a black-and-white-to-Technicolor moment.

Visitations finds Clinic four albums into their career, but they launch each new tune with the unhinged spirit of a band who are just discovering the power of rock.

For the most part an exercise in Prince-like electro-funk, full of squelchy keyboard fuzz and chicken-scratch guitar noise and absurdly complicated falsetto harmonies.

Woke Myself Up is smart, arresting, and nimble; at 30 minutes, the only real disappointment is that it’s over too soon.

Frontman Ross Flournoy and his mates kick up a ramshackle jangle-pop racket that gets its energy from always sounding as if it were on the verge of falling apart.

Freedom’s Road addresses his pet topics — hard work and small-town life, not to mention freedom and the road — in catchy-enough tunes built with rootsy guitar licks, boot-scooting beats, and the occasional splash of spaghetti-western strings.

A brilliant shot of Veloso the pop composer.

A showcase for some undervalued compositional chops.

For the second time in 2006, Wu-Tang’s Ghostface has released an album that makes it seem everyone else in the hip-hop world should be paying more attention to Ghostface.

Fortunately, getting the money isn’t all this follow-up to last year’s breakthrough Let’s Get It cares about, and the singles here are fire.

Too often on The Evolution she’s looking over her shoulder, too self-conscious to be a real seductress.

Their third effort finds the four-piece twisting confessional post-punk into something startling, brash, and exhilarating.

Even if the disc’s too long and there’s too much coasting here and there to qualify it as near-classic, there’s more than enough to convince doubters that Snoop can still deliver.

[It] depends less on the band’s gear-smashing antics than on their sense of tunecraft, which isn’t as highly developed.

He avoids being too folksy or slipping into an acoustic coma by layering percussion, electric guitars, and strings when needed. By the end, you’ll feel you’ve been through the same wringer.

Urban has the market wisdom to balance his artistic efforts with assembly-line Nashville pop-chart fodder.

This latest entry in the old-icon-meets-young-iconoclast trend is lit up by the sparks between the principals.

Noise Floor is a smattering of moods and modes all tied together by Oberst’s love-it-or-loathe-it voice.

Several cuts on +/-’s third full-length... feature tunes sturdy (and dreamy) enough to satisfy a Death Cab for Cutie fan. But Let’s Build a Fire is also full of moments that suggest Baluyut has grown tired of the straightforward indie-rock approach.

It’s a shame he doesn’t indulge more of his rock impulses, because his ornate mid-tempo predilections tend to water down his natural charisma.

Instead of wandering into opaque experimentation, as they’ve been known to do in the past, they corral those unruly elements into a series of hummable, memorable tunes.

Normal Happiness... could be one of his most satisfying sets.

For a gangster, Banks sure plays it safe.

As frontman Craig Finn tries singing instead of just reciting and the band hang tighter around their major-chord riffs, the music sounds older than ever, recalling beautiful-loser ’70s rock like Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland.”

In their music... the Decemberists are more confident and willing to stretch out than ever before.

His much-delayed solo debut eschews the kind of risk his productions are known for, and the result turns into one big mash of slow fades waiting for pretty ladies in the video.

It’s as warm and melodic as the Soft Boys’ Nextdoorland was brittle and jagged.

Under the Skin’s tenderly whispered ruminations... are gripping little creations, full of weird acoustic-guitar riffs and uncomfortably intimate vocals and open revelations about the anxiety he feels in trying to reassert his creative identity at this late date.

The results unfold like a well-plotted novel.

The echo-saturated clang works as background music if you’re washing dishes in a haunted house or performing at-home knee surgery, but hunker down with the sound by itself and it evaporates like stale smoke.

It’s their honest simplicity that offers a refreshing contrast to the irony of neo-new-wave disco retreads that are all the rage in the UK.

He’s brought together his best batch of melodies yet, along with lyrics that aim less to shock than to amuse.

Kasabian can’t do anything besides snarl, a limitation that’s starting to show after only two albums.

Eschewing the live-in-the-studio roughness of 2004’s On My Way, he returns to the fuller production of his solo debut, 2002’s Sha Sha.

An eclectic, danceable collection of hip-hop, R&B, and pop confections.

Experimental without sacrificing anything in terms of hooks or melody, passionate yet never overbearing, and clever without giving in to the urge to indulge, it places TV on the Radio on a plane with no peers.

So the first-listen impact has been lessened, but the growing affection ends up in the same place as always.

You can’t ask for much more from a sophomore album.

As eclectic as the disc is, it never strays from that warm sense of familiarity.

Because Seger has honed his craft to such a silver-bullet point, the album never feels like a retread; as on John Fogerty’s underrated Deja Vu All Over Again from 2004, roots-rock tradition seems renewed in Seger’s hands.

Its stories of survivors and struggling lovers have a wistfulness that spills from the lyrics into the tone of David Hidalgo’s vocal performances and the warm guitar lines, which draw on blues, classic rock, and traditional Mexican musical flourishes.

The template holds.

In the end it’s the guitars, which alternate from restrained, melodic jangles to serrated feedback screams, and the general sense that Happy Hollow chronicles life during wartime that hold these 14 tune together, hymns or otherwise.

The 18 cuts here showcase the Birmingham (England) group’s brand of eerie yet pretty electro-acoustic pop as well as any of their three proper albums.

Damaged isn’t the most tuneful record Wagner and company have made.

The simplicity of the punk-driven songwriting and the bare, urgent honesty of vocalist/guitarist Hutch Harris’ delivery drive home the album’s political points with startling effectiveness.

Ratatat never get as Daft funky or as outright punky as you’d want. But they never linger for too long in one place, and they throw more than enough cerebral curveballs to keep you on your musical toes.

The murky production seems lazy rather than artful; the hard-rock riffs don’t kick as hard as they’re meant to.

Some tracks, of course, are as sexy as a soggy batch of freedom fries once the words are comprehensible. But the best updates... have a seedy splendor all their own.

This time the throwbacks are so brazenly imitative, they might raise the copyright hackles of the earliest copyright infringers.

Think of it as rock-and-roll comfort food.

The warmth and the easy familiarity enable The Trials of Van Occupanther to stand on its own.

Peaches sharpens her synth hooks, varies the electrogrooves, and serves up 13 tracks that are just amusing enough in their risqué behavior to keep the smiles coming while also standing behind the political point of the title.

Only the title track bears any resemblance to what Dashboard once were.

You’re unlikely to encounter another pioneering techno-pop act entering its third decade with style and substance largely intact.

Keith is... for the first time living up to the standards of his most important precursor, the shape-shifting funkateer George Clinton. That is, even as he jokes and grooves his way through Octagon’s long-awaited return, he’s also serious as shit.

Phillips captures the imagery, as well as the heart, of an era’s underground.

It’s Frank Black on his first real roll as a solo artist.

If the lyrics weren’t so surreal, you could imagine yourself dining with George and Tammy before a Grand Ole Opry performance.

[Sonic Youth's] most openly “mature” disc, possibly their best since ’95’s Washing Machine, maybe even the almighty Daydream Nation.

Always ambitious, occasionally experimental, and sometimes even radio-friendly.

Son exudes the studied calm of a laboratory technician engaged in heavy-duty experimentation.

Although they love drama, AFI never abandon believability here. Which means the arena-rock trappings don’t make the music feel fake -- they just make it feel more exciting than life.

It’s this willingness to experiment with sounds and percussion that distinguishes Psapp from their electro-organic brethren.

Free To Stay is all about hyper, exuberant tunes as accessible to Kidz Bop kids as they are to parents.

Although Citrus allures with its dizzying waves of sound and airy melodies, the band never let those elements become tangential or spiral off into cul-de-sacs of pointless theatrics.

The effect is as scattershot as the guest list.

It’s better this way, all apologies to Meg White.

At War with the Mystics is as accessibly odd as Yoshimi but more scattered and darker.

In a genre dominated by sensitive boys in sneakers and second-hand cardigans, Rainer Maria have had an edge: ... There’s barely a male voice to be heard on Catastrophe Keeps Us Together.