Three thin voices rap-sing-chant over the same bare-bones electro that sophisticates equate with two-headed dildos and black leatherette. But here, it intensifies the toughness, naïveté, moralism, sentimentality, ambition, ebullience, and sex drive all high school girls know but few have the sass to project and none have forged into art, especially with a Brooklyn accent.

They've found it in their talent to put black music's long tradition of tune and structure into practice.

Although Lidell's voice lacks muscle and butter, he knows how to launch a falsetto, and the beats on "A Little Bit More" and "The City" should not be played within earshot of anyone wearing a pacemaker.

Its double-CD sprawl is ambitious not hubristic, imposing not indigestible.

The selection here is at once so obvious and so inappropriate it feels redemptive.

Liliput is the analogy even if Nikki Colk has never heard of them either. Kaito are noisier, faster, girlier; Colk mispronounces her English not as a Marlene Marder homage but so people will think she's from Sweden. But the two share a rare, rambunctious sense that noise is fun and life is livable.

Without resorting to anything so obvious as a hook she manages to maintain continuity and interest over an hour-plus of poetry-with-funk.

With American Idol rampant, it's nice to have this emotional hipster sticking her celebrity cred in the stupid world's face.

More trip- than hip-hop in that its irresistibility is atmospheric -- a sound that pits industrial textures against quiet piano samples/parts.

In short, they "rock." Finally.

Foolhardy though it was to saddle such an uncrucial record with a title that dares the young and the restless to bitch about how it doesn't change the world, the rest of us are free to enjoy how confidently it develops a groove.

The lyrics are intelligent of course, clever and moral and street-conscious and just gnomic enough, but their art is in their beats and flow and tunes too.

Skeletal, fragmented, stumblebum, Kim and Kelley retain their knack for righting themselves with a tuneburst just when you thought they'd never do the limbo again.

In a bad time for young guitar bands, including many barely forgettable ones lumped under the trade name "emo," these ambitious yowlers are reason for hope.

He sings roughly but warmly, and makes up as many hooks as he samples...

This is mannerist DOR more accomplished and less sentimental than its sources.

Class warfare meets gangsta-rock.

The loveliest album of Pernice's pretty career.

This album radiates positive energy, and in today's alt, that's a precious thing.

The first four tracks... [are] as powerful as any he's written.

Clever and droll but also hypnotic and mysterious.

His adolescent gulps and yowls are street-Brit with a Jamaican liquidity, as lean, eccentric, and arresting as the beats.

And that's how the album goes--too fond of drama, but aware of its small place in the big world, and usually beautiful.

This gentle, suave, insistent smoothie parlayed his direct lyrics and tricky beats into a strong straight r&b album in a year when contenders Raphael Saadig and Me'shell NdegéOcello got tangled up in form.

The best of these seven songs is a Stones cover, only not by as much as you first think, and the second-best is the opener ["Astronaut"], ditto.

Both guys are so irrepressibly playful that they get serious at their peril--they're better off as a nonstop musical goof.

The old sound is hard in new ways.

All the ugly gangsta lies are here, especially as regards the brutalization of women and the business of death. But they're incidental to the mood of the piece, which is friendly, relaxed, good-humored, and in the groove.