There's no more accomplished crew in alt-rap, and though that can make their messages seem slick sometimes, on ['The Craft'] their booming beats, lucid raps, and articulate rhymes are technically miraculous.

Production notwithstanding, the major-label move is the lyric sheet, which situates their circular minor-key riffs in a congruent worldview: eternal recurrence as infinite regress as cosmic bummer.

What sticks out right off is a drive that can't be taught or approximated.

No catchier collection of jingles has come to my attention since Steve Miller made his mint off jet airliners.

At her best--which must not come easy, or they'd release more and more consistent albums--Rennie Sparks is a great American realist.

All shallow, all pure as a result--pure escape, pure delight, and, as the cavalcade of gospel postures at the end makes clear, pure spiritual yearning.

"Unsound" is their most clearly irresistible ever, and the aural nimbi that surround or trail after the others never obscure Van Dyk's lines of thought.

Although Mike Elizondo adds momentum, Jon Brion's colors still predominate, and the melodic and structural contours are all Apple's.

Gibbard's delicate voice matches the subtle electro arrangements far more precisely than it does the folky guitars of his real group.

No other Brazilian composer defies cultural boundaries so eloquently.

Even when the forced pronunciations turn gauche, she remains a good egg who's not afraid to put herself on the line.

A glorious phantasmagoria of flow.

Often seems fragile, offhand, tentative, even enervated. But this isn't a weakness--it only makes their sound more their own.

But though this may be pretension, it's also delight, strange and humorous verbally and aurally.

A band record, a groove record, a riff record; something lowdown, dirty, smoky.

[Bell Orchestre] varies its cunningly sequenced, gratifyingly brief instrumental tracks with such old-fashioned amenities as textured melodies, pleasing dynamic shifts, and passages that, if they don't actually r-o-c-k, at least bound down the road in an excited manner.

The voice asserts itself as the record sinks in, however, and not only does each song stand out, but the production variegates a sonic grandeur grounded in the rock verities.

Not counting Stephin Merritt, no other under-40 approaches McKay's gift for cabaret.

These aren't indelible tunes like "At Home He's a Tourist" or "Suspect Device." But months later they're still getting not just stronger but rawer, which isn't how this game usually works.

There's plenty of detail, and feeling too--not just anger, tenderness.

They woke up one day, glanced around a marketplace where art wasn't mega anymore, and figured that since they'd been calling themselves pop for half of their two-decade run, maybe they'd better sit down and write some catchy songs. So they did.

Charming, civilized, childish, Kieran Hebden imagines an aural space in which electronic malfunction is cute rather than annoying or ominous.

Despite its lack of an anthem to replace "Start Me Up," it certainly beats Tattoo You or anything else going back to Exile except Some Girls.

Here's one new rock record whose optimistic abandon is specifically conceived as a response to deprivation and attack.

The attitude is tougher and the material thinner, but you have to love it for not falling flat on its heightened expectations.

For any Upper West Side showbiz kid, musical comedy is mother's milk, more "natural" than the rude attack of rock or the polite confessional of folk ... With crucial help from Jon Brion, she's got the Richard Rodgers/Kurt Weill part down, and will surely tackle the Dorothy Fields/Lorenz Hart part later.

The brightest actual pop album of 2003.

They've gotten unmistakably louder and unmistakably gayer--or perhaps I mean, hate the term, more metrosexual.