What carries the album is, I swear, the skits.

Leonard Cohen has had No Voice since he began recording at 33. But he has more No Voice today, at 70, than he did on Ten New Songs, at 67.

I don't get this.

There's that Ramones sense that songs should be short like life, and that XTC sense that songs should be complicated like life.

Here the defining flow is sonic--a shadowy, guitar-drenched tone poem of the streets.

Her chin-up ditties don't connect every time, but her abandonment of home recording will win new listeners anyway.

Morrison's predictably intelligent solo debut puts personality where the Dismemberment Plan's synergy used to be.

Smile's post-adolescent utopia isn't disfigured by Brian's thickened, soured 62-year-old voice. It's ennobled--the material limitations of its sunny artifice and pretentious tomfoolery acknowledged and joyfully engaged.

Grae can rhyme, and if she had a male larynx and a production budget, her hype men, chipmunk soul, minor-key piano hooks, and "I wanna rock a fella so bad" might stand underground on its head.

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

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

Rarely do the settings distinguish themselves.... But a distinct voice delivering noticeable verbal content is a setting too--that's why you notice the content.

Here, their structures adamantly circular and their tunes less catchy but more durable, they make dandy mystagogues on an album that begins inarticulate and attains the nirvana of total nonverbality.

Class warfare meets gangsta-rock.

The music on this feisty, funny rap album isn't new--just irresistible.

Granted his major-label production budget in the sky, Tim DeLaughter hones his tunes and dispels woozy comparisons to the Flaming Lips.

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.

It's hard to imagine any of the suckers who fell for the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot hype striving to identify with, say, "Muzzle of Bees." Not impossible. Just hard.

This unusually songful set is well up among their late good ones, its dissonances a lingua franca deployed less atmospherically than has been their recent practice.

This makes engrossing listening if the effort suits you, but it's useless as background music.

When the songs are not just clever but lively--most spectacularly on the unrelenting "I Thought You Were My Boyfriend"--Stephin Merritt's demo-ready monotone could pass for a singing voice.

No, she hasn't regained her sense of humor, but aren't you fast losing yours?

Weathered now, their herky-jerk stands up smartly to interjections from the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

A glorious phantasmagoria of flow.

All told, pretty dull--unless you're so desperate that you'll sing hosanna for every piece of intelligent-honest-original that comes down the circuit.

Half God's gift to hip-hop, half man of the people, he never quite puts all his good tracks together or across.

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

An album as invigorating in its contempt for rock professionalism as Neil Young's Tonight's the Night.