It's the rare guitar geek who acts like strings and horns are where he's always belonged rather than where he hopes he'll fit in.

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

It's wish fulfillment for boys who make passes at girls who wear glasses.

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.

two about his parents are juicier than the mother love gushing from God's Son. The Afrocentric pep song is so much deeper than the mawkish, misinformed new "I Can" that you believe he might yet get politics.

It fleshes out its cohesive narrative and cogent ideas with beats that respect the spare antipop ethos without abjuring such wayward rhythm elements as femme chorus, bass-drum-whoop jam, and $20 synth loop.

Their best album in a decade.

Something much bigger than last year's Girls Can Tell, the breakthrough album skeptics like me took for a fluke peak.

Sleater-Kinney... go for defiant uplift and seem energized by the challenge.

Her best bunch of songs since--not Broken English, that's ridiculous, but Strange Weather or A Child's Adventure.

The latest Old Person to forge Honest Music in the teeth of a Youth-Orientated Marketplace has lost his legendary voice, so what's the attraction?

The old sound is hard in new ways.

It's not enough for Anthony Keidis to get all mature--he's supposed to say something interesting about maturity. And he's never had thing one to say about anything else.

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

The overall effect is less grand than that of Endtroducing six years ago, popper and rocker and r&ber. But an overall effect there is, grounded in Shadow's trademark-tremendous bass 'n' drum.

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.

He's at his best in the fictional-mythic mode that prevails here.

The Hives explode where a hundred other punk bands are proud to rock.

Mood music, maybe. How to be conscious and happy at the same time.

Eventually, the tunes fall into place. What never materialize in sufficient number are the billowing climaxes and cutting remarks that mark their best albums, meaning most of them.

Pop isn't an ambition for these smart people with other things to do, it's a discipline--the tunes strong, the beats solid, the vocals lightly yearning and pungently sweet.

Sure they're clever, but they're also as shallow as Britney Spears.

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

These are pop songs in the sense that they deliver their payloads in 90 seconds. But they're also confessional, dark, downtempo--and, OK, a little gauche sometimes, which just makes them seem realer.

Imperfect, definitely. But only because perfection is on the table.

At 78 minutes this is too long, and especially given his history, "The Lost Children" is offensive. But the first three tracks are the Rodney Jerkins of the year, "2000 Watts" is the Teddy Riley of the past five years, and even the prunables offer small surprises.

Obviously it's not perky enough, funky enough either, but their best (and third) album in 15 years (and probably last ever) sounds an awful lot like what kids today call pop.

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