There's more bounce-to-the-ounce and less molasses in the jams, more delight and less braggadocio in the raps.

A glorious phantasmagoria of flow.

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

No "Ms. Jackson," no "Rosa Parks," no "Bombs Over Baghdad," no "The Whole World" either. Just commercial ebullience, creative confidence, and wretched excess, blessed excess, impressive excess.

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

The Strokes' privileged formalism is annoying, so too their delight in romantic dysfunction. But they're smarter than the playa haters who aren't smart enough to target these blatant shortcomings.

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

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

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

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

Young people who think Kraftwerk were more important than the Ramones are free to satisfy their craving for the neu with this retreat into simplicity. But even Radiohead and Mouse on Mars contain more chaos.

Even the "jazz" and "punk" cuts are good for a few laughs -- total losers are rare indeed.

If Nirvana and Robert Johnson are rock's essence for you, so's To Bring You My Love. But if you believe the Beatles and George Clinton had more to say in the end, this could be the first PJ album you adore as well as admire.

Although the album is definitely loud, it's also raw, with no hint of the symphonic, yet at the same time it's a melodic highlight of an honorably tuneful catalog.

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

Reduced to a tuneful 18-song essence that watches too much television, their mildness seems diverting and their Englishness definitive.

Not only is his willingness to express emotion commoner than indie denizens imagine, his failure to undercut that emotion with irony or humor is a spiritual weakness.

The stories are as vivid, brutal, and thought-out as any noir.

Not only does he create a unique role model, that role model is dangerous--his arguments against education are as market-targeted as other rappers' arguments for thug life.

Throughout they succeed in rendering Southern gothic as social realism.

Class warfare meets gangsta-rock.

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

A thematically linked work where some of the sonic landscapes were entrancing (although not warm).

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

No other Brazilian composer defies cultural boundaries so eloquently.

This literature with power chords addresses not only the crucial matter of vanishing bohemias as cultural myth but also the crucial matter of re-emerging spiritualities as cultural fact.

Their tunes have always seemed too facile, but seven years divided by three albums doesn't equal glib, especially with those years deepening their lyricism rather than their cynicism.

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.