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.

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

Everyone who says this isn't a sentimental record is right. But it admits sentiment, hold the hygiene, and suggests that he knows more about love dying than he did when he was immortal.

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

Every once in a while a drone or pattern emerges, reminding me of what I treasure most in "world music"-- articulated rhythm. Then he gets some tech genie or steel player to throw on another synth substitute and it's back to the miasma.

He shows off discreetly, underplaying his vocal chops and musical command, even his familiarity with scientific arcana--nay, his intelligence itself.... But discretion exacts a price in identity, clarity, and meaning.

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

Like the empathy of so many young men, especially artists, his is more self-involved than saints like us prefer. But at least he expresses empathy--to memorable melodies that very nearly bear up under the repetitions his rarely witless or superfluous lyrics require.

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 clarity, economy, and devastating detail of the man's rapping and rhyming are a benison, turning the spare beats he favors into an ascetic aesthetic.

Robert's songs more tuneful in their maturity, Grant's more atmospheric, they punch 'em all up to make a stronger impression than on their comeback album.

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

The collection doesn't cohere the way it should, and I still say seek out Talkin' Honky Blues. But wherever you start, he's a major rhymer, performer, storyteller, humanist visionary, and student of the DJ arts.

To care about this band you have to find Karen O's fuck-me persona provocative if not seductive, and since I've never been one for the sex-is-combat thing, I find it silly or obnoxious depending on who's taking it seriously.

But though the blues and gospel and more gospel testify not just for song but for body and spirit, they wouldn't shout anywhere near as loud and clear without the mastermind's ministrations--his grooves, his pacing, his textures, his harmonies, sometimes his tunes...

Their warmest album ever.

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

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

Though I can imagine putting this on at year's end and remembering every song with a kind of surprised admiration, I can't imagine doing it any sooner--or any later either.

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

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.

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

In short, they "rock." Finally.

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.

Gibbons's failure to leave the likes of "And I only hear/Only hear the rain" and "Time is but a memory" in her notebook suggests one limitation of her songcraft.

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

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

Though he's the kind of rhymer who scans "another good record with bad distribution" all too swimmingly, the hip-hop don't stop.

The main problem with this background tour de force is that you understand not just how good it is but how pretty it is only when you listen up.

Even more than, speak of the devil, Garth Brooks, she's a creature of the recording industry and the smorgasbord-of-the-air it's laid out everywhere. Are the emotions she displays so pithily as synthetic in the end as her harmonica-with-strings or steel/slide guitar? Does that make them less real?

This is the stuff of one-shot art-punk.

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

Many details are too U.K.-specific for Yank-yob gratification. But aesthetes will come to enjoy Taylor's nuanced adenoids and his bandmates' thought-through arrangements.

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

Exactly the unpredictable effort you'd expect, it utilizes a new bunch of Portland buddies to render the old noises into background music as it explores such themes as Yul Brynner's makeover and piracy on the coast of Montenegro.

I don't get this.

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

Their best album in a decade.

Tremendous craft, winning enthusiasm.

We shall overkill, he means.

Lyrics swirl around sensibly and the formidable tunesmithing never goes down the drain.

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.

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.

White's commercial success has nothing to do with de Stijl or da blooze--just a strong, emotive voice delivering simple yet distinctive songs, which are fairly numerous here.

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

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.

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.

For all his overreliance on dramatic drawls, Southwestern locales, and mother love, Springsteen has stories to tell.

David Berman joins a pickup band that includes his close personal friend Stephen Malkmus to explore realms of vocal inexpressiveness undreamt by Stephin Merritt or the Handsome Family.

This being anthropology, pretty much, a sampler is the ideal introduction.

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.

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.

But for all its rapped W-Unity, this is RZA's record.... Far from straining, he's gone sensei, achieving a craft in which the hand leads the mind.

"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.

She scores over and over on 14-tracks-in-72-minutes that miss maybe twice and only seem long-winded when she gives the flautist some.

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

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

Outfitted in this music, however, Common's pretensions stand up and do jumping jacks.

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.

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

If anything, it's more a dance record, leaving those of us with a sentimental weakness for distinct parts a little lost.

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.

The album moves the way you always hope jungle will, like a cross between a tiger and a snake, yet it's also a kind of mix record, with five showcases for Reprazent's serviceable MC Dynamite, who's as useful as the inevitable Method Man in the crucial matter of providing rap sounds. Size has his own Chaka, too. Her name is Onallee, and she takes the record out.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.