To really care about this album you have to be able to get into the pure hard sounds of the dance-track percussion and the way Michael tends to garnish them with his voice.

Neither as bad as you might fear nor as good as you might hope.

Ten New Songs is all introspection, closer in sound to a technologically updated Songs From a Room.

The Id suffers from the conundrum of all post-breakout second albums. You're disappointed either because the songs are not enough like the first one or because they're too much like the first but not quite as good.

It's what you might expect from a bunch of musos playing with Cubase or ProTools: sampled loops, Brixton dub, trip-hoppy tangents. U.N.K.L.E.'s bratty nephew, really, though the album sounds like the group locked the metronome on "heavy funk groove"--chugging and satisfying at first, it feels exhausted by the fifth or sixth track.

His old-school MC sensibilities clash with his need to make unit-shifting quotas, and it trips up the record.

Mike Mills's and Peter Buck's acoustic midtempo strummings and electronic ambience match 1992's Automatic for the People for lethargy, without the looming darkness or catchy sentimentality that made it compelling.

Compared to the patchwork G-funk on Dead Man Walkin, Tha Last Meal is a sonic wonderworld. Dr. Dre and Timbaland gussy up Snoop's drag with their unique shuffles, making his descent into even deeper banality irrelevant.

Conspiracy of One? It's fine. Is there anything here as cute as "Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)"? No: Like with Ixnay on the Hombre, their follow-up to the megahit Smash, this follow-up to the even more megahit Americana finds them in dance-with-the-girl-what-brung-you mode--more punk, less pop.

There's little on Parachutes that demands attention or punctures the pensive spell, and, unlike Travis's, Coldplay's hooks are slight.

A halfway successful attempt by Cook to stake his claim as Serious Artist.... Cook started work on Halfway feeling paralyzed by the problem of how to bypass big beat's exhausted fastbreaks-acidriffs-oldskoolsamples formula. He found his path by partially abandoning breakbeats in favor of house's hypnotic four-to-the-floor, and by bringing in what he's called an "almost gospelly" flavor.... It's surprising, though, how much dated, big-beat-style pummel you have to endure before the almost gospel vibe's glorious return.

So You're the One, like all of Simon's work since Graceland, has to be judged a failure.... Image be damned, but pop doesn't just flow out of groove and penmanship.

Too much dark and not enough dancer--textured passages that might sound great with luscious visuals, but are mere din from a cheap CD boom box.

Throughout Maroon, though, producer Don Was mercifully dispenses with mawkishness in favor of a theatrical approach tailored for arena consumption.

So while Ecleftic ain't wack, it's no carnival. It realizes the B-boy boho dream much better than caricaturist "hiphop metal" acts, but Clef served our interests much better last time at bat.

And while Holmes can't be faulted for applying cut-and-paste to mood and drama as well as sounds and beats, his tracks' lack of freshness still adds up to an ambitious letdown.

Hand-clappable tunes and delicious cover design aside, sharp narrative-driven writing has been what saves the band from being merely annoying or silly or cute; too bad Fold Your Hands Child entirely abandons the vivid narrative vignette model.