Like her game soprano, which breaks apart with the same lucid strength it sometimes uses to soar with trepidation, Land of Talk's music unleashes its own aggressive logic.

So with Murs for President, he just did what he does, churning out another strong album of choppy retro samples that pretend chipmunk-soul and snap never existed.

These guys were rubbish as careerists, essentially banishing much of their stronger material to the depths. So think of The Power of Negative Thinking as the great unveiling.

His new Double Night Time is a relatively introspective affair. It's also more satisfying as headphone fodder, thanks largely to a phalanx of synthesizers (burbling arpeggios cushion most tracks) and vocals from Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys.

It's a page out of Mogwai grandchildren Ratatat's playbook, and it shows these Scots doing something we haven't seen them do in a while: evolve.

Through headphones or computer speakers, Caleb's echoey vocals just don't ring credible. Their Black-Crowes-go-new-wave choruses are exciting enough, but they feel unearned after tiresome, oversung verses.

Jenny is a definitely a chosen one in the talent department, but she doesn't really let on.

Ne-Yo's fantastic third CD, The Year of the Gentleman, reconfigures "grown and sexy" by detailing relationships with an often uneasy mix of heartache, reflection, wit, lust, and resignation.

When he flexes his craft, he corrals multi-tracked vocals of himself that coast over static guitar arpeggios, like a priest who prefers to clack his rosary beads in his bedroom rather than pray aloud in a chapel with his peers. If there's a Lord, he's grateful for the devotion, but for eavesdroppers, it does get tedious.

Even while Saadiq pays homage to soul's golden era, he brings his own flavor through his tell-tale tenor; still, if it ain't your cup of tea, just slip this in your parents' record collection and they won't notice a thing.

The real problem, though, isn't the music (accomplished and catchy enough for distracted listening), nor is it Nelly's own verses (more stylish than substantive, as always). Rather, it's that a dedicated capitalist--hear his "Buy me the mall" manifesto on 'Hold Up'--is using a business model that's on its way to extinction.

The group never abandoned its orquestra live, and that may be why this return to form sounds so welcoming.

The Stand-Ins, reportedly taped at the same time as "Stage Names," is an improvement, not least because Sheff punishes himself (rather humorously) for the sin of relying on tragic heroes at all.

Singer Justin Ringle often muffles his words or loses them altogether (as though a wool scarf were covering his mouth) as he trudges through cadences reminiscent of Ryan Adams or Iron & Wine's Sam Beam, delicately dotting his stanzas with multi-dimensional characters weathering the winters of their existence. Which is more enriching than it sounds.

Despite creating some killer drones in '03 and '04, the duo has been in decline for more than two years now, and the trend continues with All the Way.

His first two albums were well-crafted, uncompromising in their focus, and exceptionally entertaining. The Recession makes it three.

Somehow, the Game is still coasting on wispy, West Coast–nostalgia fumes--chronic, red rags, lolos, etc.--but the goodwill, at this point, has pretty much exhausted itself.

Diehards will probably resent their new predictability and homogeneity, but the group's mature phase is capable of generating one hell of a pop album.

While Where You Go may not be his masterpiece, as a distillation of the space-disco aesthetic, it's unparalleled.

Too many of these songs get bogged down in chord changes and lyrics likely to sound worn-out even to a 10-year-old.

Her voice is rich, finely textured, and more expressive now than when it hit r&b charts in the 1960s. But her recordings can sound monotonous. That's not true here.

Mostly the fascination here is with sounds-not-songs, which is fine for the year Portishead came back, as long as the Faint have enough dial tones and farts swiped from Thom Yorke's basement tapes to deck out Fink's traditionally one-note delivery when attention wanders.

Newman is a master of sardonic humor, be it subtle or slapstick. Harps and Angels is further proof.

Weaponry is essential: a particularly overwhelming headphones album not unlike some of Boredoms' more hypnotic work.

If Vandervelde's new set struggles to generate the same charge, maybe that's because it doesn't approach its source material with the same aggression or playfulness.

22 Dreams, Weller's ninth solo effort, is complete bollocks.

As far as eagerly anticipated debuts go, Partie Traumatic is loose and unforced in its extreme eagerness to please.

Highlights of Fate coming back 'round one last time give satisfying closure, but also tease what's coming when it's inevitably cued up again.

The only thing Britney ever did better was cut loose, and even through Breakout's title suggests both a debutante's cotillion (leaving Disneyland and entering the airwaves) and an emotional liberation, Miley often sounds held-back and controlled.

It's chaotic, but extremely beautiful and endlessly fascinating.

Though the result doesn't quite reach the rarefied heights of 2005's Separation Sunday or the following year's nearly equally great follow-up, Boys and Girls in America, it fits nicely alongside LCD Soundsystem's "Sound of Silver" and the National's "Boxer" as a poignant example of veteran artists maturing gracefully, capturing that feeling you get just after the peak, when you've started noticing the decline but haven't figured out what to do about it yet.

Controversy aside, without any truly addictive tracks, you can't consider Nas's latest among his greatest. But it's hard not to appreciate the effort.

No doubt about it, from first note to last, Mar Dulce (loose translation: "the Sweet Sea") is a most tasty dive.

The clever (and accurate) branding that associated the warm, metallic grids of those thumb pianos (or likembes) with repetitive electronic music. On that front, 7th Moon doesn't disappoint a bit.

¿Cómo Te Llama? is best when the songs seem to shake and quaver within their candy-coated shells; fittingly, that’s when they’re at their Strokes-iest.

Sure, the novelty helps, and if it recurs too often, the glee of hearing Nelson and Marsalis mesh will diminish. But hearing once how they play with and against each other is a real treat.

LP3 is a stronger outing, though it's not necessarily harder or faster.

Like all of her wordplay--as written, sometimes spontaneously spoken, and occasionally sung--it fits.

The party holds strong into the second half, where the comedown always muddles the songwriting a little. Surprise: Antony's dramatic ululations return to rescue the trawling sonics.

Fire Songs isn't a masterpiece, but it's in the right ZIP code.

No surprise, Ribot's versatility as a guitarist is the main draw here.

For all the extracurricular drama, it's pretty good.

When the pastoral Eno flourishes that started Vida off so promisingly return for a quick coda, Martin reverts back to his suavely crooning self, but blows it with his first four words: "And in the end . . . . " Bam, you're thinking 'Abbey Road,' and while Vida is far from a dog, it's just another unflattering comparison that the record itself needlessly invites--an extremely overconfident way to handle a crisis of confidence.

Fortunately, The Devil, You + Me shows that the Notwist been keeping their ears to the street and their asses in the studio since releasing 2002's indie-synth breakthrough "Neon Golden."

[The album] exude grace and vocal excellence in the realm of Art Garfunkel or Kate Bush--a consequence of the earth-shattering stakes at hand. The rub is that Shark's Teeth is better than good.

The patchwork of styles thrown around here distracts you from the album's strengths.

Now Diamond Hoo Ha, find Supergrass mired in a sort of stasis. We always knew the lads were limited to just three chords; with efforts that feel measured, contrived, and dawdling, they finally sound like it.

This Is Not the World sounds more like a Buzzcocks record--a merry collection of punk cut-ups.

Rook is great, with an emotional clarity and narrative acuity that makes it one of the year's most rewarding listens.

A little too sitting-on-the-dock-of-the-bay for Chris Breezy–trained earbuds, perhaps, Here I Stand is pure grown-man bidness.

Now 62, the mighty reverend may not be able to make you spontaneously combust like yesteryear, but damn if he can't still get you in the mood with his third batch of love songs for Blue Note.

The result ebbs and flows.

The result is impressive genre prowess--especially when he invites Austin unknown Deon Davis (a/k/a Element 7d) to contribute some post-rap boogie on 'Crystal Lite,' or rips off Wham’s 'Everything She Wants' on 'I Choose You'--but Pants might still be flexing prematurely.

Against all odds, Anywhere I Lay My Head doesn't feel like a vain stunt. Mostly.

II Trill, is psychologically up-market, with genuinely well-appointed guest spots (that Webbie and Lupe Fiasco both sound comfortable on the same album speaks volumes) and hungry young producers offering their best tricks.

On Crayons, it’s like no time has passed at all, and of course it hasn't.

Solidified by finally having a mostly established band, this record is less impressive than their pre-’90s work, but better than anything since 1994, and generally a welcome addition to their already established résumé.

With catchy choruses (hear "Why, tell me why?/I don't know" once and it won't go away), assured self-production, and lyrics that lean on nobody's pen, it won't be long before people start comparing other bands to French Kicks, instead of the other way around.

It's their mediocre album.

Take Foxy Brown's (belated) fourth album, Brooklyn's Don Diva, as the latest missed opportunity.

Nouns' title stinks compared to that of their 2007 debut, "Weirdo Rippers," but the jams are way better.

By submerging listeners gently, Water Curses never goes off the deep end.

Estelle turns Shine into a durable debut, pleasant and shrewd.

The good news for people who love bad news is that Portishead have gotten better, too.

Kensington Heights, like its predecessor, isn't as fiery as the best moments on the band's inconsistent breakthrough, 2003's "Shine a Light," but the Constantines still deliver bedrock strength and eternal-flame passion.

Her appeal is questionable when she tries to sound like an American rapper, but on tracks where she just sings--the immaculate junk symphony of 'Be Mine,' the excellently Japanese 'Bum Like You,' the Autobahn power-ballad 'With Every Heartbeat'--she gives Europop a swift Swedish energy and presence.

All in all, Hard Candy could be the greatest swan song to a pop career this side of Let It Be, if you wanna get all hyperbolic about it.

With her eponymous debut's deft mix of dap, punk, rock, pop, house, reggae, and hip-hop, she won't completely live down associations with the famous Sri Lankan (whom she also counts as a friend), but the result emerges as much more than a mere imitation.

The production style displays unique shadings and shifts in sound, suggesting an attention to sonic detail emblematic of a drummer with the deep musical (especially jazz-related) knowledge that ?uestlove owns. But this may also sustain the most oft-heard complaint against the Roots: the seeming inability of their lead vocalist, Black Thought, to unfailingly deliver "hip-hop quotables."

Not a bad debut, finally, but someone should tell her that speaking for the young people doesn't mean merely becoming Shanice with attitude.

The singer's Mancunian bleariness is such that the bittersweet barfly sing-along 'Grounds for Divorce' rings effortlessly real, while the quasi-spiritual questing of 'Weather to Fly' gets reined in by the sobering image of "pounding the streets where my father's feet/Still ring from the walls."

Overall, Mr. Love and Justice is classic Bragg: frequently fantastic folk-rock that keeps both the faith and your attention.

The piano twinkle and mere droplet of a beat on 'Like the Rest of Us' sounds like Slug doing Regina Spektor; the coos and plucks of 'Me' are Yael Naïm; the barista-strum acoustic rap of 'Guarantees' aims for Elliott Smith and ends up with Uncle Kracker; the skipping hand-clap gospel of 'Puppets' is pure Moby Playtime; and, for some reason, 'Dreamer' sounds like Michael McDonald--funkless, martial, stiff, and innocuous, perfect for an upwardly mobile 21-45 demo that seeks neither boom nor bap with their soy latte.

The Mobb Deep don sounds beyond frayed, barely restraining his byzantine gangster paranoia while scratching out his own self-convinced logic evoking both grief and menace.

Serene but emotionally flat, Valley feels like too much church on a cold Sunday afternoon.

Anthony Gonzalez nurtures nostalgia but isn't enslaved by it, and Saturdays=Youth teems with equal parts ache and pomp as a result.

He's always here to try to twist reality's wires some more, just so, and leave a little room to move.

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! should prove an exhilarating listen for most fans of Cave's oeuvre. It has a lot of the rawness and jagged edges of a classic Bad Seeds album, hopped up with off-kilter beats and loads of loops contributed by violinist Warren Ellis.

It's basically a minimalist record that coasts on one's predilection for NINoise.

In many ways, what follows is the perfect distillation of the Breeders' catalog (and Deal's attendant side project, the Amps).

Problem is, Walk It Off is recorded like a single, 45-minute Big Event, rendering the alleged omniharp, tubular bells, and timpani mere liner-note abstractions.

Do It! is the first Clinic record that seems assembled from bits of old Clinic records, its personality the result of combined ideas rather than new ones.

Rabbit Habits, the Philadelphia group's first for Anti-, turns down the amps, reduces the Jolt intake, and generally bids for newfound maturity and restraint. The surprise is that it mostly works.

But in clearing away the ear-candy clutter that's increasingly come to define his band's records (for better or for worse), Meloy enables even observers less convinced than those caught on tape to admire the tidy architecture of his material.

It's not the production, as copiously sexy as it is, that makes this great: It's that Kylie has an ear for fantastic pop-rock tunes restyled for 2008, and she approaches them not as merely amusing sonic glitter, but as totally vital music.

For a band about whom most of the talk (pro and con) has focused on their unrelenting giddiness, Los Campesinos! have produced a debut that's surprisingly muddled emotionally.

'Sing for the Submarine's' winking nods to old song titles ("electron blue," "gravity's pull," "high-speed train") are painfully self-aware. It's a sharp contrast to the rest of Accelerate, on which R.E.M. stop overthinking things--and start roaring toward the future.

A song or two will keep you warm and contented, but take in the full album and April will smother you worse than a down comforter in July.

There may be a deep coat of irony smeared about here, but in the end, Pretty. Odd. is exactly what it says it is.

Thankfully, if anything differentiates the terrific Get Awkward from its hardly inauspicious predecessor, it's that this one may be even less complicated. Whereas the debut made room for actual relationships and a couple of headlong jams, this is a tighter, blunter assault, affording Pearl only just enough room to summarize B-movie plots or super-soak society.

More glamorous but less versatile, the Kills are the easier listen, particularly if their superficiality is taken to be deliberate.

'Basso Profundo,' sticks out like a sore thumb, overindulging the band's penchant for melting-pot quirk before the listener's had a chance to acclimate, throwing off the balance of an otherwise perfectly paced album.

The result is so robotic in its attempt to jolt every single pleasure center every single second that any twist of human joy, lust, awareness, or reflection is assimilated into its brittle, crunky Borg cube.

Street Horrrsing is, to your dad's ears (unless your dad is Lou Reed), a whole lot of noise. But what virtuosic, complicated noise it is.

A hastily crafted follow-up, a subpar sequel, much more "Rocky V" than "The Godfather: Part II."

There's nothing offensive about anything on Volume One, which, with its catchy melodies, universally appealing lyrics, and mellow production, might just be a hit.

These gals are older, more cohesive, and more enchanting than before, plus Maxim-approved.

Too Old to Die Young is a fully plugged-in affair that expands on the muscular sighs of its predecessor and ups the rhythmic ante.