The carping is intercut with elegiac little pauses that align Blink 182 with a branch of punk rock you could trace back through the Replacements and Ramones Leave Home, to the more ethereal of early Who songs.

Where Kid A couldn't help but be seen as a reaction to fame and intense scrutiny, Amnesiac illuminates what Radiohead are now, and will likely be for a long time: an evasive, willfully experimental rock band who feel uncomfortable in their own skins.

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

Like nearly any DM record, Exciter, their 14th album, mostly leaves one hungry for the inevitable remixes.

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.

Where Unwound's songs have usually been jagged or drained, Leaves Turn Inside You remains level for two discs (almost 80 minutes), making it one of the darkest, most placid hard rock records since Soundgarden's Superunknown.

While the acoustic simplicity of Reckoning seems thin at first, particularly beside Revelling's sensual, bombastic joy, the croons and ballads grow on you, if not for their melancholy navel-gazing, then for their languid, old-school folksiness.

The new Monster Magnet album is kinda crappy, and they'd better check themselves before they quite irrevocably wreck themselves.

Stag is a diverse non-Indigo mix (the only song that makes me go hmmm starts, "She brings me Spanish clementines, I eat them by the waterside"), intermingling Ray's canny ear for melody with a lo-fi, raw sensibility and attitude aplenty.

Arab Strap mix the stoic, set-permanently-at-dawn folk whispers of last year's Elephant Shoe with the beat-friendly sense of their best early singles: "The First Big Weekend," "(Afternoon) Soaps," "Cherubs." The music sheds its amateur charm for the sound of a band in control of its art and its drum machines.

Everyday has at least six tracks more beautiful than U2's "Beautiful Day"; the album, needless to say, kicks All That You Can't Leave Behind's behind.

Ultimately, most Run DMC fans would have been much happier with old-school Run, D, and Jay than with a smorgasbord of Billboard chart-toppers for hire.

A swell record: personal but easy-going, distinctive, with a lot of picaresque personal narratives occasionally conveyed through exaggerated fantasy elements.

A punk-rock attitude and metal licks are all that are necessary for these four chicks to show the world what they want. Turn 21 is way heavier than the bubble-yum power-chord punch-punk they started out with—you know, the kind of three-minute tunes that came so easily when you were rehearsing after school for your first big show. But when they want to, the Donnas can still pull it all out and go Mano.

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.

The most penetrating and engaging album of their career...

Filled with startling jump cuts and puzzling reverberations, The W is the best-produced Wu-affiliated album since GZA's 1995 Liquid Swords.... Eight years after their first single, it's a thrill to hear Wu-Tang sounding so unhinged. But it's also a pain in the ass. With nine voices, nine styles competing for your ear, even the most carefully crafted Wu-Tang album flirts with chaos, and the listener is left to separate milestones from mistakes. The W bursts with inspiration, but what does it all mean? You can't help wishing there was someone in charge.

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.

TP-2.com is a magnum opus of the genre, milking both Kelly's recent reflection and his baser inclinations for all they're worth.

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.

All That You Can't Leave Behind returns to the grand gestures of old. Practically every song a potential hit single. Soulful, exuberant, at peace with its own clichés, this is one U2 record that will never be called antianything.... Call it their R.E.M. album, monster rock filtered through a sophisticate's restraint.

When talking about an album as multilayered, thematically diverse, and sonically rich as OutKast's Stankonia, though, the best thing is to boil it down to its essentials, its influences, its approaches. You know, the uppercase conceptual stuff. This album, the acclaimed Atlanta duo's fourth and best, contains so many hummable hooks, so many snap-your-head beats, so many break-'em-out-and-talk-about-'em metaphors, that it's easy to get lost in the sauce.

It embraces rock guitar again with the same gulping pleasure with which Harvey is for once embracing her man.

And though it's as good as, if not better than, its predecessor, the album's not bowling people over, either. Maybe its rap-folk hybrid is just too much of the same. Or maybe we just can't identify with the first-person "Black Jesus" like we can the third person of yore. Because maybe this album's greatest strength is exactly what's holding it back: the narrative.

On the whole, Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water feels like an interminable groan, a harried hustle toward obsolescence. Rather than creating a cathartic requiem for, say, the impending dotcom depression, this turgid non-effort doesn't even live up to the mookish reputation refuted with such salacious fervor on "Take a Look Around."

It putters here and there across 18 ditties and doodles gracefully arranged, but played with two left feet and recorded to match.... This English Elliott Smith's got a plainspeak voice that compels with repeated listenings, and the subtle tunes are likewise sneaky, enlivened by all sorts of quirky bits...

It's... really different. And oblique oblique oblique: short, unsettled, deliberately shorn of easy hooks and clear lyrics and comfortable arrangements. Also incredibly beautiful.

The album's darn spooky good... Shelving the old Green Day wall of guitars (Dookie and Insomniac) in favor of the youngest (and best) Pete Townshend mod-clanky buzz opens up the band's sound dramatically; it's airy and spacious, lots of room for the vocals. The whole thing breathes with neat ambiences.

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.

Music breaks down neatly into three discrete sections, on which I'll hang the very technical names the dance part, the good part, and the dirge part. The good part, so named because it's really good, accounts for half of Music's 10 songs, conveniently nestled into tracks four through eight inclusive, so you can play that section over and over again without interruption.

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.

Godspeed's records will either blow your head off or leave you shrugging, depending on where your personal quest for freedom is taking you.

A flat-out incredible live recording... it's Underworld as nonstop high, a disc that for 75 minutes keeps seizing and re-seizing the air.

Confidently ridiculous and matter-of-factly wise, the 6ths record is a lovely collection of songs about pining, yearning, coveting, aching, "kissing the bottle wishing it was you." Needless to say, it's also quite funny.

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.

De La may have made their most formulaic album to date in order to speak against the formularization of hip-hop.

Their new record rules, but in the party-punk, young-dumb-full-of-aplomb manner of their eponymous debut and the following year's Let's Go--not in the guitar-often-on-the-offbeat, more mannered manner of . . . And Out Come the Wolves (1995) and Life Won't Wait (1998).

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.

With the fabulously synthetic surfaces forming a cozy cocoon around Merritt's reflexive cynicism, the new FBH EP is a shiny, acidic counterpoint to the twilit wallow of [6ths album] Hyacinths.

The new album is looser in the rhythm, has less wall of slash, relatively more lilt and funk, and more variety in the sound ... but in general the music is too diffuse.

The studio scrubbing leaves no noticeable film; even the effects--like the spacey guitar that launches "Gravity Rides Everything"--ring true.

As they proved on their debut EP a couple of years back, Jurassic aren't just Furious Five retro: They summon visions of lightly rocking grace like "I'll Take You There," the intro to "Dance to the Music," or the Harlem Globetrotters passing the ball around to "Sweet Georgia Brown." Like the more serious underground hip-hop acts, though, in the end they're not quite sure what to do with themselves beyond boasting.

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.

The History of Rock, despite being not nearly as funny or fruggable, despite mostly haphazardly handpicking rerecorded renditions of old songs that are no match for new hesher-hop product by upstarts like Kottonmouth Kings and Brougham, and despite leaving such fuzzily boinging Beastie-beatboxed scratch-rap goodies as "Live" and "Classic Rock" in the vault, is still a keeper.

What lots of people loved about "Push" isn't much in evidence here, but neither is what lots of people hated about it.

The ever increasing variety in Eminem's voice (drawled Southern-bounce cadences, impatiently curt throaty staccatos, flat Beck-like deadpans, crying and screaming) somehow feels completely conversational, and the musical backdrop (calypso/Caribbean, Gothic etherea, jiggy disco evolving into P.M. Dawn) is frequently, of all things, beautiful.

Fey, coy, yet rich and deep, track after track on Broken by Whispers emits an exacting, well-crafted melodrama. Subtle electro touches only add to the wondrous acoustic guitars, wondrous and breathy declarations of love, and wondrous early morning seaside atmosphere. Those who balk at dreamy-boy nakedness will want to skip the bathos, but such people are called Americans...

The music turns Aja's fusion-pop mode jumpier and snappier, sourer and trickier and less soothing--postfunk, whether anyone will admit it or not.

Don't misunderstand. I Am Shelby Lynne is a standout... Still, if the range of reference marks Lynne's hard-won liberation from cookie-cutter Nashville, there's a different sort of plasticity to this sound, which may explain why it broke not in the heartland or on VH1, but the U.K.

A&C really cook, no matter how low-key or deliberately trivial they're sounding, and this is one way that they (usually, not always) avoid being camp or kitsch or cute.

It's a pastiche festival that works in the interest of groove every bit as hard as it does for knowingness and yuks.

Apple's arty predisposition and prodigious gifts allow this 22-year-old to wax poetic and make it rock because her delivery is so dexterous and forceful.

Albums like this one ... are by definition not great personal statements, nor even necessarily artistic peaks for the acts involved. But they keep going, A to the B to the C to the D, and right now that's more than enough.

Like a great romance, it's consistently lovable even when stupid or frustrating, and its best moments are absolutely breathtaking.

The Lips may have been inspired by the easy-listening craze, but the seeker's quality within their music tugs against that style's instinctive cheapening of sentiment.

A perfect blend of sacred and secular--exactly what Moby's been looking for all along.