I miss the penis jokes, I sincerely do, but when life's little fuckups sound like cosmic conundrums--and here I'm referring not just to the new disc's big choruses but, more importantly, to its snaking structures and unrelentingly urgent harmonies--now-and-then comparisons fail.

The hilariously blasphemous Jesus number, '80s-AOR-chorded tough-girl ode, Margaritaville-calypsoed frat-band lookback, and outlaw drawler about Willie's deadly herb all movingly balance muscle with vulnerability.

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.

A record that's half as long as The Fragile but just as plodding and mummified.

Even when veering wildly away from good sense--and 'Change' is hardly a sensical move--there’s an unwitting pop hit right around the bend.

Under the Blacklight is a brief and often bizarre record, jiggling with artificial rhythm and awash in backup singers imported from 1981.

On their directionless new Creature Comforts, Black Dice seem confused, in fact, about what precisely their aesthetic is.

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.

Drag it Up doesn't have the gut-level impact of the older stuff.

And while LAMB is adventurous and playful--with nary a ska-punk riddim to be found--it's when Gwen reaches back and goes totally '80s that the CD reverberates with unwavering charm.

With Ropechain, the emotional turnaround's reversed: An initial, burning desire to hate everything about this album--the stylistic mish-mash, the artistic blackface, the blah cover art--gives way to wary admiration, even though it's hard to shake the sense that its creator's something of a jerk.

Somehow the band manages to sound insincere and gorgeous at the same time.

Grandiloquent, glorious gobbledygook.

Every track is a pure battle, with searing bursts of abrasion chopping at lava flows of insane density.

In the process of adding new facets to their sound, Truth winds up reinforcing self-imposed limitations.

Their craft has gotten way deeper than hey-ho blitzkrieg bop.

Like Trailer Park, her first full-length, the new Daybreaker is less about melody and being lovely than about instrumentation and experimentation with the elements--electronic, acoustic, and lyrical.

Kiedis's lyrics are absolutely baffling.

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.

A great pop album that reconciles his sudden wealth, attachment to home, and desire to rule the world.

School of Seven Bells, is a far more meditative and electronic affair dominated by former On!Air!Library! entrancers Alejandra and Claudia Deheza, who sing in mesmerizing siren-song unison, even if they sound like a grade-A hookah-bar act at times.

Only a great fool would be satisfied with just a track or two.

A bore of an album.

Establishes both how hard it is to turn out material worthy of Utopia Parkway and Welcome Interstate Managers and how often Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger come close.

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

This is the funniest hard-rock album I've ever heard; also, the hardest-rocking funny album I've ever heard, since if you take away the jokes you've still got the power of the music.

What makes this work, beyond Lang's ability to control both prickly and inspiring material, is her sensuality.

The reason this convoluted rock opera can't match the Who, U2, Green Day, or even Styx is that Danger Days is a story constructed without rising or falling action.

Its darkness relative to the other stuff here (blues shuffle, surf pastiche, Les Paul tribute, B.B. King duet) is startling, even if the tune turns out to be about his wife.

It's cocky, it's manufactured, it's too reliant on industry pal-downs, ugh, it's inorganic. Then again, it's perfectly of a moment where "All I Do Is Win" is the must-have self-fulfilling prophecy, and Planet Pit sounds like it's winning. And even if it isn't, well, it all but tells you to go ahead and groan.

Lightspeed Champion sounds like an ambitious fan, eager to stuff his entire record collection into his solo debut, but with the uncluttered grace of a patient melodist, albeit one who can't resist naming a song 'Let the Bitches Die.'

Yeah, Jacked contains a few shadowy rewrites of Here for the Party tunes, but the players this time are more in sync with the star--the music is louder, beerier.

It blows me away when someone can make nostalgia for the '60s or the '80s, or in this case both, sound relevant or recent or worth swooning over.

The best tunes here have that boys'-club vibe of the best early-to-mid-'70s hard-rock bands, dead-on and nailed.

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.

The songs on The Forgotten Arm are too engaging to dismiss their familiarity.

The best thing about 3121 is the opportunity it affords its maverick creator to school the children by recontextualizing historically resonant pop riffs and icons.

First Impressions of Earth is the sound of the Strokes taking a formal, technical, and emotional leap forward, but leaving the tunes behind.

Shelter doesn't settle into one sound--which is fine--but it's never able to harness its manic energy into anything coherent.

Although Devil Dirt has its rewarding moments, they're usually matters of arrangement rather than execution or personality, which means it's more about the chemistry of boy-meets-girl than about the specific boy or girl.

Damage seems yoked to the early '90s.

It's a unique and occasionally maddening formula, but what makes this supremely rinky-dink fourth-grade-production-of–Pirates of Penzance racket captivating is the unflappable way they sell all this circuitous dream logic, instead of just reverting to uncaring, insufferable twee.

Quality stuff. Sorta like 'Send for the Man,' but better.

This perfectly pitched record reveals that these hardworking brothers' valiant quest for independence shall be rewarded.

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.

Back to Basics doesn't always transcend the liability inherent to dancehall albums: Most songs in the genre work best not as finished singles but as 30-second snippets, meant to be sampled in a selector's riddim-based set.

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.

If the poisoned well of bad love has soused some of her most brutally detailed observations (see crushers like Essence's "Reason to Cry" or World Without Tears's "Overtime," for starters), confronting mortality seems to have thrown Williams into wandering, formless meditations.

Ms. Alecia Moore turns tragedy into a huge artistic coup once again on the only somewhat inaccurately named Funhouse.

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

This suspicious move into another moribund genre resembles the frustrated strivings of a band uncertain of how to exist After Rock.

Adams mines American Beauty and Workingman's Dead respectably, but his attempts at early-'70s Neil Young piano ballads come off as tear-stained love letters to himself, and hardly distinguish him as the guy who dropped out of high school to become Paul Westerberg.

Overall, the songs are weaker than before--too many feel cheesy, bland, half-baked.

Finest is at its finest when the beats ride out wordlessly, and bloodlessly.

Finally Famous, which contains a handful of other tracks produced by No I.D. as well as collaborations with the likes of the Neptunes and Wiz Khalifa, is a slick triumph filled with muscular drums and rolling synthesizers.

As with most things Trail of Dead, it's bloated where it thinks it's profound.

Sure, the electrifying attack of Zen Arcade and New Day Rising is a distant memory. But Body of Song closes with two guitar anthems oversized enough to point back to Mould's best work in Sugar.

Pink Friday is full of boring....the most confounding thing about Pink Friday is that it lacks style, lacks weirdness, whatever your opinions of how deeply that weirdness goes.

The music is often cresting and joyous, implying sweating bodies careening through a space designed to hold half their number.

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.

She remains vitally important to The Discourse for that reason alone. Maya both reminds you of that fact-of that sickly sweet spot only she can hit-and warns you how long and punishing a road it can be to get there. For her, and for you.

That voice is still "that voice," but gravity was never what made it fly.

Jack White took Loretta Lynn indie-rock Nashville with an unquenchable musical hunger and attainment that never had to feel sheepish about following the work of a music maestro as juicy and august as the late Owen Bradley. AJ Azzarto, Matt Azzarto, and Don Fleming, Sinatra's producers, do something else. They craft an indie-rock Nancy Sinatra, way too much of which is way too 1994.

The left-bent, middle-class everymen in these songs are consistently disarming.

Tortoise may be the only band that can match the everything-mashup steez, sonic skills, conceptual ambition, and breakbeat heat of the Roots.

[The album] s clogged with reverb-choked guitar riffs too woozy to propel the garage rock they ought to carry.

As a consequence of his preoccupation with acting and "lyricism," Luda neglects to do what he does best: make fun music.

Their catchiest, most compelling record yet.

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.

Sure, Fever's brushed-steel Eurodisco is old hat, Munich '77 via Paris '98. But mainlined along FM frequencies, it sounds totally 2002.

The Vines have trouble faking both the depth of feeling and the noisome mischief that good garage-punk requires, and the two rote Britpop numbers they tack on don't help.

On the scale of Singing Shat, Has Been ranks above the Shakespeare rap in Free Enterprise, but below "Mr. Tambourine Man."

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 Fragile Army actually has substance—thematically, musically, and lyrically.

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.

Jackson's songs don't seem uninflected so much as just plain skimpy, but their word-shy inertia suggests a sly detumescence that only the very successful can imagine, let alone turn to the service of their art.

Eve-Olution lacks its predecessors' element of surprise.... On the other hand, for my money, Eve remains in the increasingly scant selection of MCs we don't mind spending an entire album with.

Asleep at Heaven's Gate now continues that same kind of expert carnival of noise, even as its songs are longer (six of the 12 creep over five minutes) and flirt with jam-band explorations. Oddly, though, it feels like a step back.

His most musically ornate and stylistically conservative [album] to date, almost bold in its timidity.

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.

It's all so precious; let's hope they still break shit live.

The first 25 minutes of this loose compilation come as close to perfection as you could hope....The five remixes that make up the rest of The Singles aren't bad by any stretch, but they all try to drag the band closer to conventional dance music, whereas the band's power lies precisely in the way they already belong on the dance floor without overselling themselves or smoothing out their rougher edges.

While he's technically adept at playing the blues, it's perfectly clear the only heartache Mayer knows how to emote comes the morning after a night of hearty partying.

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

Anchored by predigested melodic hooks, Nelly's songs seem composed with the sole intention of ending up as your next ringtone. [Combined review of both discs]

[It] feels more like record label franchise building--"And let's get Willie to sing a Grateful Dead song!" "Cool!"--than an actual, like, album.

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

As the dying industry is still breathing in the toxins of useless filler, patrons like John Legend are fully indulging their creativity in all its flawed glory, just like the soul giants of yesteryear.

Even more telling is her frequently blank-eyed delivery: She's never been a great vocal interpreter, but on Fatale she sounds about as present as she did on Blackout.

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

It's all very funny and cheeky, but after a full album's worth it grows cloying, like a good Saturday Night Live skit that's two minutes too long.

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.

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.

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.

It is hands-down the most diabolically sensous collection of baby-making gangsta music since Pac's All Eyez.

Suggests nothing so much as Adrenaline Rush part two.

Banks lacks 50's humor, vocal playfulness, and stone-cold articulation.