Santogold bursts with the arrogance of a world-beating hip-hop debut while thriving on vulnerability.

Rising Down is tightly focused and appealingly modest in its ambitions.

Conjuring doubts and tenderness, Forster's writing has never been surer. [May 2008, p.76]

Making good on the promise of two nervously explosive EPs, Tokyo Police Club indulge in plenty of echoey atmospherics but also add Foo Fighters-esque blasts of guitar, as if leaping into action and kicking over their chairs. [May 2008, p.79]

Fans of the TV show will have heard versions of almost all these songs before. The problem is, they've also seen these songs before.

E=MC2 is Carey's most-fun album, and her best.

Filled with ambitious production and winsome nostalgia, Saturdays is an otherworldly chronicle of adolescence only a starry-eyed 20-something could make.

Muscularly arranged with bongolated beats, psychedelic swamp guitars, boogie-woogie pine top and snowballing chorus hooks, Just Us Kids approximates a certain literate strain of early-'80s album rock.

The tunes are basically chants and the drumming is more straight-ahead than "tribal" and when the vibraphone trips in after 40 seconds of 'The Ballad of Butter Bean,' you may not bust a gut laughing, but you'll probably grin. [June 2008, p.75]

Thanks to a sneaky sense of emo self-awareness and shambling, expansive instrumentation, they avoid cute overload. [Apr 2008, p.80]

Odd touches, from the choir that materializes halfway through 'I Got Mine' to the sonar ping keeping time in 'Oceans & Streams,' add texture yo these impressionistic tales of ramblin' and being done wrong, without ever sacrificing the Keys' raw power. [Apr 2008, p.76]

Their 14th studio album is a fierce nostalgia­fest full of cascading jangle, candied power chords, lonesome harmonies, Southern-gothic protest poetry and roundhouse drum bash.

Their weaponry is wrought from comedy gold.

Panic's cherry-picking yields several good songs, and a few brush up against greatness. [Apr 2008, p.76]

The introductory kiddie voice and opening guitar scrape establish this second album as White's show; mariachi-style brass fanfare, Appalachian-hoedown fiddling and plenty of Roman-candle solos soon follow. [June 2008, p.76]

The quintet’s debut LP often plays like a low-budget male companion piece to Amy Winehouse’s throwback hit 'Back to Black.'

Most of their songs gallop by in a minute or two, erupting with new beats the moment they start to itch. [Apr 2008, p.83]

It's one big, horny wink--halfway between charming and totally sleazy. [Apr 2008, p.78]

If this is soul, it's soul for 21st-century sociopaths. [Apr 2008, p.77]

The quartet throws itself into these vintage gestures with so much verve and dumb-fun exuberance that the songs, even with their simplistic, catchphrase lyrics, are hard to resist.

Many bands sound like this, but few do it so well, or with such dorky haircuts. [June 2008, p.77]

It’s a very rare, wondrous thing: prog-rock for firesides and fuzzy-slipper Sundays.

Will Gregory’s sparkling webs of acoustic guitar, synth and strings allow the more slender melodies to slide into vaporous prettiness, but Goldfrapp’s voice remains extraordinary, as witchily sensual as Kate Bush’s, as otherworldly as a theremin.

On his solo debut, Bradford Cox sinks, phantomlike, into lush, highly processed arrangements of organ, drum machine and (evidently) whatever instrument is laying around. The disappearing act really can be magical.

Doughty’s fourth and best solo album gives up two keepers: the semi-absurdist 'More Bacon Than the Pan Can Handle,' with Stephanie Bischoff’s guest vocals sexier for sure than any synth weirdness Soul Coughing ever confabulated, and the mournfully understated Iraq opener, 'Fort Hood.'

Things get almost crushingly heavy, but he fights through his nightmares like he's one spastic stab in the dark from flicking on a night light. [Apr 2008, p.77]

Even as they cherry-pick from seemingly incongruous sources (deep house, hard rock, smooth R&B), there’s a newfound decisiveness, a move toward heavier beats, meatier grooves and warmer sentiments.

The more you listen, the less soothing his songs become; this is drifty music about living a rootless life where satisfaction is elusive.