She offsets an assault of cheekiness with confessions so intimate, they could have been drafted during an A.A. meeting.

Keep It Hid is guitarist and singer Dan Auerbach’s affirmation of ragged principles, self-recorded with blunt, squawky ax-picking and loving lo-fi grit. The sentiments can be snoozily familiar.

These dozen R&B songs boast all the verve and sex appeal of a busines plan. [Apr 2009, p.61]

The Denver foursome is spectacularly anonymous: poignant enough to bring out the waterworks, but generic enough not to get in the way of someone else’s story--making them the perfect soundtrack for prime-time melodrama.

With steel guitars, fiddles, banjos and newspaper-scrap reports of floods and desolation, The Mountain is as fierce as any past Bastards recording, just more honed and hellbound.

As usual, Franz Ferdinand pack a greatest-hits album’s worth of melodic tricks into each tune, while Kapranos purrs the sort of pick-up lines that would earn a lesser man a gimlet in the face.

The end of the working day, the mark of Cain, to win, darling, we must pay--these phrases, variations on ones he's used previously, arise on his fifth studio album in seven years, until it seems his uncharacteristic prolific streak comes partly from lazy songwriting, maybe done with a set of Bruce Springsteen Lyric Magnets.

Album four is especially monochrome gut-check metal, so flourishes of mellow pianos or cargo-shorts funk are as welcome as a bag of Skittles in a pack of combat rations.

His flat baritone suggests he’s still new at this whole “getting angry” thing, but the dude’s got the damaged part down.

This is their sunniest, most likeable record, leavened by hints of light-footed dance music.

ven the weaker material is nothing worse than pleasant, but it outweighs and obscures the better-than-pleasant; the middle of the album dissolves into an anonymously sweet haze.

Some songs are all middle, stuck on what might be mere bridges by, say, Rufus Wainwright or Paul Simon. Yet Bird’s open-field poetics do let a wider world creep in, from the corruption of ecosystems to the isolation that can afflict a touring musician or a declining leader alike.

Recorded in Matt’s childhood bedroom with their trademark teenage palette (a Casiotone, Matt’s nasal whinge and Kim’s bubbly punk beats), their sophomore album plays like the indie-musical version of one of those yesterday-I-was-a-teenager-but-now-I’m magically-an-adult ’80s movies.

They're not just churning out electro-scuz-soaked romps, they're reclaiming music's right to drop the verse-chorus form, set out on weird five-minute electronic benders and end up somewhere strange and exciting. [Oct 2008, p.80]

It’s hard to listen to Already Free without thinking: Visine. Need Visine. That’s how redolent of pot-smoke-and-jam-band mud fields this music is.

Glasvegas are often compared to the Jesus and Mary Chain, another great Scottish band that worshiped Phil Spector and the whammy pedal, but Mary Chain’s appeal was a chilly remoteness. Glasvegas make it cool to care.

The mellow rethink helps Cook get over his sweaty ’90s heyday, and his buddies sound equally liberated.

This is the brightest, breeziest, giddiest record Fall Out Boy have ever made.

Anything involving a string section is disastrous, but a couple of choruses are suitable for both raucous fist-pumping and rampant pouting.

After contributing smart songs and sly vocals to Al Green’s 2008 Lay It Down, Anthony Hamilton seemed poised for a breakthrough. This isn’t it.

The MC turns largely to the Neptunes for music, and their lithe, bombastic space-porno sonatas provide a vitality and playfulness he’s still capable of matching. But a string of increasingly awkward and thoroughly ludicrous sex jams finds him slapping asses, and may leave his devotees smacking their foreheads.

Her wispily aspirational singing tugs hardest on 'Fall,' cowritten with Natasha Bedingfield, where escapism and realism do battle and her pretty pony of love rides a beautiful rainbow that may or may not lead to the glue factory of hobbled dreams. Stay tuned.

Trying to express her actual feelings, instead of inhabiting a fantasy, she leaves us looking for an authenticity and vulnerability that isn’t in her skill set.

On album three, he tests out heartbreak, and his emotional wiring doesn’t cooperate.

It’s a modest record, but also the first Byrne album in decades to feel sprung from outside the ex-Head’s head space.

They’ve upped the sonic oomph a notch, leaning on the piano, violin, xylophones and perfectly mangled Pavement-style guitar mess.

The 808 features just 16 sounds, but Kanye works wonders with this limited palette, turning lo-fi kick drums into an austere artistic statement.

Punch line for punch line, Luda is still the best in the business (e.g., promising to get ladies “wetter than Michael Phelps”), but these sex jams and hater disses feel too flat and perfunctory for his thousand-watt personality.