This is all folded into a weirdly ambitious disco-rock record (Madonna collaborator Stuart Price produced) that occasionally takes on fun topics like desert-motel nooky, but more often gets bogged down in ruminations on Why We’re Here, not to mention What It All Means.

Generally, they’re smart and musical enough to turn rhetorical gestures into convincing rock & roll. But when they subtitle the whole schmear “A Love Vision!” you wonder who they’re trying to kid.

Chinese Democracy's non-existence is so well-known and ingrained, the source of so many jokes, that its actual existence can only be a letdown. That is until you hear it. Then, somewhat astonishingly, 5,475 days, at least $13 million, fourteen studios, twenty or so musicians (including five guitarists and a harpist) seems just about right.

What’s revealed is...well, what we’re used to. Beyonce is still a beauty-shop feminist, quick with the smack-downs, and she still describes the rattling rush of love with preternatural poise.

It’s a steadfast assault, whether he’s brooding over dust in the wind ('If Today Was Your Last Day') or idealizing a girl (“She ain’t no Cinderella when she gettin’ undressed/’Cause she rocks it like the naughty Wicked Witch of the West").

Dido should let her socks go unsorted for a while; genuine sorrow sounds good on her.

As overblown as he is oversensitive, reaching toward the rafters whether his jumbled platitudes about wounded relationships warrant it or not, Cook is more like Michael Bolton in a T-shirt.

Since his 2005 debut, T-Pain has seen his Auto-Tuned swagger jacked by everyone from Kanye to Lil Wayne, but he has kept his sound fresh with a bottomless bag of hooks and a grainy rasp that the computers can’t buff away.

Swift has the personality and poise to make these songs hit as hard as gems like 'Tim McGraw' and 'Our Song' from her smash debut, and, once again, she wrote or cowrote them all.

After 25 minutes, they close with five worthy remixes instead of the typical filler—a startup rarity, knowing how to quit while you’re ahead.

Credit four supportive guys rolling out unkempt riffs at tempos so punky they reveal the guitar line of Joy Division’s 'She Lost Control' for the pop hook it is (with saxophone icing).

They've been compiled to death, but this two-disc set is the most comprehensive survey yet of the Mancunians' brief, tear-stained blaze through the mid-'80s indie-pop firmament. [Feb 2009, p.67]

The first few songs on their fourth might fool you into thinking they have a future.... But it's downhill after the highpoint: 'Sirens in the Deep Sea.'

The Renaissance hints at newness, but its cushy boom-bap grooves, airy soulfulness and rhymes about struggle and redemption recall rap’s Edenic “golden age.”

It's delightfully wacky and right in character. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.80]

Here, they simply sound jittery, putting romantic complaints to studio-worked music that's oddly brisk and busy, with a dissonance that drowns out the emotion. [Nov 2008, p.73]

This mismatched combo brings out the best in each other only on the refreshingly lightweight 'Call Me.' [Nov 2008, p.76]

With his buddy Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age, Hughes gets the details right all over Heart On.

Amid the frenzied melancholy, there’s filler and a histrionic misstep or two, but for those willfully lost in the perpetual adolescence Smith has always documented, here’s the new soundtrack to Saturday night.

The bigger the gamble, the stronger she feels. By the end of the record, she’s lassoing the moon, getting through her loneliness the way she got past teen pop: by sheer force of will.

Scary. And at times, scary good. [Nov 2008, p.73]

Prince made sexual audacity a trademark ages ago, but Legend is just too cautious to put it over--he sounds like a CPA on his first trip to the Hustler Club.

Cardinology lays even deeper into the language of rehabilitation, grace and renewal.

Skeletal Lamping is a new high for this long-running yet just-peaking band.

GGD’s career has been a gradual climb out of primordial noise muck and toward beats, and album four is their most propulsive.

The Dears’ breakthrough was 2004’s "No Cities Left," a post-apocalyptic expedition through emotional and political wreckage, and they’re still mining that barren landscape, trying to rebuild.

Reborn, the track leads off the sardonic sextet’s fifth album of apocalyptic buffoonery shot through with metal, new wave and disco, all of it hilarious, none of it a joke.

While their new album never thrashes, it at least keeps its pretty bare feet on Mother Earth.