Church has always known how to write, and he's blowing here.

This doesn't rock, and it shouldn't. But it rollicks, skanks, and two-steps just fine.

Now 74 and short half a lung, he's not making the best music of his life, just the best albums.

Less dynamic and more ruminative than The Ruminant Band, here are 10 songs and a poky instrumental for country hippies manque and other shaggy folk down on the little luck they ever had.

The first three songs on this EP are strong, the fourth misty, the fifth sweet and slight, but all know melody and all fill out a portrait of a young man your daughter should only bring home to mother.

"Come to our shows and they're clapping again/Thank you my friends" isn't sarcastic, which doesn't mean it's devoid of irony or should be. "There's a brand new dance/Give us all your money/Everybody love everybody" is sarcastic.

Their seventh album opens with a simulated big-pop anthem and maintains that size and momentum without compromising their ability to play the new songs live.

Bouncing off each other like loaded dice, they could make you cry once you're away long enough to think about it.

Not "desert blues." Sadder than blues‑-too sad to be merely calming.

Predictably, Jay's power is more interesting than Ye's, which was funnier and sicker on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Think the patron's proximity made the protegee nervous? Think the patron figured it would? I do.

Nine seven-inches etc. plus five previously unreleaseds including three remnants of an abandoned musical obviously add up to an intentional hodgepodge. Still, I wonder whether the intention was to backload.

Lulled into a formalistic revery by their catchy choruses, you assume their content is as null as their groove. But in fact they're so girl-shy it's thematic, and refreshingly empathetic about women with problems.

The meaning's in the music, which to her considerable benefit shares the widespread Stockholm suspicion that the distinction between pop and dance music isn't worth troubling yourself over, but is nonetheless pinned for appearance's sake to the shades of yearning that mark it verbally.

Committed to synth squelch and chary of synth tweedle, it's basically instrumental except when transforming Mayer Hawthorne into the generic soul falsetto he was born to be and M.I.A. into the cheeky disco dolly she's too conscious to become.

What it sounds like is the redemption of Young's lost mid-'80s‑-the countryish album Old Ways was supposed to be, neither rote like Re-ac-tor nor static like that sacred cow Harvest.

Sure the tone is often depressive or satirical. But it's also often kind, pained, silly, unhinged, and other things.

To call this the best record of his solo career isn't to claim it's great, it's to reckon that it's pretty darn good.

I agree, men are dogs. But it gets my radar in a lather when this loving, lovable woman structures her 2007 album along a break-up's narrative arc and then four years later the same thing happens twice‑-only the first guy leaves her with a boychild who, let's be candid, she loves more unreservedly than she has any grown man on record.

The way his heedless old songs liberate cautious young professionals lays to rest any doubts as to whether he belongs in the same pantheon as George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin. He just bequeathed us a smaller book.

Play loud. I can't speak to the listening practices of the post-illbient beatmakers whose tricks Palaceer Lazaro gathers together and improves on like he's just been waiting for the go-ahead from Tricky himself.

Not afraid to be funny because they're having so much fun, Arve-Ahlund-Ahlund are one more electrobeat-wielding​ Swedish cartel bent on proving that rock and roll proceeds from enlightened capitalism like we had in America before our plutocrats started expanding the national income gap up past Colombia's.

This isn't up to The Fame or The Fame Monster. But both of those keep growing, and with its mad momentum and nutty thematics, this one could too--despite being laid down on tour trailed by 28 semis.

Just as Moore's tunings sharpen noise-rock intellectually, they tone up pretty-folk physically‑-as do Samara Lubelski's violin and producer Beck Hansen's synths.

So much better than a Ferrari that never needs a tune-up, muse I. In the studio they're less accident prone, and they still tintinnabulate some. But now they also grunt.

Parody is hard to sustain. That this follow-up provides so many laughs without flailing around in can-you-top-this? is a tribute to the comedians' musicality and their musician friends' sense of comedy.

Horny for his wife but not horny enough, loving her like she's leaving because he thinks that might help, his songcraft is undiminished, and he remains the smartest and nicest guy in his world.

There's too much of the same on Flair's 25-year-old R&B Dynamite, which omits "Shortnin' Bread Rock" and adds only the very early "Be My Lovey Dovey" to her A list, though it includes all the obvious keepers. I prefer this in part because it's shorter. Makes the voice easier to treasure.

Fortunately, they also do what all maturing s.-p.o.w.t.a. wish they could do‑-write better songs. I noticed the guitar roar first and the tunes second. But I stayed for the lyrics.