Lady Gaga has made a quintessential pop album with Born This Way.

They've recaptured the brash cheek of their best work on Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, which the trio has elected to release before the "delayed indefinitely" Part One.

Skip the heavily lifting and split the record into smaller chunks, which makes it easier appreciate the songs for the obvious care that Eisold has put into them.

Despite a slew of hit singles and eye-popping sales figures, Britney Spears has never released an album as coherent from start to finish as her latest, Femme Fatale.

It's an assured effort from the very start.

It's a record with a folky, sometimes psychedelic edge, but it's never self-indulgent or less than focused. In fact, Smoke Ring for My Halo is persuasive evidence that Vile has come fully into his own as a songwriter and musician.

It's been a long time since Radiohead made records with an eye toward anything more than satisfying the band's own creative impulses, if it ever did. Those who are prepared to stick it out, though, may well find The King of Limbs worth the wait.

At its core, The Party Ain't Over is a strong testament to Jackson's enduring talent, and White's vision for how best to deploy it. Even though Jackson was never actually gone, it's a pleasure having her back.

It's a loose, easy-rolling centerpiece to an album that shows, after several fussier efforts, how effectively the Decemberists can make use of open space in their music. The King is Dead--long live the king.

The Lady Killer doesn't have the same tightly focused future-soul sound as Green's other project, Gnarls Barkley, but that gives the singer a chance to show his wider ranging musical appetites with elements of vintage R&B, irresistible pop and even a couple of sleek spy-movie riffs.

The Promise demonstrates how wide-ranging Springsteen's musical interests and abilities were when he was 27.

Like many of Kanye's brainstorms, it's a crazy idea -- and like many of Kanye's crazy ideas, it works.

The wistful tunes are the big draw here. They're masterworks of pop production, with Robyn's wispy voice weaving through spinning swirls of sugary synthesizers and hip-twitching beats that make it all but impossible to sit still.

It's an odd sort of talent, making joyless slogs out of music that is supposed to be fun and exuberant, but The Beginning is at its core a shrine to forced joviality, and that's no fun at all.

It's provided great fodder as devotees of celebrity gossip speculate on who, exactly, she's singing about, but with Swift's endearing appeal as a singer and ever-growing skill as a songwriter, Speak Now makes for great listening, too.

A charming collection of breezy, hook-filled pop songs.

The circuitous path to success has done the band good: it's given Brown and company time enough to develop a winsome country-rock style without undue meddling from the major-label mediocracy, and it shows on You Get What You Give.

Produced by Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy, Staples' latest is a joyous celebration of life and faith on traditional gospel songs and tunes by Tweedy, Allen Toussaint, John Fogerty, Randy Newman and Staples' father, Roebuck "Pops" Staples.

By the end of Teenage Dream--hell, halfway through--it's apparent that neither Perry nor her collaborators had much to say that was meaningful, or even particularly interesting. It sure didn't stop them from saying it anyway.

Despite the catchy moments, The Orchard is not a distinctive record. In fact, aside from showcasing Duquette's inventive, propulsive drum work, the only chance the album takes is that it doesn't really take any chances.

The tunes are among the most musically diverse the band has recorded so far, with buoyant piano pop undercut by an air of melancholy on the opening title track, glittering beds of synthesizers on "Sprawl II," churning, punk simplicity in the guitars on "Month of May" and a propulsive rhythm driving "Half Light II (No Celebration)," layers of vocal harmonies and moaning strings floating atop the relentless beat.

Mostly, though, the album is noisy jumble of competing sounds and ideas, none of which ever develops fully enough to make MAYA into as cohesive a statement as her first two albums.

Though understated compared to their predecessors, these songs are smart and catchy.

His vocals here are mostly murmurs, and the musical accompaniment, though skillful throughout, lacks the punch of his previous albums.

He picks solid songs with themes just about anyone can relate to, and he sings them with a hint of twang in his warm voice. His songs feel like home, and his latest, Twang, is no different.

Although the alter-ego suggests that Banks would be happy to keep his own name out of it, the fact is that Julian Plenti is ... Skyscraper is the truest reflection of Banks' musical impulses, which don't always shine through in the democracy that is Interpol.

The New Milford transplant has released a slew of solo albums, including the excellent new collection Man Overboard.

It's a collection packed with groaning clichés and calculated banality, and while that's not so different from plenty of music in any era, Leave This Town is so formulaic, it could have come from a laboratory at DuPont, where they make plastic.

No one ought to begrudge Tweedy his hard-won peace of mind, but there's less of the emotional, or musical, turbulence here that made for such compelling listening on previous Wilco records.

It's Street Sweeper Social Club, pairing guitarist Tom Morello with rapper Boots Riley on a self-titled collection of striking, strident songs that take aim at the status quo with devastating riffs and searing lyrics.

It's Sonic Youth's most compelling album in years.

Matthews finds a skillful balance in his lyrics between off-handed whimsy and deeper reflections, and the others back him with a tighter version of the instrumental interplay that has made them one of the most popular American bands of the past 15 years.

Even the songs that seem simple have greater depth than is at first apparent, and the band's skill at crafting complex music in an increasingly accessible way makes Veckatimest a rich listen.

Mandy Moore faces the same challenge any other singer-songwriter does: delivering songs that are consistently compelling. She does a decent job of it on Amanda Leigh.

Only one or two of these 15 songs (there are also five skits on the 20-track album) features the dazzling wordplay and unparalleled lyrical flow that made Marshall Mathers one of the biggest names in rap.

Like "More Specials," the Specials' second-record departure, It's Frightening isn't nearly buoyant as its predecessor. Insofar as its purpose is to rattle the bones, it's a fidgety, impenetrable success.

His voice is as yearning and creaky as ever, at once aged and childlike, and if the music doesn't always have a lot of weight, Lytle's songwriting remains pleasantly distracting on the surface and thoughtfully sublime upon closer inspection.

Green Day's latest is a collection of powerful songs worth waiting nearly five years for.

The soul of Van Zandt is evident on all of these songs--even in the distorted voice effect on 'Lungs'--but Earle best captures his spirit on 'Colorado Girl,' a high lonesome song with rich acoustic guitar chords and wistful vocals.

At their best, the Meat Puppets tackle swampy rock, erratic punk, boisterous country, ruminative folk, and seedy psych with equal authority, all while instilling a surreal scent of the desert.

The collection presents Big Music on a manageable scale, and even if the songs reference fire, water and sky, the long-running Aussie quartet forgoes the kind of sonic grandiosity such subject matter tends to invite.

This album veers all over the place, but it's united by spotless production, eerie control and a confidence that's well deserved.

The result is a restless hybrid that never completely settles into the groove that has defined the singer and guitarist's best albums.

No such luck on 'Cause I Sez So, an album that, despite a few bright spots, is too flimsy and forgettable to honor the Dolls' legacy.

Professionalism is the order of the day, and most of Entertainment, recorded over two years and produced by Killers boardman Jeff Satzman, aims for the same middle ground.

Outside Love offers up the best and worst that life has to offer, with love and hate locked in an eternal struggle. It makes the Pink Mountaintops the perfect complement to Black Mountain's lyrical and musical heft.

He overreaches on occasion, but more often pulls off the sort of trick he manages with 'Families Cheating at Board Games,' merging faith and offbeat, cerebral underpinnings to forge quirky slivers of fresh perspective.

On her second album under the name A Camp, Persson drapes herself in breezy '60s-pop arrangements, lamb's-wool duds that dress some deadly ideas.

Sure enough, we know these devils: they're the ones who make so many latter-day metal bands look like hopeless poseurs.

This rethink has by no means robbed the band of its tunefulness, as the snappy 'Inaugural Trams' readily proves. But the dozen minutes of 'Pric,' which meanders charmingly around the musical map, are more representative of an outfit which is at its best wild and weird.

It plays like a late-career recap of all that's come before, referencing both the bubblegum synth-pop of its early days and the self-conscious black-leather sensuality of its 1987-1993 creative peak.

The band's third full-length, Touchdown, is more of a 10-yard pass than a score.

Produced by the Pixies' Frank Black, the band's third album is pretty straight-forward musically, all chugging indie rock with fat bass lines and scribbled guitar solos.

A noodling version of the Truckers' own 'Space City' wanders a little too aimlessly to close, but Potato Hole overall is a subtle album with enough fire to prove that Jones can still bring the heat.

The English duo's cheeky moniker implies some kind of inferiority complex, and while Owen is certainly not immune to wallowing, he spends the group's sophomore album examining loneliness and isolation through a number of different lenses.

The uneven Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle finds Callahan's knack for twangy crispness, pastoral imagery, and stone-faced singing very much intact, though he adopts a distinct growl to utter the title of 'My Friends.'

Metric is back with its strongest collection of songs so far.

The shambling London trio Micachu & the Shapes embrace all manners of homemade noises on this cheeky debut, surprisingly produced by electronic experimentalist Matthew Herbert.

Sov never quite recaptures the brash personality and cutting-edge sound of her first album. The beats here are more pedestrian, the lyrics more tentative, and for all her talk in the press notes about resuming her career (after a six-month break) with a sense of control over her music, Jigsaw sounds more like an album without a firm direction than the wide-ranging statement of purpose she meant it to be.

He's alternately reflective, rueful and accusatory, and he combines all three on 'I'm Sorry Baby, But You Can't Stand in My Light Any More.'

The Last Kiss ends up a reasonable, though backward-looking, outing.

The duo's third album uses its fidgety rhythms and broad palette of synth sounds to create music that's perhaps subtler and more emotionally resonant than any they could hope to fashion using "real" instruments.

An act that thrives on formula continues to mine it with Unstoppable, another celebration of puppy love and sugary hooks boiled down to their simplest forms.

Far from easy listening, the tune, like the album, remains oddly accessible. Harvey is a tornado of anger, lunacy, and regret, but her punishing wind is something to behold.

The vocals come in a robotic monotone on 'I'm Losing My Mind,' and there's not much holding together all the rhythm on the opener, 'The Feeling.' It just shows that finding the right mix between melody and rhythm is a delicate balance, but these dozen tunes strike it more often than not.

Tapping into the sensuous mode of such classic divas of desire as Julie London and Peggy Lee, Diana Krall is at her most seductive on this bossa nova-flavored collaboration with Claus Ogerman.

Their latest, A New Tide, is their most accessible set yet.

Keith Urban's music and the themes that fill it rarely stray from predictable territory, but his pop-friendly country constructs are fueled by outsized charisma that keep them consistently above the pack.

Thunderheist prove more winning than most, due to Isis' knack for calm, rhythmic flow, all one- or two-syllable rhymes and the schoolyard-inspired spelling out of words.

Black Cascade is impressive enough to vault Wolves into the top ranks of the highly idiosyncratic U.S. black-metal scene, allowing them rub shoulders with such standard-bearer bands as Nachtmystium and Absu.

The set's signature disc Lotusflow3r, is its most consistently enjoyable, a far-flung cornucopia of electric guitar licks from one of the instrument's sharpest practitioners.

The drum machine hallmark of his 1980s heyday is a staple of MPLSound, a disc that hauls that sound into the present with mixed results.

The third disc, Bria Valente's Elixer, is a tepid afterthought.

Fluency aside, with the first in what is hopefully a long line of releases, Fever Ray knocks down more walls than it puts up.

He doesn't quite succeed, though in the process of failing, he turns in his most restrained and focused recordings to date.

Deacon is hampered by his boundless creativity. In his mad dash to leave no pathway unexplored, he neglects to chart a course toward anyplace in particular.

It's a far-reaching and ambitious album, stronger than its predecessor and full of gallant wordplay and vivid imagery.

'I Don't Even Know What Time It Is' sums up the whole record, stranded between sublime '80s guitar-pop and the more recent smarminess of Arctic Monkeys and Art Brut.

The 42-year-old Kansas native continues to mine that vein on her 10th studio album, "Shine," but although her singing is still strong, polish and predictability are its defining traits.

While that darkness gives the album its semblance of originality, it may prove incompatible with the group's mass-market ambitions.

The enigmatic nature of his music aside, Oldham invariably sounds like he's having fun making it, which makes Beware a warning only to those who place too high a value on simplistic clarity.

Despite any pretensions otherwise, their second album sounds a lot like the Day-Glo disco and retro house being pushed by every other hip indie-dance act right now.

An album as engrossing as it is sometimes unsettling.

The good songs are great, but the empty bluster on some of the others overshadows the spunky personality that made Clarkson a draw in the first place.

It's a smarmy affair, and there's a compelling interplay between his wild-eyed desperation and her cool, clean sheen of thumps and melodies.

On her fifth CD, Bare Bones, the Georgia native puts her stamp on all-new material, and weaves an alluring tapestry of sonic elegance, vocal character and lyrical bite.

Comprising organ, piano, upright bass and acoustic guitars, as well as the occasional fiddle or burst of New Orleans brass, the music wheezes and strolls with old-timey authenticity.

Singers with powerful voices often gravitate toward material that lets them prove it, but Neko Case demonstrates the power of subtlety on her latest.

No Line on the Horizon is a considered and nuanced work with significant depth beneath the dense, sometimes thorny exterior. Getting there, though, requires some work.

Even when the guys indulge in cheesy temptations, like the piano at the end of 'Lawless River,' it's usually in the service of making their catchy, extroverted anthems even more so.

The husband and wife team's fourth album with both of their names on it, Written in Chalk, makes the most of its rangy sonic palette with subtly soul-searing, rough-edged tunes that are equal parts savvy and haunting.

The guitars are rough and the lyrics mumbled, but even the most rote garage tunes betray a craftsmanship often missing from the genre. The collection is the Lips' first that would have benefited from some trimming.

Holland's airy, electronic pop music with layers of vocals. It's pleasant enough, though it's not as compelling as March of the Zapotec.

The difference between mediocre and magnificent Morrissey records tends to be the music, and by that measure, Years of Refusal is the strongest of his three '00s comeback efforts.

Thursday gets away with being so gloomy by keeping the energy level sky-high and the sonic assault dense, making Common Existence more thrilling than seething.

A tight collection fueled by glints of the rock, soul and country that came out of FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., in the '60s and '70s.

A more mature Allen might not be as much fun, but in the absence of acidity, her sweetness shines through.

Auerbach shows his vocal range again and again, actually singing instead of just howling at the moon, and his knack for warm production is impressive.