Listen to your body tonight. They made themselves up, and they're strictly for real.

'Stay Positive' nails the travails of the aging rock band harder than 'Start Me Up' because it's about fans, and 'Constructive Summer' craftily confuses different ways to get hammered.

Deprived of Bruce Gilbert's guitar, these fractious lifers return to and improve on their dance-rock '80s.

The beats beat Green Lantern's. And what the finale has to say about Obama is so sane I may just check out van Sertima myself.

It serves up the distorted buzz Congotronics fans jones for, sonics that are generally raunchy even though the thumb pianos also generate balafon beauty, and five lead singers.

No Age too brutalist for you? Here's a heedlessly beautiful alternative.

It's easy out there for an Oscar winner, but you'd never know it from these entertainment moguls, who pretend or report that they're still investing in mayhem, misogyny and sales careers whose main drawback is that they can get you arrested.

The sound is bigger too, strengthening a band that's all guitars-drums-vocals sonics -- including Molly Siegel's yelping vocables, without which the sound's faux-tween soul and wise-ass tempo shifts would evanesce into abstraction.

From the start you know this is no mixtape because it's clearer and more forceful. Every track attends to detail, with fun tricks like the chipmunk-chorused "Mr. Carter"'s sudden descent into screwed-and-chopped before Jay-Z comes in.

He knows what reality is. It's giving grief a bad name.

True, Green spends more time supplicating than celebrating, and probably fabricated the whole scenario. But he knows his subject, and he doesn't need Jesus to lay it down.

Buy it while you can.

Only one thing's certain -- his songwriting.

This one's solider, more concrete -- even beautiful sometimes.

Right now her main message is just to do all this. If enough people like it, she has the aura of someone who might push the envelope.

With an incongruent Fall Out Boy track set aside for single duty and all those rappers a dream community taking the burden off Black Thought, this is the most accomplished pure hip-hop album in years.

As on most Go-Betweens records, the melodies take time to sink in, though not the Grant McLennan legacy retrofitted with a Robert lyric about Grant's affinity for melody.

Very minor, rather lovely and it rocks.

Nevertheless, the lost lives and loves he sketches are so painfully familiar they feel like truth. And Ant's homey beats enhance the illusion.

Live, McMurtry can still be way too strophic and trad. But he's never made an album so loud or hard.

The subtle flutter of her finest melismatics could give an open-minded person goose bumps. Her coarser melismatics, however, are the usual showoff BS and probably also a commercial prerequisite, like not having a harelip.

Finer minds than mine may find these pieces worthy of continuous attention. I say they're background music, there waiting when your mind drifts speakerward, just distracting enough to change up your mood in a useful way.

They're brainy about their alienation, they're funny about their alienation, and when they bitch about their relationships their post- or pre-alt normality is exceptionally refreshing.

A glockenspiel in a guitar band? Freshens up the sound, they think. And they're right.

These nutty kids turned DOR nostalgia act make their first album in 16 years their sex album. Eeyew, say today's normal kids. 'Bout time, says anybody old enough to know that one lure of the flesh is that it's always decaying.

As vision, still somewhere between narrow and ignant. Yet not a boho archetype for nothing.

Although Nick Urata can't match pipes with Richard Hawley, a plus in a way, he's hawking mellifluous overstatement flavored with a nostalgia far enough past its sell-by date that it stinks a little.

It's that he trivializes his own content--not the gangsta, braggadocio no one takes seriously anymore, but the pimp slime.