Affecting a clarity and delight that pleases the many and confounds the some, their lyrically alluring, structurally hop-skip-and-jumping songs aren't deep. They're just thoughtful fun.

Even doing her humble bit, she yells in your ear.

OK, 19 songs, gotta be filler here somewhere, and there is, only it isn't melodic -- with all music credited to the band, Shonna Tucker's muzzier lyrics and Mike Cooley's more elusive ones sound as well-turned as those of Patterson Hood, who's never written better.

He's made a novelty record that gets deeper with time.

She remains a nice kid whose knowledge of her own limitations doesn't interfere with her self-respect. That's not just because the knowledge helps her make catchy music out of it, either. But the music helps.

Busta Rhymes and Ludacris get her back to where she once belonged for the duration of their openers. After that, it's an expensive, honorable, credible sampler of the hottest current R&B brands.

He makes UNKLE and Fall Out Boy sound fresher than Tricky Stewart.

The album belongs to the hip-hop hippie. And an album it definitely is.

Deconstructing and recontextualizing their tune stock "mais oui," these robot wannabes bathed the unwashed in the blood of the synthesizer, broadening and lowering sounds that in their original substantiations owe not just Detroit techno but Ramada Inn lounge.

By dint of hard work, Ghost now has him a minor career as the classiest crime story writer in a genre that supports plenty of them.

Burbling electronic ticktocks vie with a carillon of bell simulacra, and rarely have vinyl crackle or laser malfunction generated more musicality.

Timelag-wise, the 1957 concept is as if some '60s songpoet had conceived an album about Armistice Day, influenza, the Palmer raids and Mary Pickford. Only that would have been a milestone and this isn't, which you can blame on heightened aesthetic expectations rather than the potency of this Canadian rapper's literary mojo.

Once again its vagaries are its distinction. Doherty makes a case for flat-on-your-ass alienation in an insane wartime culture.

Loaded with talent, heart and personality, he's an eccentric who still thinks the world is his friend, and one more sweet argument for the civilized compromises of democratic socialism.

There are enough sonic strokes here to keep the wrong bizzer in ringtone rappers for a year.

Grohl is hookier than Nickelback, which is saying something.

Through almost as many producers as Mary, this album has a single identity, a contour and a groove that suits its well-inhabited breakup concept.

What the two boil down to is that a parvenu mastering pop music for money has turned into a made man running on vanity. I find that this renders his expert trivialization of murder and such rather less piquant, and I think he does too--that an audacious formal delight has become routine.

Every single track offers up its momentary pleasures--choruses that make you say yeah on songs you've already found wanting, confessional details and emotional aperçus on an album that still reduces to quality product when they're over.

Just when you're ready to give up and apply to graduate school, along comes a simple band who get everything right.

This is a speedier pop suite suitable for dancing or straightening up the flat.

Still a band that improves everyone in it, and more forthcoming this time, though they really ought to risk despoiling their precious graphics with lyrics.

Terse and beaty, with Dr. Dre referral Mike Elizondo going half on the baby, this isn't a pop record, but it does avoid guitar-band shapes, sonics and truisms.

If you don't know much about these 30-year veterans except that they're legendary, this probably isn't where to find out why. If you have any idea what I'm talking about, however, partake.

There's no denying her eye for out-of-the-way details or her ear for a decent tune.

The best music here is so deep it's more powerful than the rhymes.

A trifle brighter, quicker and fuller than "Gimme Fiction."

Polysyllabic and self-aware, this is the best political punk in years.