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

Soused at the student union bar, licking Haagen-Dazs off her beau in literally filthy foreplay, she's weird and you're weird. That makes you mates.

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.

He takes songs easy without throwing them away, and these were written to hold up their end of that bargain.

For a principled slacker like Snider, diffidence is an aesthetic principle, but here it tends to obscure some affecting little songs.

Not only will you hum snatches, you'll parse lyrical bits, too: a basement-dwelling twentysomething high on Gatorade in an underpopulated housing development, a waitressing job for Solange Knowles.

The reason we care is that she retains her spunk, tunes, and way with a phrase. And not only is she talented, she's really cute.

His good-old-days laments taste sweet where once they curdled.

The singer isn't up to tenderness and the accordion gets annoying. But the first two tracks are standards in the making, the last two tracks are prophetic and mean, and the blues in between are as pointed as the pop songs are long-winded.

Recorded July 1, 1998, a 78-minute double-CD proves how stiff and thin this made-up collective's mysteriously canonical 1997 studio album is.

Detailing his fidelity on one track, elongating a lap dance on another, he's a decent guy in conceptual command of an aesthetic he invented.

Unlike "Guero" this one really has some war in it.

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.

Only a talent as major as Lewis could half bring it off.

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.

One wonders whether 4AD has thrown his critical followers off with its line about how this one abandons autobiography for "mythical creatures" etc.

It's touching on a human level. Noble, even. I didn't think he had it in him.

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

Never thought I'd say this, but RZA isn't missed--the budget production enhances a master lyricist's specialty by subtraction.

The painful detail and joyful exuberance are there once they get going. But in under two years this Welsh punk sextet has matured/devolved from tromping over their pan-sexual alienation like so many glockenspiel-wielding grape dancers to enacting "miserabilia" about how unfulfilling it is to get on your knees next to a urinal.

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.

These guys sure can rap and rhyme, and they do.

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.

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

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

'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.

The result is less a mixtape than a hip-hop version of a good Augustus Pablo album--more varied, jocular, and disquieting because that's how hip-hop is, but still a single organism.

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.