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.

There are three good songs on this 11-track artifact, and deeply vapid though the split-personality bit is, the trick of dividing the album into two CDs does leave a 17-minute dance disc that can be played without gastric distress by any purchaser who isn't picky about diva gangstaism or videophone porn.

If only she was as sophisticated as she thinks she is. Or as funny. [Feb/Mar 2007]

Talented lad, Turner. Not on this evidence incapable of ever writing quick, clever, cynical little songs again.

Such is the lure of his hypersensitivity that his admirers forgive and even applaud the extreme attenuation of this tastefully decorated click-and-loop.

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.

Buried at Track 7, the developed rhyme, unkiltered time, unsettling keyboards, and Kenny Garrett sax coda of "Abstractionisms" deliver what the flowery "Caring" and the endless "Do You Dig U?" emphatically do not: the "brand new sound" the finale only brags about.

Just when I'd made my peace with pop prog and begun to hope arty prog would prove another casualty of the age of digital instantaneity, these postrock warriors get the bright idea of adding tune and humor to their higher mathematics.

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

At least when the bassist ruled they livened up this overworked dynamic with beats. Now they tax it with tunes.

This is a new direction? It's not even a halfway decent collection of songs.

Eminem settles for sensationalism straight up, and, worse still, makes you wonder whether he ever truly knew the difference.

Low-tune for a pop band, low-momentum for a rock band, they stand a chance of evoking bad Elvis Costello when they take you by surprise or emote on in the background.

This airy prog-psych self-indulgence is merely an elaboration of the back half of that debut--the half I tuned out then but appreciate some now, because, even as self-indulgent elaborations go, the follow-up's a doozy.

These are "rock songs" in Ned Rorem's dreams -- they're as ornate as a high-class geisha house.

So much that is sprightly about the debut is subsumed here by ambition, to be kind, and privilege, to be brutally accurate. [Feb/Mar 2007]

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

Their skilled playing remains modest enough, but on this subtler and more pretentious material, the skills predominate, and just in case they don't, let's add a string quartet here and real choirboys there.

The turns of phrase are usually cul-de-sacs, the flights into obscurity have bum wings, and do you really prefer, for instance, Vernon's best-in-show "Now all your love is wasted?/Then who the hell was I?" (much less "Only love is all maroon/Lapping lakes like leery loons") to this Creeley ordinaire

I don't like right-wing Christianists either. But as every oppressed teen in the right-wing orbit knows full well, they're not as garbled and simplistic as Armstrong's anthems insist.

His plot is so preposterous and unempathetic it's more the appearance of a plot, or an elaborate joke about a plot.

She has hitched her modest talent to an art-rock wagon she won't outpace anytime soon.

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.

It's not as if he overdoes the sexism or sounds like a total lame, although his voice does crack slightly.

The album is unlistenable for a simple reason: Roger Daltrey.

This two-hour double-CD/triple-LP, their first product since 2001, is grand, somber, amelodic, arhythmic and slow, leaving plenty of time to admire the notes' altered states.