Amongst the bubble-and-squeak, there's much audio delight to savor...

The astonishing way in which the latest outing from San Franciscan deconstructionist darlings Matmos was put together is of such novel conceit it threatens to overshadow the final product.

Green Day have created a great punk-meets-rock album.

The chaff-to-wheat ratio remains distressingly unbalanced on Torino.

The album largely treads the same brazen minimal-electro territory; and most of the dick/tits/cunt-centric songs will be familiar for anyone who's seen Peaches' girlie-show shows in full-frontal effect over the past couple years.

Throughout Love and Distortion, the Stratford 4 convey through their music that sounding like other good bands that came before them isn't a bad thing.

They're merely using Psychocandy as a workaday aesthetic strategy and, despite loads of melodrama, they never sound pretentious about it either.

Though it's not quite the folk-pop album that some post-Head Music interviews with Anderson had foreshadowed, the ballads do outweigh the rockers, which puts the lyrics in the spotlight, for better and for worse.

Luckily, the album has an easy-going air that lifts it out of the realm of smart-guy assemblage and into sexy, summery territories.

The songs on Mama's Gun slip from one to the next effortlessly, coming together as a set of sedate, buttery-smooth grooves.

The gear is buffed to such a productional sheen that its every sound seems like a reflective surface, the compositional complexity leading to an album as confusing -- and, ultimately, distancing -- as a hall of mirrors.

His weighty messages are duly noted. Unfortunately, they're delivered so acrimoniously that the overwhelming lack of fun in the music makes his albums a chore to listen to.

His party peaks too early, though, with the gear soon settling into a middling middle, where the songs start to sound less distinct, and the changes start to become less pronounced, and interest starts to lag, and where, eventually, like a desperate host hoping to keep the party going, Hebden stacks on break after break in a gallant attempt to remind you that the disc is actually playing.

The music here tries to be as unobtrusive as possible, its plasticky tone and carefully shined finish constructed to contrast with the earnest soulfulness of Usher's singing. And it's in his words that the album finds the substance that it does have.

Auf der Maur plays the kinda late-'90s alt-rock that Veruca Salt's debut (American Thighs, the one with "Seether") hinted at (too bad this isn't the late '90s...).

Up Above Is, in such, a gentle enough jam to work/non-work in an incidentalist sense; but compare it to folk that do this sort of gear with a fearsome seriousness -- like, most obviously, the Vibracathedral Orchestra -- and T&C come up as pale as a Midwestern mid-winter tan.

An abundance of morose, meandering material in search of a hook.

Fleeting moments of genius flanked by sketchy songs... [and] curious, dense production burying Eitzel's amazing voice under layers of maudlin instrumentation.

His songwriting shine is soon obscured behind the dark clouds of densely layered home recording.

Feels a little bit contrived, at times, an elaborate game of dress-ups unleashed under the unlikely title This Is for Real -- a claim which, if not deliberately ironic, sure seems the complete opposite of the fabricated fashion-conscious compilation-of-quotations that the album actually is.

The problem with Warnings/Promises is the material: the band failed to bring enough good song ideas with them when they went into the studio.

Brings to mind an image of someone stuck on a treadmill who has been fooled into believing that he's actually moving forward.

Just another bloated arena show.

Alive to Every Smile finds TBS swanning through a set of soft-pop numbers giddy with the misty misery of melancholy and coated with the softest frostings of studio icing-sugar.

As forward-thinking as this sounds, it just kind of makes Gorillaz an Archies/Josie & The Pussycats for the new millennium. It also makes them and their album fit in with everyone else in the progressive hip-hop canon, all of whom see fit to make slightly ludicrous concept records.

A jangly collection of contagious pop tunes made melancholy by a dark songwriting style.

While previous records have consisted almost entirely of a simple guitar/vocals/drum-machine arrangement, this fourth longplayer finds different sonic deployments.

The record maps for, and makes for, an unhurried listen, stringing between buttery grooves with an apparent smoker's-delight vibe; the set only goes up a notch when The Pharcyde step up to the microphone, their goofy, lithe lyricism upping the relaxed pulse for a pair of fine moments.

On their second proper longplayer, Air project that melancholy forward, depicting romantic recollections from a future world in which "technology" has attained sci-fi levels.

Maladroit is the emo equivalent of '70s arena rock -- a bracingly cocky attitude that tag-teams with its partner, navel-gazing.

Walking With Thee isn't a rehashing of last year's Internal Wrangler; it's actually an inferior version of it.

This band's playing is so tight you wonder if the members aren't cogs in a machine.

Lacking the startling mark of cool-hearted covermongers such as Cat Power and Mark Kozelek, this is still an easeful album of mostly slow-blooded tunes.

The only obvious goal seems to be shorter, more direct songs, delivered with more straightforward demeanor.

Bobby Gillespie and company come up short here.

It's hard to figure out exactly why everybody is so excited about this record.... There is something there to like -- plenty, in fact. But it is also disjointed and sometimes maddening.

. Ditching some of the more Cali-like, pop-like and psych-like vestments of past longplayers, Argyle Heir finds the quartet-cum-sextet making the most medieval indie-rock this side of dungeon-dancing Helium honcho Mary Timony.

Coming up in the discothèque all disco/not-disco, Jackson's perspicacious hindsight gazes back to what was winning back in the day, now dragging it into the drag-and-drop to create pro-tooled playlist pop, its parts glued together into a seamless, shiny, mirroring whole.

The album's tone and tunes and imagery and such are all still on the same haunted-house/boat-of-the-dead kinda kick they've kicked out on their three previous, numerically-titled jams.

Ancient Melodies of the Future sounds more like "vaguely familiar melodies of the past," but so do some of the best albums in rock.

Elastica throw out crackling melodies with little regard for the listener.

One problem: Common is an MC, not a musician. Which makes it difficult for him to achieve his lofty goals. Mostly he fails.

An improvement over his lo-fi solo debut and his over-produced second disc, but it misses as often as it hits.

Attention to detail particularly benefits the lush and endearing "Good Fruit," the rare track wherein lovelorn earnestness replaces self-conscious repartee.

Pierce seems to have lost the magic that he once seemed in total command of.

While the pair probably had a lot of fun making the record, unfortunately, it isn't the most enjoyable listen.

Rock Steady certainly isn't that good, and at times it's rather bad (usually when Ocasek gets a bit Cars). But it does have its moments, most of which come at the hands of [co-producer Nellee] Hooper...

Surprisingly misguided and disjointed.

It's nice to see him seek stronger production; beatmeisters like RJD2 and Joey Chavez provide supple soundscapes for the Ace Man to rock over. But ol' reliable Acey kinda forgot what makes him one of the essential MCs of the last decade: ridiculous wordplay.

Tindersticks have always made music that conjures up smoke: songs that are elusive, wispy and ephemeral, sung by men with somewhat rough smokers' voices. With Waiting for the Moon, unfortunately, little remains once the smoke clears.

Although much of the record re-verses and re-crafts melodies in the same vein, there are a few gems that can't be missed.

Their new pop direction finds them drifting about, directionless as opposed to eclectic.

The glassy-eyed micro-manic bass-'n'-breaks belligerence on show-offy tracks on this Squarepusher longplayer is either tellingly tired or terrifically tiring, with Jenx's wicked licks of brown-note boogie either spuriously slow in the foot or a swift kick to the collective ass of a collectively ass-kissing musical community.

While the sound is often thick -- layers of dewy guitars, keyboards, old organs, bass, drums/beats -- it's always concerned with the "space" of the piece, such thickness often casting insular environments in which Eitzel's voice can wander lonely.

All for You is, for the most part, signature Janet.

Boy, is it a sprawling mess.

Their debut album flits between uneasy ambient pieces, pop songs buried in layers and loops, and crunchy takes on the IDM sound.

They're trapped by this, their one-trick shtick; it the same old song, played again, Sam, for all those girls in white belts who won't stop 'til they get enough.

Just like every other record Malkmus has been involved with, it doesn't feel like an album, doesn't feel like one whole work, doesn't feel focused, or of some specific intent. Pig Lib sounds rambling and goofy and slump-shouldered and half-assed and happened-upon and lazily comfortable with every step that it takes.

[A] tired, uninspired collection of music and songs.

In the future the restless, insecure South-men may perhaps harness their broad tastes into a more cogent sound, but From Here On In finds them a well-produced but overly expansive mess.

Gemstones is shit. It's awful. It really, really is.

It's the sound of someone crashing and burning in a heap of misguided, grandiose intentions.

Guitars riff, drums pound, the bass plods, and the singer yowls -- but nothing gels.

Part of the fun of the Beastie Boys is knowing that they're fucking with the rhymes and you; another part is knowing that they give a fuck about what's happening in the world. Those two things don't always work well together, though, especially when they say something watered down and deliver it as though they don't buy it either.

Lyrically, I suspect that part of the problem is rust, while part of the problem is age — a song about bumping into an ex-girlfriend, then coming home to tell the wife about it ("Jane Allen") just doesn't stick to the ribs, while the more overtly political numbers feel heavy-handed and preachy.

Just like an album of guitar solos, an album of battling fancy-fingered trick-pony turntablism is an utterly artless endeavor.

Rain on Lens isn't awful, but boy, is it a long way from The Doctor Came at Dawn.

Left to his own devices here, Marr has penned vague lyrics and delivered them in a monotone, coupled with uninspired melodies that only underline the singer's limitations.

Cold and lifeless.

TA have now officially run out of original ideas.

It's not bad, it's just so goddamn mediocre.