Beck desperately aims for Johnny Cash's funereal blues, but the unremitting bleakness of Sea Change more closely resembles alternative rock's limpid whine.

One of the heaviest rock albums since Seattle's heyday.

It's Coldplay's lack of humor, the very straightness of its lyrics, that makes the dourness so detestable. And where miserabilists past had a strong pop sensibility, Coldplay is content to create directionless palettes of sound.

Springsteen refuses to allow himself either vengefulness or excessive pride, and he avoids too-literal musings on the tragedy that ultimately undermined songs like Neil Young's "Let's Roll."

Parton's risks here bring great, unexpected pleasures.

By the Way is as enjoyable as being stuck in an elevator playing a Muzak version of "Under the Bridge."

Psychedelia is really only compelling when ego takes a backseat to kaleidoscopic music, and the Gallaghers are, of course, incapable of such a gesture.

Murray Street is like falling asleep with the TV on and waking to rapturous white noise.

For anyone with a critical reading of his long career, the album is a drowsy downer unconvincingly cloaked in interplanetary piffle.

It's less rootsy than its predecessor, as Shadow moves from the bohemian, jazzy hip-hop he's come to be associated with to more synthetic sounds like electro and synth pop.

The Eminem Show has pretensions toward real life, but it possesses all the resonance and revelation of a sitcom.

Ferry could seem too reverent toward the material on As Time Goes By, but his new album, Frantic, feels a lot looser (and less respectful) even as it revisits the singer's favorite sources (Dylan, Leadbelly).

Moby is no auteur, a fact made painfully clear by his terrible new album, 18, which revisits the already derivative territory of Play.

An album of taut, bilious rock that -- propelled, not coincidentally, by original Attractions members Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas -- has all the teetering-on-unhinged feel of Costello's very best work.

Young's surprisingly conservative new album, Are You Passionate?, is simply frustrating, and worse, often as risk-averse as a CSNY reunion.

Morissette seems unwilling to step into unfamiliar territory.

Ironically, little on the album captures the imagination the way narrower genres like techno, house, or even hip-hop often do

Bionix continues the party that began on the first AOI volume, Mosaic Thump, but without the endless collaborations that made that album feel forced.

Goddess is the only forward-looking project by a Rolling Stone since the band flirted with disco on "Miss You."

With its fluttering horns, gauzy percussion, and the playing of smooth-jazz saxophonist Najee, Prince's new album, The Rainbow Children, is steeped in the kind of fusion [Miles] Davis pioneered.

Invincible is an assembly-line bore.

"Love and Theft" showcases the gloriously sloppy spontaneity he's displayed onstage but only rarely captured on record.

More than ever, Blige's harmonious state just isn't an interesting place to be: Songs like "Beautiful Day" and "Flying Away" express exuberance of the rainbows-and-flowers variety. Miserable, Blige can be penetrating and profound; happy, she comes off generic and bland.

Her new album, Vespertine, is the singer's most complete and compelling expression of that wondrous worldview yet.

On Rooty, Basement Jaxx refines the ambitious but untidy sprawl of its debut into a carnivalesque mix of two-step, house, funk, and disco with a modern take on George Clinton's late-seventies mission of "rescuing dance music from the blahs."

By leaving her images blurry and her singing uncomplicated, Williams has found a way to capture the sound she hears in her head and obsesses over the recording process to find.

Too tentative and slight to be genuinely moving.

What's most exciting about Miss E is its sense of playfulness: It's the rare hip-hop album in which unabashed joy -- rather than acquisitiveness or grimacing gangsterism -- is the main ingredient.

It's full of the same monochromatic balladry and hipster references of its recent albums.

All fifteen tracks are one-dimensional disses and dismissals of scantily clad women, vengeful boyfriends, and the group's assorted doubters.

Like her awkward lyrical ventures into S&M and bisexuality on The Velvet Rope, songs like "Love Scene (Ooh Baby)" and "When We Oooo" aim for hot-and-heaviness but have the chilliness of her brother's famous televised kiss with Lisa Marie Presley.

Taken on its own, Live is still the best officially released evidence of the camaraderie that makes the E Street Band so vital, as well as an essential next chapter for an artist who hasn't released a studio album in some time. But there are still ways in which, as for so many of Springsteen's performances, you had to be there.

Buckcherry now captures the decadence of seventies and eighties hard rock better than anyone who actually lived it.

At its very best, "Superman Inside" for example, Reptile is as expressive as anything he did in the nineties. The other half of Reptile is a series of oddball genre digressions and cornball balladeering.

Along the way, though, Aerosmith slips into the stylized studio excesses of a professional producer (it might also be their only album to have strings on half the songs), and the ballads the band does deliver are as corny as anything it's ever done.

And though the smarter songs (the more personal "If I Had It All," the easygoing "Fool to Think") benefit from the concision, the group's newfound musical sharpness isn't that of a world-class bar band but that of an outsize stadium act -- all grand gesture and larger-than-life lyrics. Sometimes, as on "I Did It," the band recaptures the spirit of seventies rock in all its innocent fun. Other times, especially on the cloying, overdramatic "The Space Between," it recaptures only those moments that involve holding a lighter high above one's head.

The Ishtar of comeback albums -- overdone, underinspired, and marketed to within an inch of its life.

His solo debut, Stephen Malkmus, doesn't sound so different from late-period Pavement, but at least he's regained his smart-ass swagger.

The W is the sort of back-to-basics album that rock bands like the Who and the Rolling Stones used to make when they felt they were losing touch with their audience. It's capable but uninspiring -- Wu by Numbers.

And though his search for dance-floor transcendence gives the album emotional heft as well as a sense of pacing, the best songs on Halfway are the ones that look straight into the gutter and dive right in, corny catchphrases and all. "Ya Mama" -- which will likely do for "Push the tempo" what "The Rockafeller Skank" did for "the funk soul brother" -- is sped-up, silly, and, in the end, one of the more memorable songs on the album. It's enough to make an auteur look back fondly on his car-commercial period.

It's full of anthemic songs with echoing guitar, catchy choruses, and the kind of spacious production Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno also brought to The Joshua Tree.

On their astonishing new Stankonia (LaFace/Arista), Outkast explore their own disappointment with hip-hop's self-satisfied acquisitiveness. But though it attacks the genre's tunnel vision, the album -- which takes its name from George Clinton's vision of funk as expressing the raw, unruly side of life -- does so with joy (and huge doses of absurdity) instead of with the polemics of Public Enemy.... Stankonia is among the most exciting albums of the year, not only because it brazenly addresses hip-hop's spiritual emptiness (other well-intentioned rappers have tried) but because it musically surpasses the most innovative work of street production dons like Swizz Beatz, Manny Fresh, and Timbaland. By offering something for both the mind and the ass, to borrow from George Clinton's slogan, Outkast, like Gang of Four and Funkadelic before them, make revolution you can dance to.

The rapper's nicotine-scarred voice does sound bluesy, and his raps are serious without being arch like Beck's. The album's sound -- a marriage of classical string arrangements and sparse drum beats -- makes the guitar stomp of his rap-rock peers seem more one-dimensional than ever. But Everlast's blues are one-shaded -- nothing on Eat at Whitey's approaches the grim fatalism of the Geto Boys' "Mind Playin' Tricks on Me," Eminem's "Rock Bottom," or even Snoop Doggy Dogg's "Murder Was the Case."

Durst offers his piggish take-it-or-leave-it stance on relationships ("It's my way or the highway," he gleefully whines on "My Way"), his fantasies of the hip-hop high life ("Livin' It Up"), and his delight with obscenity ("If I say fuck two more times that's 46 fucks in this fucked-up rhyme"). Limp Bizkit's music is just as predictable, complete with scratches, guitar squalls, and mosh-pit crescendos.

Not content to embrace familiar dance-music genres like trance (the way Madonna does when she's feeling experimental), the band delves into the most outré electronic music imaginable, from the amniotic soundscapes of Brian Eno to the industrial gristle of Coil. The result is Radiohead's best album...

Nelson's voice, silky enough to sing standards, lacks the vocal grit for the blues, and he rarely works up enough energy to milk the titular cow. Most of these songs are better suited for a supper club than for a juke joint. [Oct 2, 2000]

Mostly, as on Ray of Light, sophisticated production masks Madonna's shortcomings as a songwriter.... Often Mirwais is the real star here... It's his music that makes Music matter. [Sep 25, 2000]

The album has its charms -- Björk's voice soars on "Scatter Heart," and her duet with Radiohead's Thom Yorke has a mambo-style sexiness -- but its overdone orchestrations and outsize emotions lack the resonance of Carousel and its metaphysical overtones or even the easygoing peacetime fizz of On the Town. [Sep 25, 2000]

Though the album follows the path cleared by Wrecking Ball, Harris takes more confident strides... Unfortunately, a little knowledge of the recording studio can be a dangerous thing, and Red Dirt Girl occasionally crosses the line from mellow into mannered.

True eclectics like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest seek out samples and inspiration -- in jazz, electronic music, even rock -- while Jean merely traffics in superficial gloss.

But despite collaborators as diverse as Chaka Khan, Busta Rhymes, and Mike D of the Beastie Boys, the album sounds more like the result of a raucous block party than of a careful marketing plan.

In a larger sense, the shock is that Belle and Sebastian have grown out of their awkward adolescence. And they sound all the more interesting for having done so in full view of their fans.

Aside from the horrifyingly detailed stalker narrative of "Stan" and the homicidal fantasy of "Kim," nothing on Marshall Mathers rises above the level of locker-room insults -- nearly every song seems to feature Eminem's giving someone the finger.

A romp as vigorous as any since 1982's English Settlement.

A remarkably overt homage to seventies stadium rock?

Smith is capable of subtle introspection, but too many of his new songs sound like the self-pitying complaints of an adolescent venting in his diary.