Underneath all of those lush, gorgeous strings, [producer] Hogarth then layered the electronic beats, delays, fades, and distortions that lend the album its freshness and vitality.

The disc ultimately hangs together on mood; Price unfailingly accentuates the bright, shiny, and happy. This not only makes good pop sense, it provides an effective counterbalance to Flowers and his achy-breaky vocals.

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."

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

While Aha Shake Heartbreak showcases four feckless stoners speaking in their own shop-class patois, it also captures them playing alarmingly sophisticated pop.

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.

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.

While Tasty features predictable envy-inspiring flaunts of sex and cash, the album is good-hearted, too.

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.

Unlike her recent work, Stumble Into Grace is made up solely of Harris’s work--love songs like “Can You Hear Me Now” that perfectly suit her voice, which is sweet and whispery yet never sentimental.

It’s their most accessible and coherent to date.

Their debut album, released in the U.S. this week, proves that the Brighton lasses aren't only well constructed, but sharp and tough all on their own.

Packaged in big, bright doses of piano-pop, her expressions of puppy love are as irresistible as puppies themselves.

Badu has rejected the role of soul princess and chosen instead to embrace a raw, unhinged spirituality that separates her from the pack.

Cover albums tend to be self-indulgent stunts, but not for Dulli. She Loves You comes across as the most natural expression of him as an artist.

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.

American Supreme proves that Suicide can reach backward and still remain ahead of the pack.

Parton's risks here bring great, unexpected pleasures.

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."

Although it lifts off with a flawless indie-pop opener and sounds somehow lively even at its most melancholy, the lovely new Weakerthans album disc is all about the art of settling in and telling a good, unhurried story.

Notice it now, or wait until people start hailing it as a lost classic in a decade's time.

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.

There is nothing tentative or unpolished about any of these songs.

There are no state-of-the-art flourishes (like Kanye West’s sped-up soul samples); he furnishes most of his own hooks, without the assistance of Auto-Tune, the now ubiquitous vocal effect favored by rappers who can’t really sing (Devin sings, and quite nicely too); and the only big-name rapper he invites is Snoop Dogg, with whom he shares some genuine stoner chemistry. Track after track (there are only twelve, and mercifully no skits), the beats land just so. And nowhere is he more confident than in his rhymes.

It is a tutorial in finely textured songwriting.

Each and every hand clap and piano chord on their foot-stomping, flawless new album, now streaming on their label's Website, is obsessively placed.

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.

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