How the West Was Won proves that Led Zeppelin was nearly peerless in creating gigantic, thunderous rock.

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.

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

It is stranger, thornier, and meaner than anything in the band’s past.

Speakerboxxx--by itself the album of the year--makes the failings of The Love Below all the more evident.

Skinner’s finely honed sense of place still has a nearly hypnotic effect.

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.

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

The whole record is about the band skillfully weaving in and out of dramatically different textures and arrangements; each song plays with several musical ideas, not just one or two.

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

A profoundly emotional, uncynical brand of songwriting that showcases Antony’s obsession with nature.

A sprawling and undisciplined mess... but it’s fully attuned to what made West so compelling in the first place, namely chunks of samples that feel raw and convey an underdog sensibility.

On Showtime, Dizzee doesn’t give up his sonic adventurousness, but he is a lot more disciplined about it.

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.

Hail to the Thief is overloaded with miraculous sounds.

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

Bubblegum is a blues record, a powerfully original reinterpretation of the genre.

When you’re treated to such a powerful front woman, it seems almost unfair to complain about the lack of sophisticated sonics.

Especially when heard on headphones, Medulla is an overwhelming sonic bliss-out, Phil Spector’s wall of sound channeled through the voice box.

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.

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 best record of his career, a collision of the idiosyncratic charms of Portastatic with the exuberant rock power of Superchunk.

Once in a Lifetime shies away from the Talking Heads’ life force. It presents them as winking ironists, not the true black-music believers that they were.

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

Broken Social Scene has pulled off the rare feat of making a heavily produced record sound instinctive and spontaneous.

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

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."

Q-Tip's flow on his new disc remains mellow, freewheeling, and vaguely inspirational. But it doesn't feel relevant.

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.

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

Strange and wonderful.

Too much of Aerial fades into a soft-focus background of soothing synthesizers, murmuring bass, and twittering birdsong.

It is a tutorial in finely textured songwriting.

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.

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.

Stands somewhere between Nebraska and Joad in terms of impact and quality.... But this album doesn’t merely find the middle ground between those two earlier releases: Its best songs break new ground for Springsteen.

Röyksopp is savvy at pulling out the joker in the pack just when the music threatens to become cutesy.

Here, Nas is so fierce, so plainspoken, so lean with words, that he demolishes not just the oeuvre of our ruling rappers (yes, including Eminem's) and recalls the music's lyrical champs like Rakim, he even brings to mind hip-hop progenitors like Muhammad Ali in the "Rumble in the Jungle" era.

The album feels like a romp, with Thompson performing everything from delicate waltzes to roadhouse rock.

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...

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]

What gives A Little Deeper its heft, though, is Dynamite’s voice: She can hold a word so long it almost floats in the air, and she purposefully embellishes her girlish, almost kewpie-doll-like whine to deliver her most stinging rebukes.

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

Dirt Farmer is an iconic album, this year’s "Time Out of Mind" or "Freedom." Just give him a Grammy.

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.

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.

The latest electro-folk offering from these Canadian twins is somehow cuter, catchier, and more heartache-y than their last disc.

The first half, in particular, has irresistible momentum... The second half drags a little, and you wish Madonna would strip the synths back to work a bass line every now and then.

It’s a lot less monotone than its predecessor.

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

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.

His latest album, Hold Time, is as finely wrought and thoroughly affecting an indie effort as 2009 is likely to see.

Like the market-minded collaborations that run rampant on hip-hop records, Elliott’s range here feels like base-covering.

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

Uh Huh Herb is a disappointment, the tepid, not-quite-there record that many artists seem to make after hitting a career peak.

Per Vulture, the Curtis-shaming Graduation "has better songs waiting in the wings. Bonus: No Jamie Foxx!"

Animal Collective has evolved; its songs continue to meander and digress, but the mania seems driven by a greater sense of purpose.

When in doubt, crank the amps. This is the philosophy behind R.E.M.’s new album, Accelerate, their best, and certainly their loudest, in years.

The carefully constructed sonics, though beautiful, can be so snoozily contemplative.

The songs, which have the choppy angles and elegant dissonance of Pavement’s, are painstakingly layered with keyboards and all manner of funky blurps and beeps. It all sounds very labor-intensive—and pretty smart, too.

Beck integrates his personae into a fairly seamless whole, and his knack for synthesizing disparate musical elements (hip-hop, robot funk, blues, country, jazz, garage rock, etc.) extends beyond samples and individual tracks. The songs migrate smoothly from one to the next; there aren’t any throwaway numbers to sabotage the album’s momentum; the whole thing coheres.

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

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.

It rewards that attention with small pleasures: guitar and organ playing off each other’s reverb, bass and drum dancing in and out of step, horns and vocals collapsing into a single bellow. In essence, it offers that luxuriant buzz that made rock and roll one of the great narcotics of the last half-century.

The central flaw of Room on Fire is the lack of hooks.

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.

Either way, this latest effort is set to be interpreted more ways than the Qur'an and see him sat atop an almighty fence pushing anyone who hears it either side with reckless glee.

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).

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

Manages, despite an excess of throwaway material, to be an appropriately eccentric testament to Cobain’s talent.

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

A deeply satisfying work of storytelling through pop.... What Are You On? is emotionally complex in a way that few of the more prosperous songwriters of Cornog’s generation are capable of producing at this point in their careers.

Like The OC, Easy Tiger manages to be pleasurable without ever being interesting.

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]

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.

Put the last eight years of Williamsburg micro-genres in a blender— all that electroclash, disco rock, retro glam, and psych-folk—and you’ve got a sense of the charming mess that is this Connecticut-via-Brooklyn duo’s debut.

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.

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.

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

Too tentative and slight to be genuinely moving.

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

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.

This is pure non-homogenised, heart-on-sleeve, downright meaningful music, the sort of thing The Wombats cry themselves to sleep over on a nightly basis. For that alone it’s worth a tenner of anybody’s money.

Endlessly pleasing (or trying to please), Feels Like Home dilutes even Jones’s brand of comfort-food jazz, grinding it down to something like a chewy gob of baby food.

Though the album can’t really stand with the Pretenders first three, it approximates them pretty well, like a faux vintage T-shirt that’s faded just right.

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

Clones testifies to how familiar (and hollow) the Neptunes’ studio tricks have become.

Though his voice is strong and sincere throughout the album, most of the material has a certain karaoke-like vibe.

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.

Without question, 50 Cent has one of the most distinctive voices in hip-hop: He raps in a molasses-slow, beyond-laconic drawl, and chants in a singsongy patois reminiscent of dance-hall stars like Sean Paul. But there isn’t enough invention in the rhymes, and, worse, barely any humor.

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.

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.

Sky Blue Sky shows his restlessness as an artist, his need to keep moving - not always forward, but never merely standing still, and certainly not dipping into the back catalogue for an idea or two.

Parton's risks here bring great, unexpected pleasures.

Wainwright’s powers of observation recall both Morrissey and Cole Porter.

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

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.