Stephen Malkmus sounds like a great unmade Pavement album polished to within an inch of its life.

Remedy is the next great step forward for house music.

Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2) finds Partridge and Moulding at the top of their game, making the collection a fitting match for past XTC triumphs...

Featuring vocal contributions from Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie, punk-blues aficionado Jon Spencer and ex-Tricky collaborator Martina Toppley-Bird, Bow Down to the Exit Sign is a dark, soul-wrenching trip through an even darker world.

It's about as good a hip hop album as you will hear this year. Correction: Make that great.... It's hip-hop that plays to the streets and the suburbs with equal intensity, intelligence, insanity and integrity.

Perhaps his most humane album and warmest work to date.

This is classic Cure music, straight up (or should that be straight down?): lengthy songs (most more than five minutes) with plenty of cold, alternately chiming and grinding guitars, fluttering keyboards and, of course, Smith's mournful yowl, which hasn't sounded this intense since the The Top's "Shake Dog Shake" in 1984.

This time around, the group eschews player-hating specificity but hits equally hard (albeit with subtler blows) against the commercially dominated empire of gangsta and hoochie rap.

Even though one can hear echoes of everything from "The Threepenny Opera" to Bitches Brew here, the funk is in her DNA.

Throughout the album, Cole & co. offer up one pop nugget after another, all carefully honed through warts-and-all shows held in New York over the last few years. The result is that The Negatives isn't just Cole's most consistent disc in 11 years; it's also quite possibly his best ever.

All for You is every bit as impressive a collection as Control, her first collaboration with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis fifteen years ago.

A landmark album that is Carpenter's best effort since 1994's Stones in the Road -- and, quite possibly, her best ever.

He's responsible for some of the most classic (and controversial) jams in the history of hip-hop.

Comparisons will inevitably be made between Canto and the Buena Vista Social Club disc, but the most significant similarity is that they both feature great songs and terrific musicianship.

By broadening both their emotional and musical spectrums, Tindersticks have come up with their best album yet -- and a classic of its kind.

With Flowers, Ian McCulloch finally finds the proper musical vehicle for the older-but-wiser (but not that much wiser) persona he's been trying on for the last few years.

Whenever the delicious sensuality of the music threatens to take over, the anxiety and restless intelligence that drive it return to the surface, creating a quietly riveting tension. Fan Dance could be Sam Phillips' best album yet -- and that's really saying something.

The Friends of Rachel Worth is the first new Go-Betweens album in a dozen years, and, remarkably, it's as if they were never away.... an ever-so-slightly-updated sound with a hint of lo-fi -- something the Go-Betweens pioneered on their earliest albums, before they found their more renowned intimate style.

Miss E... So Addictive shows another side of Missy Elliott, yet unlike the calculations of other artists who morph themselves mainly as a marketing scheme, her dancing-sex-queen moves come through more like revelation than reinvention.

Some of the finest music of their already sterling career.

On the evidence of her work here, one would have to say there really isn't any pop-rock composer writing more sophisticated material these days than Mann.

Here's music tailor-made for cruising down the road with the wind blowing through your mullet.

But what makes Badu a source of deep pride for her black audience (and intriguing puzzlement for her ever-growing white one) is that her mysticism produces its most compelling poetry when set against gritty realities such as drug-dealing boyfriends, jealous neighbors, ghetto etiquette, and the constant war on poverty. As a songwriter, Badu's particular gift is being able to work such everyday touchstones into sublime allusions of spiritual rebirth.

On Let It Come Down, Jason Pierce successfully peels away layers of pretension and exposes the humanity at the heart of his music.

Time Bomb is loaded with two things that are markedly absent from most of today's hard rock scene: memorable melodies and a loose but swinging rhythmic foundation.

It's been a good three decades since Dylan has sounded as footloose and, er, freewheeling as he does on much of Love and Theft. That it comes on the heels of '97's haunted, hellhound-on-my-trail-vibed Time Out of Mind makes it all the more remarkable.

Hiatt holds down the drummerless rhythm with his acoustic six-string and a National resonator guitar. The boisterous atmosphere (everybody hoots and hollers) evokes a back-porch picking session, and Hiatt's songs draw from similarly down-home sources.... a recording that reflects the spirit of musicians who live to sing and play.

[rating only; no review]