Midnite Vultures is the album of a great entertainer, not a great artist.

A seamless and transcendent eight-track mix culled from a handful of 1998 and 1999 performances...

Revelling/Reckoning is a dense, daunting work -- and, quite possibly, her strongest one yet.

Even darker and more emotionally resonant than its impressive predecessors.

Without resorting to sappy new age or yuppie lounge cliches, Hebden has created a blissed-out ambient album for the post-rave generation.

Celebrity is a few good songs short of becoming a new gold pop standard (Michael Jackson's all-hits Thriller still holds that distinction), but with its well-balanced dance track-to-ballad ratio and uniformly infectious grooves, it does come within moonwalk striking distance...

Methodical, often sprawling and sonically messy, 13 isn't a charmer, but it is awfully seductive.

Ancient Melodies... acknowledges the importance of ongoing adult relationships. This may reduce the music's hipness quotient, but it greatly increases its emotional resonance.

U2 albums are generally slow growers, so it's much too early to label All That You Can't Leave Behind a classic. One can say with reasonable certainty that it's their most vibrant offering since Achtung Baby, their hardest-rocking one since The Joshua Tree, and their first true soul recording.

Given the changes that both New York and Jackson have undergone over the years, it's fitting that the new album lacks the swagger and bubbly feel of the first edition, and instead leaves the listener sad and gray...

The duo's most commercial and downright joyous album to date.

Red Dirt Girl is a model of tasteful genre blending: a little bit country and a little bit electro-ambient pop.

On G.O.A.T., LL Cool J has renewed his old-school style for a new generation of fans while still retaining old-school support.

Here, country twang knocks against rap, funk basslines and blues harmonicas, and liberal lashings of reggae, ska and dub are added -- all adding up to a groove jam congealed into a multi-faceted but consistent and accomplished sound.

This is Duncan Sheik at his most orchestrally, acoustically indulgent, and it's a lovely, haunting effort.

Take away the album's lone misfire -- the cliché-filled "Rock the Boat," produced by Rapture and E. Seats -- and this work is nearly perfect.

Sugar Ray actually sound like a band -- a quality missing from most of their earlier work.

A strong rebound that finds lang supported by the sleek, techno-lite production of Damian leGassick?

Alison Krauss & Union Station are one of the best instrumental bands in acoustic music today.

Another smart, danceable collection of cultural subversion.

When the Pawn Hits ... is so good that the next album could have a 900-word title and I wouldn't even scratch my goatee.

The band's new sound appropriates slabs of dance music, free jazz, rock and techno to create a menacing landscape of rattling beats, thundering bass and crippling distortion, dotted with lyrics that evoke urban decay and social disgust.

The band continues to rock in the Rush/Metallica eight-minute flexathon tradition: it may impress you with individual lines, but in the end, it excels mainly at musical gymnastics.

Shangri-La Dee Da stands with the band's best work -- a furious tug of war between strychnine-laced grunge and acid-stoked psychedelic pop. In fact, it may be well be the brooding California group's pinnacle.

A strong, expressive singer, Usher is particularly adroit at seductive, late-night ballads.

Mojave 3's lead singer, primary songwriter and aforementioned poet, Neil Halstead, writes simple, graceful love songs populated by lonely characters who are usually hopelessly hopeful and usually, albeit fleetingly, in love.... Excuses for Travellers is beautiful music for romance's never-ending cycles of beginnings and ends.

Replete with tasty elements borrowed from jungle, drum & bass and contemporary Afro-pop, their fifth full-length album manages to blend and synthesize all their disparate source material better than any previous effort save their startling 1982 debut.

Righteous Love turns out to have been worth the five-year wait, as it boasts a higher percentage of good songs than Relish, a more organic instrumental sound, and a singer whose vocal finesse now matches her raw power.