The result is entertaining but so bound by the requirements of Jamaican and American clichés that there's not much room left for his own personality to come through.

Their songs still bulge at the seams with clever ideas, but they're veiled in deep grooves and hooks.... Outkast have developed a major sweet tooth for P-Funk, but what they've picked up from their former collaborator George Clinton isn't his low-end bounce. It's rather his hovering, serpentine vocal arrangements and his acidic political fantasies.... [but] Stankonia's conceptual sprawl isn't all good for the album -- the collection is hampered by more than a little filler.

Producer Don Was allows the surprisingly girlish, persuasive part of Midler's style to shine, working in harmony with the production and the material.

It's not inappropriate to think of Ten New Songs as an audio book of poetry with musical accompaniment.

Garbage have finally discovered a hint of the blood-pumping human heart underneath their icy exterior.

But if "Chemistry" is a pure-pop sugar rush, much of what follows is equally sour, often falling into the thematic trap that snares so many post-hit albums: lots of songs about how success is really hard on rock stars and their girlfriends.

Certain moments find the quartet keying in on the same fugal intertwining of beauty and dissonance that Television explored back in the late 1970s.

The funk-by-numbers grooves of Everybody's Got Their Something borrow heavily from the likes of Sly Stone, Chaka Khan and early Prince, but do so with such affection and spirit that it's hard to take offense.

Although he's the primary MC throughout this album, it's his studio skills that keep listeners on their toes...

A 28-minute, 10-song romantic pop album that includes two gems that handily best their early geek anthems "Buddy Holly" and "Undone (The Sweater Song)."

Fortunately, for most of the album, the soft-but-solid Austin backing band assembled by guitarist/co-producer Derek O'Brien is as well seasoned as Nelson, and shares his gift for making a little go a long way. And, ultimately, the best tracks may well be those sung by Willie alone.

Most of the new disc sounds like noisy grooves in search of songs, and the mechanical accompaniment makes the accomplished jazz-rock fusion of such mid-1970s Beck classics as Blow by Blow and Wired sound downright earthy.

Listeners might tire of its mechanical edge, but luckily Daft Punk folds in a few more layers. Whether the listener believes it or not, Discovery postulates that club music can possess depth of sound and be more than a never-ending beat that simply marshals your body along with it. Thus, the songs are shorter, more eclectic and rife with hills and valleys of beat that urge you to stop and listen.

In sharing its predecessor's desire to cover every musical base, Goodbye Country (Hello Nightclub) suggests a continued identity crisis.

Cake at times manage to counterbalance the smart-aleck cynicism with skilled musicianship, and when [John] McCrea drops the monotone bombast and actually sings, the songs really work.

MCs Evidence and Rakaa's shortcomings are amendable because they do have a great scratchmaster in DJ Babu. The problem is that this inventive DJ is allowed to shift gears and twist and crawl only after the rappers have said their pieces.

While the result is hit-or-miss, the Charlatans manage to hit much more than they miss.

Jakob Dylan and his team have fashioned an album that's longer on big guitars, crunchy grooves and cool changes than overt confessionals. All told, Breach is a subtle, seamless effort with nary a lull or misstep -- in contrast to its multiplatinum predecessor, the second half of which suffered from a series of pedestrian songs.

Fans of "Praise You"'s twisted but hooky soul or the beat-box bonanza "The Rockafeller Skank" may be a bit disappointed with this current collection. Not because the record is a thundering and cohesive example of sequencers used for good instead of evil, but because Fatboy's approach this go around is a lot less (new-) user friendly. The tracks are longer and more measured, many of them built around the ebb and flow so essential to dance music made for the clubs, as opposed to dance music made for TV dance shows.

Private Suit finds them more in command of their craft, filled with less fury, but no less skilled at crafting sublime pop ditties.... Though there are a couple of misfires, it's their most confident effort since their debut.

While they've evolved into a band that can actually, like, play more than a handful of chords, they wisely stick with what they know best -- trim, fast-paced, crunch-guitar-filled songs about sex and partying.

In small doses it's wonderful stuff, though in total it's a little sickly sweet.

An album of surface comfort masking massive insecurities -- a perfect complement to the nation it so redolently evokes.

A borderline adult-contemporary sound that's catchy and exuberant enough to gloss over the intermittently dark verse.

With Movement in Still Life however, BT (born Brian Transeau) offers something many of his peers have failed to deliver: an album that accurately and convincingly reflects dance music's present state and, possibly, its future.

With Cydonia, Paterson continues on the trippy trajectory he established in 1989 with his debut 22-minute single, "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld."

Make no mistake: This album represents a small step for a band, not a giant leap for mankind. But it is energetic, entertaining and several polymer configurations less plastic than the teenybopper product currently being manufactured in Orlando and elsewhere.

Surprisingly, Strange Little Girls is a street project -- daring, visceral and engaging, even when it's not fully successful.