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

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

The Surfers teeter on the brink of conventional rock values. However, throughout the new album, singer Gibby Haynes drives the proverbial truck into the ditch with rambling psychotic speeches.

A lot of what distinguishes Wonderful Life is its fragility. At its best, the music feels as though it could blow apart at any moment.

Because her samples are so shameless, so out in the open, what No More Drama sounds like in the end is Blige singing along to the radio: equal parts fan and artist.

1997's Homogenic, also a mixture of heavy beats and strings, was not as varied or complete as this album, and while Selmasongs, last year's soundtrack to "Dancer in the Dark" (in which Björk starred), was lovely in its own sweeping, cinematic way, Björk has surpassed herself with this new work.

Lacking Pierce's unifying vision, The Carnivorous Lunar Activities Of ... tries hard to make a virtue out of stylistic schizophrenia, and only partly succeeds.

She lets [the songs] drift off into the kind of embalmed chamber music respectability often synonymous with the Nonesuch label.

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

Now is Maxwell's best album, because he's learned that while soul can be suggested by a good groove, it really lives in a song.

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

Unfortunately, this newest attempt at expanding the group's musical horizons is more a lateral move than a vertical one, and the same problems that have plagued Better Than Ezra since Deluxe -- mawkish, derivative material -- undermine this effort as well.

Tweekend isn't a giant leap forward for the Crystal Method, but it certainly doesn't keep them trapped in the past.

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.

Welch has become a notable talent on that long, rootsy highway, and she and Rawlings have fashioned their own unique sound.

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...

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.

His most consistently slamming release since 1990's Brick by Brick.

While Bilal's vocal gymnastics -- high-arching notes, off-rhythm choruses and complex harmonies -- add texture to these songs, many of them sound too musically similar to everything else in the neo-soul movement. He's at his best on the tracks that he or his partner, Dahoud Darien, have produced themselves.

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.

This maturing band is getting closer to a fully realized vision.

Ivy specialize in nebulously oriented dream-pop: too ethereal for straight pop fans, too structured for the 4AD crowd. The result is rather like Swing Out Sister playing with all the rock and roll abandon of, say, the Sundays.

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

Melissa Etheridge's Skin belongs in a tradition of breakup albums that includes Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love and Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear.

While the album stays true to the group's legacy of alcohol-themed, head-nodding party anthems, it falls short by schematically aping other artists' music.

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

It's too lightweight and silly to appeal to those looking for musical innovation, and the songs aren't focused or fully developed enough to grab new fans. Mostly, it's just a really annoying album.

Basement Jaxx create real songs around their chugging house beats.