A smart, sensitive blend of head and heart.

Casablancas is all old-school rocker in the Mick Jagger/Chris Robinson mold -- an ugly/pretty boy out to beg, borrow and bleed for even prettier women while acting like nothing ever satisfies.

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

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

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

Vega's been good before, especially on her eponymous 1985 debut and its '87 follow-up, Solitude Standing, but never as consistently good as she is here.

A curious time warp of a recording: loud, soft, tender, mean, thoughtful, reckless.

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

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

V doesn't bring Live right back to earth, but it does find the group playing to strengths, experimenting with recording techniques, and striving for renewed relevance.

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

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

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.

Continues in the bucolic vein of Deserter's Songs, and sounds almost as wondrous.

The new Ben Folds is a lot like the old one: as unpredictable as he is talented.

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

Even darker and more emotionally resonant than its impressive predecessors.

The Blueprint is not a perfect album. Some of the material is undoubtedly filler. But this recording makes it clear that hip-hop is supposed to be fun -- and that Jay-Z is having a ball.

Slayer return to the knuckle-busting fury of their demonic 1986 speed metal classic, Reign in Blood, while still somehow managing to spike their sonic mayhem with some catchy riffing and the odd melodic vocal line.

While Carey has never been a particularly confessional musician, Glitter seems a step in a more cathartic direction, from which subsequent albums should no doubt benefit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Basement Jaxx create real songs around their chugging house beats.

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.

While fans expecting "Thong Redux" might be disappointed, there are flashes of (dare one say it?) integrity and substance nestled deep in the banging beats and big-time excesses that make Sisqó, well, Sisqó.

Mandy Moore is a pop album to be proud of: every song has a good melody, a solid hook, and dramatically improved singing from its star.

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

In toeing the fine line between clever and dumb, they've always worn their "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts with goofy pride. But don't cry for them, as this time they've polished their musical turd to a brilliant sheen.

The album would have benefited from a few less midtempo grooves; the closest drummer Neil Primrose and bassist Dougie Payne get to really rocking is on the peppier rhythms of "Follow the Light" and "Flowers in the Window" -- not surprisingly, two of the album's highlights.

Deep Down & Dirty is the group's hardest, most animated and strongest-sounding album to date.

Overall, Poses is more daring (and, at times, more mellow) than its predecessor, mostly because Wainwright has densely packed images and sounds in a way that is less immediately catchy and more complex.

Radiohead have remembered how to feel, and do so without relying on the arena rock bluster of The Bends, the Orwellian remoteness of OK Computer or Kid A's pretense as a sort of MC Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. That's why Amnesiac sounds like their best album.

Happily deviates from the Moon Safari mold of new wave kitsch and sugary pop, guiding the knob-twisting duo's retro-synth sensibilities into a darker, more brooding realm.

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

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.

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.

While the San Francisco-based songwriter is still crafting unmistakably Eitzel-esque gloom tunes, his latest, The Invisible Man, is his most eclectic outing to date, veering from the low-key electronica of the opening track to the understated atmospherics of "Sleep."

If it's energy that it is the single strongest selling point of God Bless the Go-Go's, well, that's kind of where they came in anyway, back in the day when lead singer Belinda Carlisle was a butch-haircutted pudge and "We Got the Beat" was, literally, just about all the Go-Gos had going for them musically.

Agaetis Byrjun is an impressively unself-conscious record that would have been difficult to make in a trend-obsessive center like London or New York. It is sincere and though its influences may be familiar, its beauty and tenderness are refreshingly new.

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.

Longtime fans will no doubt be initially thrown by the lack of "motorik" beats and general rock action here. Yet after a couple of listens, many of Exciter's songs begin to worm their way into the subconscious.

Such lightness of touch is missing from the between-song skits, which have Franti posing as a DJ on a community-radio show, conducting interviews and dispensing commentary on the death penalty. But the between-skit songs are terrific.

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)."

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.

A work that retains their signature sound while embracing a more mature and cautiously positive outlook on matters of the heart.

With Lewis' weighty, tuneful voice and Mike Mushok's meaty, anthemic guitar, Staind recall the Soundgarden/Alice in Chains era of early-'90s rock. Free of phony posturing, DJ scratching and over-reliance on vapid thrash riffs, they're almost like an alternative version of today's mainstream metal.

Perhaps his most humane album and warmest work to date.

While Placebo's latest, Black Market Music, doesn't have any single track as galvanizing as "Pure Morning," Molko, Swedish bassist Stefan Olsdal, and English drummer Steve Hewitt have again crafted a hip-hop-laced collection of hard-driving rock that effectively mixes clever wordplay with solid musicianship.

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.

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

There are more layers here than on Mouse on Mars' last album, 2000's critically acclaimed Niun Niggung, and everything is more intricately detailed, each sound given plenty of space in the mix.

He delivers all this with passion and booming authority: the teacher is back in front of the classroom, where he belongs.

Lemon Jelly's groovy, Technicolor music exudes a warmth and sense of fun that predates samplers, sequencers and the concept of the DJ-as-auteur.

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

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.

Ditching lo-fi aesthetics for a more radio-ready sound in the spirit of, say, the Raspberries or Badfinger, Pollard has wisely chosen not bury his songs in oblique lyrical references and muddy tape hiss.

Live in New York City is that imperfect creation in which the whole equals something less than the sum of its parts. Taken one song at a time, though, it can be as compelling as live music gets.

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.

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

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

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.

The collaboration ultimately benefits both players, adding a touch of art house abandon to Hammond's at times studied formalism, and authenticity to Waits' Martian grease-monkey blues.

With guitars down in the mix (when they aren't unplugged altogether), Clapton's ever-evolving voice is the real centerpiece.

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.

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.

It's too bad this independently released album will most likely fall through the commercial cracks, because Stag is one of those rare albums that fuses aggression, good music and sharp institutional critiques without sounding strident or, um, stiff.

Granted, not everything here is top drawer scarf-worthy.... Still, it's worth noting that the album works to a middle-of-the-set peak -- which means that Aerosmith understands the dynamics of CD construction better than bands half its age.

It contains some of the most affecting work she's ever created, exploring the power of songs stripped to their essence, and the juxtaposition of delicate melodies with the explosive emotions conveyed by her lyrics.

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

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."

It's all remarkably effective. In capturing "the ghost in the machine," Mirwais has made a most warm and humane album.

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

These 14 live offerings are a satisfying sampling from each of the band's five albums, though happily the selection leans more heavily toward Penthouse...

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.

One of the best things about Ms. C as an artist, especially considering her indie-ish background, is that she hasn't been afraid to embrace plastic pop as a vehicle for self-expression. More importantly, though, having found success within this genre , Vitamin C here takes chances instead of relying purely on formula.

With the twangy, kaleidoscopic blend of country blues, downtown jazz and so many other unexpected flavors and sounds on Bill Frisell's latest album, Blues Dream, one can't help but be reminded a little of the updated American folkloric music score in the Coen Brothers' latest film.

Another smart, danceable collection of cultural subversion.

Little Sparrow captures one of country's greatest talents in top form, backed by some of the best acoustic players around...

J.Lo has a feisty, damn-I-know-I'm-all-that attitude, combined with pulsating, insistent beats that leap out of the speakers and make you wanna move.

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.