When the songs are not just clever but lively--most spectacularly on the unrelenting "I Thought You Were My Boyfriend"--Stephin Merritt's demo-ready monotone could pass for a singing voice.

Boring strummed singer-songwritering with not terribly interesting electronica.

No, she hasn't regained her sense of humor, but aren't you fast losing yours?

Weathered now, their herky-jerk stands up smartly to interjections from the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

Inferior to not just Nirvana but Oasis.

A glorious phantasmagoria of flow.

His voice devoid of Newman-Waits grit, his eclecticism even and controlled where theirs bristles with jokes, oddity, and gusto, how does he expect to connect with anyone but other likable progressives, and rather detached and inscrutable ones at that?

All told, pretty dull--unless you're so desperate that you'll sing hosanna for every piece of intelligent-honest-original that comes down the circuit.

Half God's gift to hip-hop, half man of the people, he never quite puts all his good tracks together or across.

The musical parsimony, cultural insularity, moral certitude, and histrionic affectations of these lo-fi artier-than-thous promise indie ideologues whole lifetimes of egoistic irrelevance.

Not counting Stephin Merritt, no other under-40 approaches McKay's gift for cabaret.

An album as invigorating in its contempt for rock professionalism as Neil Young's Tonight's the Night.

Not only does he create a unique role model, that role model is dangerous--his arguments against education are as market-targeted as other rappers' arguments for thug life.

A singer's record.

These aren't indelible tunes like "At Home He's a Tourist" or "Suspect Device." But months later they're still getting not just stronger but rawer, which isn't how this game usually works.

His adolescent gulps and yowls are street-Brit with a Jamaican liquidity, as lean, eccentric, and arresting as the beats.

[A] sentimental cutesification of surf and country.

This is mannerist DOR more accomplished and less sentimental than its sources.

Gibbons's failure to leave the likes of "And I only hear/Only hear the rain" and "Time is but a memory" in her notebook suggests one limitation of her songcraft.

No "Ms. Jackson," no "Rosa Parks," no "Bombs Over Baghdad," no "The Whole World" either. Just commercial ebullience, creative confidence, and wretched excess, blessed excess, impressive excess.

Norah Jones is herself, give her that. I hate to think what this phenom will have to go through to get that far.

He claims his Dave Matthews-sponsored major- label debut was his chance to make a true band record, and I guess his boys are trickier than Crazy Horse, just not in any way you haven't heard before.

Everyone who says this isn't a sentimental record is right. But it admits sentiment, hold the hygiene, and suggests that he knows more about love dying than he did when he was immortal.

Their warmest album ever.

Clever and droll but also hypnotic and mysterious.

These Danes aren't tuned-in enough for stereotype play.

Now, done with that id shit, she finds her voice by pleading with her man to stay or come back as the case may be.

Three thin voices rap-sing-chant over the same bare-bones electro that sophisticates equate with two-headed dildos and black leatherette. But here, it intensifies the toughness, naïveté, moralism, sentimentality, ambition, ebullience, and sex drive all high school girls know but few have the sass to project and none have forged into art, especially with a Brooklyn accent.