A thematically linked work where some of the sonic landscapes were entrancing (although not warm).

This is a double album where the best songwriting never meshes with the best horn writing, which is what gets her juices going these days.

There are better beats on the damn Jadakiss CD.

Exactly the unpredictable effort you'd expect, it utilizes a new bunch of Portland buddies to render the old noises into background music as it explores such themes as Yul Brynner's makeover and piracy on the coast of Montenegro.

After a 34-minute art project that ended up a great album, a 17-minute EP ends up an art project.

Rainer Maria is the genuine collegiate article: impressionistic and overwrought.

Definitely not dead yet.

But for all its rapped W-Unity, this is RZA's record.... Far from straining, he's gone sensei, achieving a craft in which the hand leads the mind.

She scores over and over on 14-tracks-in-72-minutes that miss maybe twice and only seem long-winded when she gives the flautist some.

Reduced to a tuneful 18-song essence that watches too much television, their mildness seems diverting and their Englishness definitive.

Yanni is Tchaikovsky by comparison, Sarah McLachlan Ella Fitzgerald, treacle Smithfield ham.... Like Master P or Michael Bolton only worse, she tests one's faith in democracy itself.

All shallow, all pure as a result--pure escape, pure delight, and, as the cavalcade of gospel postures at the end makes clear, pure spiritual yearning.

They woke up one day, glanced around a marketplace where art wasn't mega anymore, and figured that since they'd been calling themselves pop for half of their two-decade run, maybe they'd better sit down and write some catchy songs. So they did.

There's more bounce-to-the-ounce and less molasses in the jams, more delight and less braggadocio in the raps.

If Nirvana and Robert Johnson are rock's essence for you, so's To Bring You My Love. But if you believe the Beatles and George Clinton had more to say in the end, this could be the first PJ album you adore as well as admire.

The album moves the way you always hope jungle will, like a cross between a tiger and a snake, yet it's also a kind of mix record, with five showcases for Reprazent's serviceable MC Dynamite, who's as useful as the inevitable Method Man in the crucial matter of providing rap sounds. Size has his own Chaka, too. Her name is Onallee, and she takes the record out.

Aiming to fill the Queenhole by injecting video-game sci-fi and radio-head sonics into a pop-metal base, the Korn protégés forge a "startling vision of a future world in which communications technology has been turned against us, becoming a tool for government surveillance rather than personal convenience." Gosh, how'd they think of that?

Though he comes up with strong melodies, he's hardly a match for Ben Folds or Elliott Smith, both of whom frame their catchy stuff more idiosyncratically and neither of whom is terribly interesting even so.

Proficient, bland, and dauntingly dull, their only threat is a promise to "take it back to the days of Mantronix" (no, please, anything but that).

It's only a mix record (two mix records, why stint in utopia?), so how bad can it be? Start with four tracks featuring Dead Can Dance and/or Lisa Gerrard. And for that mass appeal--Blade Runner!

What a weird (dishonest? ironic? clueless?) name for a record that's all literature and arty sound effects.

In a bad time for young guitar bands, including many barely forgettable ones lumped under the trade name "emo," these ambitious yowlers are reason for hope.

"Unsound" is their most clearly irresistible ever, and the aural nimbi that surround or trail after the others never obscure Van Dyk's lines of thought.

He sings roughly but warmly, and makes up as many hooks as he samples...

It's not that these songs are all obvious or overdone--this nonfolkie had never heard a few of them. It's that they're so soft they squish even when Alvin tries to rev one past you, which usually he doesn't.

The lyrics are intelligent of course, clever and moral and street-conscious and just gnomic enough, but their art is in their beats and flow and tunes too.

The clarity, economy, and devastating detail of the man's rapping and rhyming are a benison, turning the spare beats he favors into an ascetic aesthetic.

Production notwithstanding, the major-label move is the lyric sheet, which situates their circular minor-key riffs in a congruent worldview: eternal recurrence as infinite regress as cosmic bummer.