At her best--which must not come easy, or they'd release more and more consistent albums--Rennie Sparks is a great American realist.

Mouthy, destructive, confused, sexed-up but no sex object, Jemima Pearl is the pearl.

This is the stuff of one-shot art-punk.

OK, more news event than musical milestone. But a really great news event.

In a time when so many bands don't know why they exist but keep on vanning anyway, his honest tale is touching and instructive.

The music is so minimal that you won't return that often. But when you do, you'll remember she loves you.

His comic timing and mixture of slangs--not to mention his musical conception... are all so much more fully developed that he's actually made a record that's fun to play in the background.

We shall overkill, he means.

His lesser songs would be dookie gold on an ordinary undie-rap album.

No other Brazilian composer defies cultural boundaries so eloquently.

With American Idol rampant, it's nice to have this emotional hipster sticking her celebrity cred in the stupid world's face.

The stories are as vivid, brutal, and thought-out as any noir.

It could be argued that music this masterful waives all claim to the sound of surprise--until you pay attention.

He thinks he belongs up there in front of that expert new band, singing or shouting whatever banality, profundity, or turn of phrase he's written down, and his level of enthusiasm combined with his level of craft will convince anyone who still likes, you know, songs.

Many details are too U.K.-specific for Yank-yob gratification. But aesthetes will come to enjoy Taylor's nuanced adenoids and his bandmates' thought-through arrangements.

This being anthropology, pretty much, a sampler is the ideal introduction.

The Brit accents on the pseudo-triumphalist, vaguely Jeezy-sounding four-cameo opener are grime enough for me--most gripping grime I know, in fact, and pretty damn fine Jeezy-sounding pseudo-triumphalism to boot.

Though the singer-with-backup music relies on formula that won't set anyone's life straight, her melodic chops--sweet as a writer, supple as a singer--put the songs across.

[Bell Orchestre] varies its cunningly sequenced, gratifyingly brief instrumental tracks with such old-fashioned amenities as textured melodies, pleasing dynamic shifts, and passages that, if they don't actually r-o-c-k, at least bound down the road in an excited manner.

If anything, it's more a dance record, leaving those of us with a sentimental weakness for distinct parts a little lost.

David Berman joins a pickup band that includes his close personal friend Stephen Malkmus to explore realms of vocal inexpressiveness undreamt by Stephin Merritt or the Handsome Family.

The melodies don't falter, and Wonder's unexpectedly and perhaps unfortunately influential vocal attack is as mellifluous as ever.

Both guys are so irrepressibly playful that they get serious at their peril--they're better off as a nonstop musical goof.

Pond's songs are the alt-rock equivalent of what used to be called New Yorker short stories: subtly realized domestic epiphanies often involving tame nature imagery.

Although Mike Elizondo adds momentum, Jon Brion's colors still predominate, and the melodic and structural contours are all Apple's.

They've gotten unmistakably louder and unmistakably gayer--or perhaps I mean, hate the term, more metrosexual.

There's no more accomplished crew in alt-rap, and though that can make their messages seem slick sometimes, on ['The Craft'] their booming beats, lucid raps, and articulate rhymes are technically miraculous.

For once he makes sure he's understood--a matter in which melodies that might otherwise seem overfamiliar are of great service.

Some observers classify these ditties "country-punk," while other crankily insist they're "anti-folk," proving mainly that nobody knows what to make of simple little guitar-band songs on a scene where everyone's busy refining his or her artistic vision.

Despite its lack of an anthem to replace "Start Me Up," it certainly beats Tattoo You or anything else going back to Exile except Some Girls.

It's vital beginning to end--vital even when it's misguided.

This album radiates positive energy, and in today's alt, that's a precious thing.

Although Lidell's voice lacks muscle and butter, he knows how to launch a falsetto, and the beats on "A Little Bit More" and "The City" should not be played within earshot of anyone wearing a pacemaker.

What sticks out right off is a drive that can't be taught or approximated.

The loveliest album of Pernice's pretty career.

Precise, bland, and banal, their sensitivity emotionless and their musicality never surprising, they're the definition of a pleasant bore--easy to tune out, impossible to care for.

White's commercial success has nothing to do with de Stijl or da blooze--just a strong, emotive voice delivering simple yet distinctive songs, which are fairly numerous here.

The drums get busy at times, but never fear--this sounds more like Rounds than it does like anything else. Just a little funkier.

Although the album is definitely loud, it's also raw, with no hint of the symphonic, yet at the same time it's a melodic highlight of an honorably tuneful catalog.

Consistently enjoyable, predictably inconsequential.

Though I can imagine putting this on at year's end and remembering every song with a kind of surprised admiration, I can't imagine doing it any sooner--or any later either.

The attitude is tougher and the material thinner, but you have to love it for not falling flat on its heightened expectations.

Robert's songs more tuneful in their maturity, Grant's more atmospheric, they punch 'em all up to make a stronger impression than on their comeback album.

This literature with power chords addresses not only the crucial matter of vanishing bohemias as cultural myth but also the crucial matter of re-emerging spiritualities as cultural fact.

Their second album isn't quite as good as their first album because its hooks are slightly less inescapable.... But the difference is slight, and other differences are positive.

For all his overreliance on dramatic drawls, Southwestern locales, and mother love, Springsteen has stories to tell.

Once his political songs fell flat because he wasn't scared or angry enough. Now when he's a shit you wonder why you should care--which is kind of hip-hop, don't you think?--but Bush has him so scared and angry he makes up for it, with a dedicated posse of El Lay studio vets getting in their licks.

But though this may be pretension, it's also delight, strange and humorous verbally and aurally.

Though he's the kind of rhymer who scans "another good record with bad distribution" all too swimmingly, the hip-hop don't stop.

All the ugly gangsta lies are here, especially as regards the brutalization of women and the business of death. But they're incidental to the mood of the piece, which is friendly, relaxed, good-humored, and in the groove.

There's an early-Stones feel here it would be perverse to deny: 12 songs in 36 minutes, each with an indelible identiriff and its own seductive rhythmic shape.

Since all the lines make sense, and almost all the stanzas almost make sense, you keep waiting for the songs to make sense. And waiting, and waiting, through calm, memorable arrangements that are never in a hurry.

He shows off discreetly, underplaying his vocal chops and musical command, even his familiarity with scientific arcana--nay, his intelligence itself.... But discretion exacts a price in identity, clarity, and meaning.

Not only is his willingness to express emotion commoner than indie denizens imagine, his failure to undercut that emotion with irony or humor is a spiritual weakness.

Like the empathy of so many young men, especially artists, his is more self-involved than saints like us prefer. But at least he expresses empathy--to memorable melodies that very nearly bear up under the repetitions his rarely witless or superfluous lyrics require.

They turn in their best album since 1996 even though some schmuck from the Charlatans ruins track two.

The collection doesn't cohere the way it should, and I still say seek out Talkin' Honky Blues. But wherever you start, he's a major rhymer, performer, storyteller, humanist visionary, and student of the DJ arts.

Its double-CD sprawl is ambitious not hubristic, imposing not indigestible.

This is too classical, too romantic, and too I-yam-what-I-yam all at once.

Funny, catchy, clever, and irreverent past his allotted time.

What carries the album is, I swear, the skits.

Leonard Cohen has had No Voice since he began recording at 33. But he has more No Voice today, at 70, than he did on Ten New Songs, at 67.

I don't get this.

There's that Ramones sense that songs should be short like life, and that XTC sense that songs should be complicated like life.

Here the defining flow is sonic--a shadowy, guitar-drenched tone poem of the streets.

Her chin-up ditties don't connect every time, but her abandonment of home recording will win new listeners anyway.

Morrison's predictably intelligent solo debut puts personality where the Dismemberment Plan's synergy used to be.

Smile's post-adolescent utopia isn't disfigured by Brian's thickened, soured 62-year-old voice. It's ennobled--the material limitations of its sunny artifice and pretentious tomfoolery acknowledged and joyfully engaged.

Grae can rhyme, and if she had a male larynx and a production budget, her hype men, chipmunk soul, minor-key piano hooks, and "I wanna rock a fella so bad" might stand underground on its head.

And that's how the album goes--too fond of drama, but aware of its small place in the big world, and usually beautiful.

Often seems fragile, offhand, tentative, even enervated. But this isn't a weakness--it only makes their sound more their own.

Rarely do the settings distinguish themselves.... But a distinct voice delivering noticeable verbal content is a setting too--that's why you notice the content.

Here, their structures adamantly circular and their tunes less catchy but more durable, they make dandy mystagogues on an album that begins inarticulate and attains the nirvana of total nonverbality.

Class warfare meets gangsta-rock.

The music on this feisty, funny rap album isn't new--just irresistible.

Granted his major-label production budget in the sky, Tim DeLaughter hones his tunes and dispels woozy comparisons to the Flaming Lips.

Foolhardy though it was to saddle such an uncrucial record with a title that dares the young and the restless to bitch about how it doesn't change the world, the rest of us are free to enjoy how confidently it develops a groove.

It's hard to imagine any of the suckers who fell for the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot hype striving to identify with, say, "Muzzle of Bees." Not impossible. Just hard.

This unusually songful set is well up among their late good ones, its dissonances a lingua franca deployed less atmospherically than has been their recent practice.

This makes engrossing listening if the effort suits you, but it's useless as background music.

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.

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.

A glorious phantasmagoria of flow.

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.

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.

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.

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.