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.

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.

The brightest actual pop album of 2003.

Throughout they succeed in rendering Southern gothic as social realism.

Their tunes have always seemed too facile, but seven years divided by three albums doesn't equal glib, especially with those years deepening their lyricism rather than their cynicism.

Their beats beat Stetsasonic's.

They exist only to rock your world. If you don't let them, you're the stupid one.

Liliput is the analogy even if Nikki Colk has never heard of them either. Kaito are noisier, faster, girlier; Colk mispronounces her English not as a Marlene Marder homage but so people will think she's from Sweden. But the two share a rare, rambunctious sense that noise is fun and life is livable.

Charming, civilized, childish, Kieran Hebden imagines an aural space in which electronic malfunction is cute rather than annoying or ominous.

Tremendous craft, winning enthusiasm.

To care about this band you have to find Karen O's fuck-me persona provocative if not seductive, and since I've never been one for the sex-is-combat thing, I find it silly or obnoxious depending on who's taking it seriously.

In short, they "rock." Finally.

Every once in a while a drone or pattern emerges, reminding me of what I treasure most in "world music"-- articulated rhythm. Then he gets some tech genie or steel player to throw on another synth substitute and it's back to the miasma.

A band record, a groove record, a riff record; something lowdown, dirty, smoky.

Young people who think Kraftwerk were more important than the Ramones are free to satisfy their craving for the neu with this retreat into simplicity. But even Radiohead and Mouse on Mars contain more chaos.

Gibbard's delicate voice matches the subtle electro arrangements far more precisely than it does the folky guitars of his real group.

The voice asserts itself as the record sinks in, however, and not only does each song stand out, but the production variegates a sonic grandeur grounded in the rock verities.

Certainly he understands things about this society that his better-adjusted contemporaries don't. But he's woefully short on not just empathy but humorous self-deprecation.

Outfitted in this music, however, Common's pretensions stand up and do jumping jacks.

They've found it in their talent to put black music's long tradition of tune and structure into practice.