No catchier collection of jingles has come to my attention since Steve Miller made his mint off jet airliners.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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...

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.

Disable your prejudgment button and you'll hear a work of art whose immense entertainment value in no way compromises its intimations of a pathology that's both personal and political, created by one of those charming rogues you encounter so much more often on the page...

Its avant parts are more listenable--nay, beautiful--than anything on Washing Machine if not A Thousand Leaves.

Lyrics swirl around sensibly and the formidable tunesmithing never goes down the drain.

The main problem with this background tour de force is that you understand not just how good it is but how pretty it is only when you listen up.

Even more than, speak of the devil, Garth Brooks, she's a creature of the recording industry and the smorgasbord-of-the-air it's laid out everywhere. Are the emotions she displays so pithily as synthetic in the end as her harmonica-with-strings or steel/slide guitar? Does that make them less real?

For any Upper West Side showbiz kid, musical comedy is mother's milk, more "natural" than the rude attack of rock or the polite confessional of folk ... With crucial help from Jon Brion, she's got the Richard Rodgers/Kurt Weill part down, and will surely tackle the Dorothy Fields/Lorenz Hart part later.