Uncompromising and wildly unpredictable, but only intermittently entertaining.

Flowers features the familiar psychedelic-tinged pop songwriting, chiming guitars, and unmistakable voice that have always been the group's trademark, but 20 years down the road, experience, nostalgia, and longing have tempered the band's sound.

For all the back story that precedes her, and even with an already overplayed first single, Everybody is a terrific debut.

Eitzel's songs, at their best, could serve as fodder for the next Sinatra, should such a crooner emerge from a dingy bar on the far side of town. As performed by Eitzel himself, his compositions resonate with a mix of existential melodrama and black humor that cuts deep to the bone.

Overall, God Bless the Go-Go's is a spirited, entertaining album that was worth the wait.

Miss E is a Top 40 radio breakthrough waiting to happen, while staying solid and true to its hip-hop roots.

It's just, well, it's just another Depeche Mode album -- a solid near-hour's worth of moody, darkly insidious tunes about such time-honored topics as love, death, and pain... and love and death.

There's a lot of great music here to enjoy. The political tone on the album is more problematic, though.

Cuomo tones down his angst and replaces it with a sunny but dirty '70s rock core.

On Reveal, the sounds vary, but the songs cohere well. For a band into its third decade, making a record with no apparent weak link is an accomplishment.

A 79-minute sonic sojourn of hard rock delivered with an arty, fusion-conscious sensibility rooted most obviously from the likes of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Jane's Addiction.

The songs, however, are principally concerned with creating atmosphere, as has always been the band's strength. Only this time the atmosphere is centered on Michae [Timmins's] contemplations of his own mortality, and it seeks musical complexity, not simplicity.

The members of Blues Traveler, new and old, still play better than they write songs, but there's no denying that the group's indefatigable spirit remains engaging.

This is an album about textures, grooves, and sounds, but it's not really about songs. Once one is done decoding its structure, Look Into the Eyeball is an elegant but empty building.

Though his voice and attitude crosses Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant's nasally histrionics with Gary Numan's clinical whelp, [Brian] Molko generally keeps his guitar playing tight and tough with Gothic overtones.

With the exception of 1999's By Your Side, which showed flashes of the band's original brilliance, in recent years the songwriting of brothers Chris and Rich Robinson has deteriorated into a muddled mess of hard rock cliches. Lions is the low point of that decline.

The only significant problem with Kidman and McGregor's numbers, which constitute half of this 15-track set, is that they don't work as well without the accompanying visuals.

Destiny's Child vamps, stamps, and oozes its way through a set of sparely arranged showcases for its layered vocal weave...

Nicks' sixth solo album is her strongest since 1983's The Wild Heart.

Underlying The Optimist's base -- two complementary voices highlighted by beautifully executed acoustic guitar -- is Turin Brakes' bent existentialism, an expansive vision that adds a feeling of fatalism to many of these songs.

OCS is quite simply straight-up and ultra-refreshing, expert in crafting great pop songs and equally adept at letting the music do its talking.

The Electric Mile more than meets expectations because this fifth effort is the group's most fully realized.

But for all its emotional directness and prodigious length, there's a point on All for You where it all starts wear thin and Jackson's moments of celebration and vindictiveness seem played out rather than genuine...

It's one of the best rock and roll records in years... the disc is a layered, beautiful thing that touches on every influence the band has revealed through its years with a refined production style that sounds at once edgy and glitteringly smooth.

Despite the initial futuristic impression, Cole proves himself to be guilty of the same superficial high concepts that taint far too many dance music albums. Still, there's much to recommend here, especially when Cole sticks to the grooves.

Peppy but relaxing chill-out tracks as sweet, shiny, and peculiar as its memorable moniker.

Supposedly split into two themes, it turns out that the music throughout is interchangeable; any track could have appeared on either CD.

It would have been a shame if this album went unheard, as it is the most fully realized Painters album to date and finds the band, as well as Kozelek's songwriting, in peak form.