Graceless he may be, but Timberlake is nevertheless kind of fascinating on FutureSex/LoveSounds since his fuses a clear musical vision -- misguided, yes, but clear all the same -- with a hammyness that only a child entertainer turned omnipresent 21st century celebrity can be.

If there's a bit less childlike élan here than in the past, there's also an intelligence and joy that confirms Yo La Tengo is still one of the great treasures of American indie rock, and they haven't run out of ideas or the desire to make them flesh in the studio just yet.

Unlike his earlier recordings, there's little here that rewards close listening.

This is vulgar music, completely unsentimental or nostalgic but with a deep, wild, and tenacious heart; it's spooky, un-caged, and frighteningly descriptive of our time and place.

Jagged, fractured, splintered, and downright violent-sounding, it's easily the most extreme music the duo has made.

While nothing on Dark Light Daybreak is mind-blowingly original, it's all very good, and each song only adds on to the effectiveness and beauty of the next, layering one upon another like the instruments themselves, and making a very solid, even great, album.

This is stoner rock for the indie set, so every suggestion of Led Zeppelin or Queen gets filtered through a Sonic Youth or Yo La Tengo aesthetic, which helps keep the bombast and pagan iconography at bay.

The goal of Xiu Xiu's confessional, confrontational music is to shake their listeners out of complacency and make them think and feel; once again, they accomplish this mission beautifully.

Meadow is a new high-water mark.

His hooks are still heavy and melodic, which makes Welcome to the Drama Club easy to listen to, even if it is too tidy.

Blood Mountain is everything fans both hoped for and feared. Mastodon has dug even deeper in its foray into prog metal, but without losing an ounce of their power, literacy, or willingness to indulge in hardcore punk, doom, and death metal.

While Face the Promise isn't quite Night Moves or Stranger in Town, it stands proudly next to those albums and is most assuredly the work of the same singer.

What the cathartic Fading Trails might lack in foot-tapping motivation, it makes up for in passion and honesty and is highly recommended for those who like to dig a little deeper for albums that get better each time they are played.

Talk to La Bomb revisits nearly all the elements that made their 2005 self-titled debut such a thrill, but the songwriting has slipped a bit, welcoming the beloved act to the sophomore slump.

The Town and the City isn't likely to be the soundtrack for your next party, but it's an exciting and emotionally powerful experience that grows with each listen.

Their inspired, eclectic mix of sounds and textures is always playful, but Taiga's powerful playing and sophisticated arrangements make it OOIOO's most mature album yet.

The delicateness of Half the Perfect World is certainly nice, but Peyroux seems to be using it as a device to hide behind instead of an actual expression of feeling.

Their most colorful, diverse and consistent record yet.

While Beyoncé does sound like she's in a bit of a hurry throughout the album, and there are no songs with the smooth elegance of "Me, Myself and I" or "Be with You," it is lean in a beneficial way, propelled by just as many highlights as the overlong Dangerously in Love.

Yellow House is... required listening not just for fans of Horn of Plenty, but for anyone who enjoys ambitious, creative music with an emotional undercurrent.

Brilliant.

It feels live, immediate.

Game Theory is a heavy album, the Roots' sharpest work. It's destined to become one of Def Jam's proudest, if not most popular, moments.

Despite it missing the fire of his first record, it's a worthy piece of work.

Unfortunately, there are enough songs on 4:21 that are so utterly boring that the claim of redemption can't be made quite yet.

Listened to with an open mind, it's a refreshingly retro rock & roll album that uses its waste-oid imagination in capturing every fantasy that entered Bobby Gillespie's teenage mind.

It's Cursive at their finest, challenging and smart and absolutely riveting.

Idlewild is certainly a spectacle, and an occasionally entertaining and enlightening one at that, but it translates into an elaborate diversion when compared to what this duo has done in the past.

They make honest indie rock for those looking for a solid, good song. There's no frills, no fancy production, just the purity of these songs.

Future Crayon is a must for Broadcast obsessives and a good way for casual fans to explore some of the rougher edges of their music.

This ranks with the best work of one of America's most original musical visionaries.

[An] impressively diverse album.

With The Body, The Blood, The Machine the Thermals haven't made another thrilling noisy gem like More Parts Per Million, they've made an inspired and inspiring, semi-grown up indie rock record with more thought than thrills.

Post-War is not only Ward's best effort yet, it's one of the best records of the year.

A compelling and touching record.

Fans of Bachmann's gruff Neil Diamond-meets-Steve Earle vocals and lonesome and literate subject matter will find everything they love about the Carolina native on display, while those who prefer his vocal affectations surrounded by the din of a full band should stick with his group efforts.

Though it's disjointed, a little bumpy, and -- in places -- perceptibly unfinished-sounding, The Shining is a very worthy addition to Dilla's discography.

Paris makes no apologies for being mass-market pop, but everybody involved made sure that this was well-constructed mass-market pop.

What makes it less successful than 1999's Kaleidoscope and 2003's Tasty is that it's extremely choppy and excessively long, and it doesn't have the range of emotions to match the varied backdrops.

VanGaalen's a skilled musician, and compositionally the pieces are well-constructed, but there's nothing on the record that truly blows you away.

Outwardly it's a fun album, triumphant and full of majestic refrains and riffs... but there's still something in it,... that makes it somehow all very sad.

It's clear from the first notes of Trying to Never Catch Up that this is a band that knows what they're doing, and is pretty damn sure about it, too.

Maybe by the time their next album rolls around they will be able to tame their influences into a more coherent-sounding body of work that will more fully represent their abilities.

It may be all about style, it may be a little crass and self-centered, but it's also catchy, exciting, and unique.

For those listeners who pine for a world when Seven Mary Three received heavy rotation, this will satisfy, but anybody expecting the spark of Jane's Addiction or even a dose of Navarro's campy on-camera charm will be sorely disappointed.

Barat's music doesn't have the baggage associated with Doherty's brooding, poetic aspirations, but it doesn't quite have the same impact, either.

More often than not, Avatar is stunningly beautiful, even if the definition of that word needs to expand a bit to embrace it.

The downside of Reprieve is that it isn't as musically arresting as earlier albums like Out of Range, and DiFranco, on a song like "Millennium Theater," can be rather obvious.

As a whole, Winter Women/Holy Ghost Language School is a lot to process at once, but untangling the mysteries of Friedberger's music feels like more fun than it has in a while.

You will be hard-pressed to keep from walking around all day grinning like a fish once you give the album an airing.

An anti-Christian/anti-Islam/anti-Theocratic, anti-war album, Christ Illusion is essential for anyone interested in the genre.

It's more of the same old, same old.

Against productions this diluted, Jurassic's top-notch rhymers -- Chali 2na, Soup, Akil -- fail to make any headway, usually spitting rhymes already familiar to listeners of their earlier work.

A large chunk of the material is second rate compared to his past highlights.

At its core, it's moodier than most of his records.

Franti's brain-stimulating songwriting rises to a new level of proficiency here.

If it's not quite a triumph, it's challenging and ambitious stuff that rocks on out and doesn't tarnish the memory of what Johansen and Sylvain accomplished so many years ago.

Putting the Days to Bed finds Roderick writing his most intimate lyrics to date while also building upon the radiant pop sensibility of 2005's Ultimatum EP.

The songs, as far as the writing goes, are routinely terrific; however, the ones that rely most on convenient synthesized elements are a bit dainty and rudimentary and deserve to be made without the limitations of a home studio.

The album is impressive, especially in small doses or when Steele reigns it in a bit, as on the pretty, bossa-nova tinged "Miles Away." As a whole, it's a sometimes exhausting listen.

A much darker, more ambitious set of songs than the Knife's previous work.

Midlake might be stuck in the '70s, but they make it sound like the best place on earth.

It isn't easy to strike the right balance between ambition and emotion, scale and humanity; White Whale manage it with ease on WWI.

There's less of the wry humor Germano usually allows to shine through once in a while... This is also her least gauzy-sounding album since Slide... Despite these differences, In the Maybe World is still a strong addition to her body of work.

The only drawback for fans is this Golden Smog doesn't bear much aural resemblance to the band that made Down by the Old Mainstream and Weird Tales; then again, the bands who make up Golden Smog's membership don't sound much like they did back then, either, so that shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

Two Thousand is nothing if not well crafted; that it doesn't have more memorable moments is as frustrating as it is mystifying.

The record is very reminiscent of the Sounds' 2006 release Dying to Say This to You, because of the sassy, provocative vocals as well as the overall mood.

Necessary if you like that wikki-wikki-scratch; recommended if you enjoy impossible pop and hip-hop from the fringe.

Muse have really done it this time.

It's a poetic work of circling guitars and melodic phrases and vocal lines repeating and layered like monastic chants.

Even if it's not as traffic-stopping as her debut, this album suggests that she can keep her music interesting for the long haul.

Stevens constructed an alternate version of Illinois that is almost as good as the original.

Intensely focused and steady.

It's not quite focused enough to place among the best of his other work.

The Silver Lining suggests that Soul Asylum might still have another great album in them (especially if Murphy does more of the songwriting), but this one certainly isn't it.

Most of the musical content is diaphanous and fleeting.

There's still a kind of inconsistency in the development of Through the Windowpane, an inconsistency that can't quite work itself out in sweeping strings and vaguely dissonant chords, and unfortunately, this diminishes the power of what the album really could be.

Listening to this album, one can't get around the knowledge that it is a posthumous collection made in Cash's last days, but even without that context, it would have much the same impact.

As the album carries on, it becomes more and more evident that this albums is less about sex than a statement about the overblown pretentiousness and drama surrounding many of the bands with artistic merit that are popular, circa 2006.

The album is a major production.

The album is gentler and falls much closer to the feeling of The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most.

The majority of Fundamental is like the majority of their great album Behavior in that repeat listens are required to do these rich songs justice.

The Return of Dr. Octagon doesn't always make a lot of sense, but that's the beauty of it.

While it's hard not to be overtaken with a sense of nostalgia while listening to this album if you knew these songs from back in the day, Phillips pulls them out of their original context and in the process reveals their strength is more timeless than one might have imagined.

If it weren't for the album's studio polish, it'd feel like an extremely well-recorded concert -- it has the ebb and flow of a good live set, and its expansive warmth ends up making its length work in its favor.

Timbaland has revitalized Nelly Furtado both creatively and commercially.

Die-hard fans might rush to judge Under the Iron Sea as sounding a bit too much like U2.

Her self-titled debut sounds a wee rushed and sometimes meanders its way into background music territory, but this comfortable effort is pleasingly homegrown, warm, and poignant in parts.

He emerges here as a more "traditional" kind of songwriter; the tunes are more conventional in structure, but like his spiritual mentor Leonard Cohen, Staples' lyrics are rooted firmly in the terrain of love, loss, regret, passage, dissolution, and absence.

Ganging Up on the Sun is the work of a band who matters.

It's not bad, it's just not as profound as Shineywater and Hughes would like everyone to believe it is.

Yes, Victory for the Comic Muse has its funny moments, its sad asides, and some of the now standard Nyman minimalist moments, but in the Divine Comedy's overall discography it's a rather slight and often flat affair with unfortunate suggestions that Hannon might have milked the comic cow dry.

News and Tributes is a far cry from the all-out rush of fun of their debut. Ultimately, though, it's a stronger set of songs.

One can't help but think that just a little bit more spice might have elevated all of these beautiful ideas out of the trappings of their now painfully insular song structures.

It's like listening to early New Order records for the first time, waiting for the next one with a little bit of excited anticipation to see what's going to happen next with every new song.

In an era of bloated and overproduced albums, Moorer has delivered a small wonder with Getting Somewhere, and it ranks with her best music to date.

He makes his tracks entertaining, but he occasionally falls prey to a common trap -- educating the listeners but not enlightening them.

Though he's as loud as ever, he has never sounded more tired.