Maybe he's no longer breaking new ground, but his eccentricities are now an attribute, not a curse, which goes a long way in making his trademark blend of funk, pop, soul, and rock sound nearly as dazzling as it did at his popular and creative peak in the '80s.

A good album that should please fans of any type of hip-hop.

Full of quietly vibrant moments.

This New Day is an excellent companion to Out of Nothing, with only a slight drop-off in quality.

Ultimately, this album ends up being a more naturalistic take on Calexico's sound; just because it's less stylized doesn't mean it's less interesting -- it just takes a little more time for Garden Ruin's power to reveal itself.

Its gloriously, thoroughly trashy fun makes it a guilt-free fling.

Mullins' most poignant, cohesive, and diverse album.

T.I.'s fourth album isn't the leap forward he's been threatening to make, but it does carry the best set of productions he has been given to work with, and it guarantees that he won't be leaving the singles charts any time soon.

While he retains his literate tongue and expressive voice, there is far less humor on Animal Years than on his previous two outings.

Lunatico is a brave and exotic experiment.

To Ze's credit, the concept never overshadows the songs which, at their heart, are pop songs.

They sound more confident than ever, igniting their cabaret-rock with more crazed inventiveness and you-are-there immediacy.

Anyone who enjoyed having their brains and ears rearranged by Blueberry Boat and Rehearsing My Choir should find Bitter Tea enjoyable, but at this point, it seems like the most challenging thing the Fiery Furnaces could do is trust their pop instincts a little more often.

Though some of the production is a bit too reminiscent of 1990s indie rock, the songs are strong enough and the attitude addictive enough to position Figurines as more than an also-ran.

Demons is well worth checking out for those who like a sense of the unexpected in their pop.

It's all done with skill and to great effect, and the album is good for mood-setting background or forefront reflection, or for some combination of the two.

A very detailed, though still utterly bewildering, glimpse into the producer's musical thought process.

Typically cryptic and loaded with tasty guitar, Songs and Other Things is an excellent return for Tom Verlaine.

With the help of Danger Mouse's platinum ear and intricate vocal productions, Green is revealed as a top-notch post-millennial soul singer.

How We Operate is strong, focused, and a complete pleasure to engage; its maturity and confidence is beyond anything they've released thus far, and the experimentalism brought into play on their other albums is here.

It's not only a step forward for the band, but a re-embracing of the epic-length rock songs found at the roots of early heavy metal.

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.

There is a depth of emotion and seriousness here that had been missing on Sumday, Lytle's vocals have a gravity they lacked before, and the bandmembers seem to mean every note they play this time.

The only complaint with the album is that all the angst and gloom can get pretty heavy at times, but if you are in the right mood, Last Secrets can play like the soundtrack to a broken dream.

Snow Patrol's hungry rock sound only gets bigger and better this time around.

Though obviously unconcerned with finding a place in the mainstream, this release just as cool and catchy as anything by Evanescence.

The Invisible Deck is often dark and scattered, and doesn't provide the rush of instant gratification that Three Fingers and Purely Evil do, but its growth and promise are more exciting in their own right.

Shut Up I Am Dreaming is pure bedroom art-pop with a thin Britpop glaze that is as poignant and self-effacing as it is self conscious and pretentious.

Musically, the album is as hard as the group has ever gotten.

[The] lack of zest in the production is forgivable because Taking the Long Way is otherwise a strong, confident affair.

Their performances sound more confident than ever.

Thursday simply sound like a superior version of themselves.

An album that's more like the Walkmen's concerts than the meticulously crafted sound of their other albums.

The great majority of Stand Still, Look Pretty is tuneful, tastefully rootsy, and quite engaging country-pop.

Citrus is as good a shoegaze record you will ever hear, regardless of release date.

A deeply thoughtful and obviously personal album.

Vintage Burden is among the most beautiful, subtle, and moving records this band has ever made.

The music presented with such care here is lovely, soothing, and seductively beguiling; taken in enough times, it becomes utterly magical.

It's quite possibly Patton's most accessible album since his Faith No More days.

Even as the guys stretch and flex their songwriting muscles, they never fail to remember where they came from, instead using their past work as the foundation to their essential growth.

Regardless of tempo, these are some of the strongest, most involving songs the band has ever recorded.

This combination of quirky sounds and suave production lands the disc in musical territory that feels at once both innovative and familiar; something like Beck, Björk, and Velvet Underground meeting in a lazy Rio cantina only to discover they've all been listening to Stereolab and Nouvelle Vague.

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.

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.

It's a solidly good album, and if taken as part of a trio of albums with Sonic Nurse and Murray Street, it shows that Sonic Youth is still in a comfortable yet creative groove, not a rut.

The album feels like getting to really know someone: at first, it's polite and a little restrained, but then its real personality, with all of its charming idiosyncrasies, finally reveals itself.

Timbaland has revitalized Nelly Furtado both creatively and commercially.

It's the sound of the band maturing, and while it's certainly more laid-back than any of Live's previous records, that low-key approach feels right for the music on Songs from Black Mountain and helps make it one of their most consistent and successful records.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Intensely focused and steady.

At times, Return to Cookie Mountain threatens to become more impressive than likeable -- a complaint that could also arguably be leveled against Desperate Youth as well -- but fortunately, TV on the Radio reconnects with, and builds on, the intimacy and purity that made Young Liars so striking.

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

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

Rye rips it up on this disc, recalling equal parts vintage AC/DC and Led Zeppelin, with a little KISS thrown in to keep things playful.

You don't have to like, or even see, Who Loves the Sun to be moved by McCaughan's work here.

If not particularly important, We Are the Pipettes is both witty and filled with ear-catching melodies.

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.

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

The album is little different than their two previous atom bombs, De-Loused in the Comatorium and Frances the Mute -- tense and anxious, continually pushing the boundaries of extreme production, with long periods of dynamics that rise ever higher, followed by an explosion of release (usually screaming hard rock with storms of atonal brass and horns).

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.

A compelling and touching record.

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.

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

Presents more of the same disconcerting, cacophonous, yet strangely melodic and catchy music that always seems to find frontman John Congleton on the verge of going absolutely insane.

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

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.

At this point, it's impossible to imagine them topping themselves; an album that is merely deeply engaging and wildly entertaining cannot be considered a flop in any way.

Jeremy Greenspan and Matt Didemus depart completely from 2-step and late-'90s Timbaland twitter, polishing their sound to such an extent that absolutely no detectable scuffs are left.

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.

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

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.

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.

This is by far their most accessible and cohesive record yet, and despite a couple of well-meaning but ultimately derivative hiccups in its second half, Awoo should bring a much larger audience into the fold.

Without it ever deliberately going for the jugular, Nuclear Daydream is nevertheless an album that is difficult to shake out of your ears; moreover, it's one that only grows stronger with every repeated play.

There is no commercial slant on this music, but it's more relevant than anyone dared expect.

It's filled with sophisticated yet welcoming changes in texture, dynamic, and form/genre that seem effortless, not forced or idiosyncratic for its own sake.

What really differentiates the album from its predecessors is that there's almost no trace of tension to be heard. It's all about fooling around and being in love.

The best thing that can be said about The Lemonheads is that it sounds like the album Dando and company should have released in 1995.

Similarities to their debut are much easier to find than differences, although the songs aren't quite as memorable (except the single "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'") and Ta-Dah is slightly samey in comparison.

If you give it time, The Information eventually reveals itself as Beck's tightest, most purposeful album yet.

But even if the music doesn't really work, it's hard not to listen to it in slack-jawed wonderment, since there's never been a record quite like it -- it's nothing but wrong-headed dreams, it's all pomp but no glamour, it's clichés sung as if they were myths.

This is a smoking little record. Its focus is small, its reach is large; it's a winner.

They're a little less baroque, they're a little less depressing... but they're just as emotional and affecting, which makes Gang of Losers very good indeed.