Another title that demonstrates what an awesome period the late '70s and early '80s was for music.

Answers has a heavy downtown spirit, with standard instruments played in a unique fashion, and an aggressive interplay that's nearly antagonistic.

If you can get past the clothespin-on-nose delivery... and the constant up-and-down swoops and dives in which it's delivered, the album has a certain sense of awkward, ramshackle charm that's frequently unhinged and claustrophobic at once.

But while De-Loused in the Comatorium may well remove the stigma from the prog and art rock forms it suggests, and is certainly a monument to unbridled creativity, it can also be seen as bombastic and indulgent.

All the Gang Starr trademarks are in place, from Premier's perfect upchoruses to Guru's reedy voice cutting or instructing, and sounding better than ever.

Terroir Blues is a significantly more ambitious and confident work from Farrar than Sebastopol, but it's also more elusive, and ultimately this is the sort of record fans will love, but the unfamiliar will have a hard time embracing.

Like a latter-day Digital Underground, Black Eyed Peas know how to get a party track moving.

The album doesn't have the detail of character that made Michelle Branch so appealing the first time out.

There's nothing wrong with a change of pace, but there's a startling lack of depth in either the words, which are entirely too literal, or the music, whose hooks are at once too obvious and not ingratiating enough.

Keep It Together may not feature the emotional dynamics or track-by-track genius of Lost and Gone Forever, but it has something that its predecessor didn't: an unabashed pop anthem that dares you to sit still.

The first half is good enough to make Dangerously in Love one of the best mainstream urban R&B records released in 2003.

A work of beautiful, desolate fragility.

Menomena clearly thinks of itself as a clever bunch of musicians. Maybe next time around they'll be more interested in sharing their wit with their listeners rather than just alluding to it.

Scorpio Rising may not have the coherence of its forerunner, but its individual eclectic achievements still add up to an engaging album.

The changes are so minute and the record so unassuming and melody free that it is really hard to care about the band anymore.

They've got a rough, nervy, lo-fi take on power rock that has the weird immediacy of the Microphones' Mount Eerie.

With Happy Songs for Happy People, Mogwai gets to have it both ways -- it's ironic and sincere, concise and expansive, challenging and accessible, and it's one of the band's best albums, no two ways about it.

No hooks, no lyrical drama, no surprises, nothing at all inside the pretty package.

The total effect is less a spin through 3 Feet High and Rising than it is an hour of Yogi Bear cartoons -- fine when you hear any one track, but much too much over the course of a full album.

Those are the two things that Twice has in spades: soul and passion. Add to that a bunch of great songs, and you've got yourself a real keeper.

Few bands can get away with being in a holding pattern like Tindersticks.

Clem Snide has crafted another gem.

Somber and smart, Decoration Day also manages to kick like a mule, and if isn't quite a masterpiece along the lines of Southern Rock Opera, it's strong enough to suggest the Drive By Truckers have another masterpiece in them.

This sophomore effort finds Brand New maturing, reaching for textures and song structures instead of clichés.

There's nothing that betrays their high standards of craft, but, on a whole, the songs are neither as hooky nor as resonant as the ones unveiled on its predecessor.

This time, the one flaw may simply be that the group doesn't know when to say when.

Thought-provoking and a bit of a downer in ways Grandaddy probably didn't intend, Sumday isn't a totally empty experience, but its ambitions and results don't add up as well as might have been expected.

The truth of its fineness and devastating beauty is in the hearing.