This never takes off the way Welcome to Mali did. But it does hang in there, and rewards attention.

Several [guest singers] distinguish themselves‑-SoKo all breathy, Lorraine nice and rough‑-as does (Tjinder) Singh, changing up the rhythms as he "milks" his usual tiny store of melody.

Countering the depressive undertow, that form is both a spiritual triumph and the aural equivalent of Jesus and Mary Chain frosting a birthday cake.

The chirpy opener about fun in the sun is a feint‑-the lyrics that follow are so depressive that the consistent cheer and conservatism of the tunes is like some perverse minimalist art move.

Excoriating as Burnett and Hill are, the real abrasive is Flatlander.

With one or two exceptions, this CD never lets up, epitomizing his biz-wise mastery of rhumba boogie and the second line. The two pop hits lead. The gris-gris tracks are songs not shtick.

Though her tempos have slowed half a turn, reducing the twee factor if that was a problem for you, her melodies are still very much there and her lyrics are sharp throughout.

If you enjoy contemporary pop whose market-tested blare offends both rockist philistines and IDM aesthetes, her second album is a worthwhile investment.

Just the album you'd hope from a thoughtful 56-year-old after his band of 30 years breaks up.

After he goes down on his knees and prays, as he promises he will, this album will be Exhibit A on his application.

This one-off EP with singer-songwriter cum symphonist Sufjan Stevens and semiclassical drum'n'bassmaker Son Lux is different, because the primary function of his raps is to ground the beautiful musics his collaborators contribute.

The beats are less brooding and more funky and propulsive on Brighter while maintaining their presence and quirkiness under their ominous lyrics.

Almost every soulful track grew on me, with the clincher "Down & Out," one of his periodic explanations of why sometimes he sips and smokes instead of trying yet again.

The music suits because it's also dissociated‑-beaty enough to keep your foot tapping and your subconscious involved, but devoid of the escapist joy that is the miracle of so much Afropop produced from equally horrendous daily struggles.

Part of its delight is how naturally the disparate parts fit together, but another part is how they add up to phantasmagoria if you let your attention wander (and don't be a tight-ass‑-you should).

Play loud. She's smart and she's proud.

It's protest music, damn right about moral abstractions rather than those finely limned characters good little aesthetes get gooey about, and for me a cathartic up.

Where the regular album is musically quirky and lyrically either risky ("Some Girls," "Far Away Eyes") or generalized ("Respectable," "Beast of Burden," damn right "When the Whip Comes Down"), the bonus disc is musically classic-Stones and lyrically small-scale.

These 15 song-puzzles in 34:20 are sophisticated amusements all, although often the amusement is attenuated and one I get bored with before half its 2:38 is over.

he's scored a full album's worth of new material that remains completely in a character unique to him while adding something new to that character.

Congrats to Baldi for getting one right.

Elsewhere it's just sweet sensation. Succumb‑-succumb.

The physical and even mental diminution enriches the music.

This is a pop record because its shamelessly hedonistic barrage of proven dancefloor tricks will obviously be more fun at home than in a club.

Musically, this is pop without shame‑-her hookiest and most dance-targeted album.

He nails three [songs] flat-out....The rest tend more, how to say it, evocative.

Chugging, grinding, crackling, swelling, bubbling, babbling, these tracks don't sound like part of the natural world, but they do sound cognizant of the natural world.

Insofar as she pretends her willful pose is the holy truth, she's annoying. What saves that pose is the willful power of a presentation less Courtney Love or Chan Marshall than PJ Harvey.

Give it its long chance and you'll find that Cohen's sense of humor alive and kicking from the first words.

His romantic laments are models of texture, respect, and profound loss, their beats subtle, seductive, weird, and seized like time.

As fresh as Lisa Lee at the top of the key.

This is how the pleasure principle feels to an alienated unbeliever resigned to engaging the world on his own perverse terms.

What kept me on it was the ingrained musicality of a bunch of jokers who've evolved into a sonic organism even though they never see each other anymore.

Their synthbeat-meets-comi​x concept got over as pop because it found a mildly playful and pleasurable way to enact well-meaning self-effacement.

The snatches of Scott-Heron's voice, cracked for sure but deeper than night nonetheless, delivers it from callow generalization and foregone conclusion.

There's more distortion, less naturalism.

With four-on-the-floor dance music the nearest the actually popular pop world came to mindless rocking out in 2011, I only wish it had a few "I Gotta Feeling"s.

It's less surefire than Culdesac. But it's more satisfying emotionally.

He surveys his doubt-ridden world with uneasy resolve and disillusioned, self-deprecating wit.

What I get from the album as a whole isn't a feel for the fictional Redford Stephens. It's the pop refrains, Euro orchestrations, and simplified drumming absorbed by a sound that shows no sign of standing pat.

The lounge feel is shored up by sometime guitarist Bruce Edwards, who if he ain't Ulmer at least ain't Jim Hall.

Every mean word delivers, and with cameos from Tyler the Creator to 50 Cent it's as if he never went solo.

The three strongest tracks on Waits's most rocking album ever all feature not just Keith Richards but Tom's drummer son Casey.

This does wind down into your basic quality country album.

Chirping their expertly executed tunes, scorning the guitar swagger good old boys think makes them so sexy, they're a pop cartoon worth more than gold.

What we're hearing here is the Temptations turning into the Delfonics--the way his midrange gives up the verse and his falsetto takes the chorus is as nice as his boyish sexism.

He's worth the shot Jay couldn't resist giving him. But he's still not comfortable enough or clever enough.

Unlike Woody Guthrie, Williams is loved more for his singing than his lyrics, and boy does some of this retrofitted doggerel lack character as entuned and delivered.

It's sure the right course correction for guys who've always fetishized the eternal old-timey more than any band from goddamn Providence should.

Try "Cult Boyfriend," one of the funnier and more philosophical of the many reflections on romantic frustration this lifetime bohemian's cult career has afforded.

Church has always known how to write, and he's blowing here.

This doesn't rock, and it shouldn't. But it rollicks, skanks, and two-steps just fine.

Now 74 and short half a lung, he's not making the best music of his life, just the best albums.

Less dynamic and more ruminative than The Ruminant Band, here are 10 songs and a poky instrumental for country hippies manque and other shaggy folk down on the little luck they ever had.

The first three songs on this EP are strong, the fourth misty, the fifth sweet and slight, but all know melody and all fill out a portrait of a young man your daughter should only bring home to mother.

"Come to our shows and they're clapping again/Thank you my friends" isn't sarcastic, which doesn't mean it's devoid of irony or should be. "There's a brand new dance/Give us all your money/Everybody love everybody" is sarcastic.

Their seventh album opens with a simulated big-pop anthem and maintains that size and momentum without compromising their ability to play the new songs live.

Bouncing off each other like loaded dice, they could make you cry once you're away long enough to think about it.

Not "desert blues." Sadder than blues‑-too sad to be merely calming.

Predictably, Jay's power is more interesting than Ye's, which was funnier and sicker on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Think the patron's proximity made the protegee nervous? Think the patron figured it would? I do.

Nine seven-inches etc. plus five previously unreleaseds including three remnants of an abandoned musical obviously add up to an intentional hodgepodge. Still, I wonder whether the intention was to backload.

Lulled into a formalistic revery by their catchy choruses, you assume their content is as null as their groove. But in fact they're so girl-shy it's thematic, and refreshingly empathetic about women with problems.

The meaning's in the music, which to her considerable benefit shares the widespread Stockholm suspicion that the distinction between pop and dance music isn't worth troubling yourself over, but is nonetheless pinned for appearance's sake to the shades of yearning that mark it verbally.

Committed to synth squelch and chary of synth tweedle, it's basically instrumental except when transforming Mayer Hawthorne into the generic soul falsetto he was born to be and M.I.A. into the cheeky disco dolly she's too conscious to become.

What it sounds like is the redemption of Young's lost mid-'80s‑-the countryish album Old Ways was supposed to be, neither rote like Re-ac-tor nor static like that sacred cow Harvest.

Sure the tone is often depressive or satirical. But it's also often kind, pained, silly, unhinged, and other things.

To call this the best record of his solo career isn't to claim it's great, it's to reckon that it's pretty darn good.

I agree, men are dogs. But it gets my radar in a lather when this loving, lovable woman structures her 2007 album along a break-up's narrative arc and then four years later the same thing happens twice‑-only the first guy leaves her with a boychild who, let's be candid, she loves more unreservedly than she has any grown man on record.

The way his heedless old songs liberate cautious young professionals lays to rest any doubts as to whether he belongs in the same pantheon as George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin. He just bequeathed us a smaller book.

Play loud. I can't speak to the listening practices of the post-illbient beatmakers whose tricks Palaceer Lazaro gathers together and improves on like he's just been waiting for the go-ahead from Tricky himself.

Not afraid to be funny because they're having so much fun, Arve-Ahlund-Ahlund are one more electrobeat-wielding​ Swedish cartel bent on proving that rock and roll proceeds from enlightened capitalism like we had in America before our plutocrats started expanding the national income gap up past Colombia's.

This isn't up to The Fame or The Fame Monster. But both of those keep growing, and with its mad momentum and nutty thematics, this one could too--despite being laid down on tour trailed by 28 semis.

Just as Moore's tunings sharpen noise-rock intellectually, they tone up pretty-folk physically‑-as do Samara Lubelski's violin and producer Beck Hansen's synths.

So much better than a Ferrari that never needs a tune-up, muse I. In the studio they're less accident prone, and they still tintinnabulate some. But now they also grunt.

Parody is hard to sustain. That this follow-up provides so many laughs without flailing around in can-you-top-this? is a tribute to the comedians' musicality and their musician friends' sense of comedy.

Horny for his wife but not horny enough, loving her like she's leaving because he thinks that might help, his songcraft is undiminished, and he remains the smartest and nicest guy in his world.

There's too much of the same on Flair's 25-year-old R&B Dynamite, which omits "Shortnin' Bread Rock" and adds only the very early "Be My Lovey Dovey" to her A list, though it includes all the obvious keepers. I prefer this in part because it's shorter. Makes the voice easier to treasure.

Fortunately, they also do what all maturing s.-p.o.w.t.a. wish they could do‑-write better songs. I noticed the guitar roar first and the tunes second. But I stayed for the lyrics.

First emailed across the seas, then finalized in Vancouver, their music is to pop as hardcore is to punk, with the Joey Ramone fillip of Cooper's bizarre pronunciation.

More Prince than Ray Parker Jr., he plays with himself to beat the band, and makes these 10 tracks bump and pulse.

With a push from Nas and a whoosh from Santigold and new life from their chorusing kids, the beats spritz and submarine in signature Beasties style as the rhymes claim contexts high-living and low-life.

Creating a suite of well-turned if unnecessarily understated antiwar songs, she's a gifted, strong-willed minor artist bent on shaking England in particular.

The four humanist protest songs she rolls out just before an unnecessarily dreamy closer seem so unforced you feel for all those who have striven so hard to do nothing more. Ari, Viv, Exene‑-because sisterhood is powerful, this one's for you.

As they add the quaver of age to Andy Gill's slashes and modernize Jon King's animadversions with cellphone photos, comparison with the 20-year-old Mall quickly reveals how blessed the mainstays are in drummer Mark Heaney, who in the great tradition of Marky Ramone has both the musical sense to respect Hugo Burnham's simplicity and the historical savvy not to attempt an anachronistic replication.

The hoarse, throaty voice knows its consonants, and the lyrics are full of the everyday breakdowns most of us survive into midlife and beyond.

It's a punk album with a difference, which at this late date is the only kind you can count on for a thrill.

She deploys her superb music to address an issue so pressing few can stand to think about it: who kills who?

Euro synth duo, tuneful and sometimes haunting, always droney fun‑-textured, beaty lines under an unnaturally high-voiced girly-woman singing lyrics of no importance when you can make them out, which isn't often.

The poppers keep on coming right through the bonus tracks of porn-lite funk-lite that's quirky and clever front to back.

The music is the mild, irregular folk-rock he's explored for decades, graced with global colors that sound as natural as that guitar.

Beautiful, especially if you like your beauty grand. And beauty is good.

Saigon don't play. He's a social realist and a realist moralist who makes his seriousness work for him.

This array of whomping exotica reflects its creator's appetite for any Third World dance movement he can get his ears on, including such new ones on me as kuduro, barefoot, and -- from the mysterious depths of the District of Columbia -- Moombahton​!

They have mouths on them, yes they do. But their mouths are connected to their hearts and minds, and amped by loud guitars.

the doting Vasquez love song "Blue Eyes," the lyrical Dawes lost song "Thanks for Nothing," and the clippety-clopping Replacements road song "Portland" all augment the deep craft and acrid wordplay of the guy who's why you heard them‑-in fact, who's why you heard this varied, consistent, tune-conscious album.

Lynn still owns the songs, but she's pleased as pie to lend them out, and they come back to her lovingly countrified even when the borrower is Hayley Williams, of Paramore and Franklin, Tennessee, who acts naturally over an acoustic guitar and should give Jack White lessons.

Atmospheric. Play loud anyway, so it won't be.

Whether she's singing it for her penniless sisters or her affluent self is impossible to tell. That's why they call her provocative. Also, um, controversial.