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

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.

Gillis's vision becomes less orgiastic and more humanistic.

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

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.

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.

Sometimes we believe we care, what happens in the tuneful drywall of her shambling dreams.

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.

The physical and even mental diminution enriches the music.

She raps better now, shaping her breathy little-girl pout into vulnerability and defiance as circumstances dictate, which often means simultaneously. She rhymes better too.

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.

A little too decisively to instill much hope for his love life, the rowdy songs are deeper than the thoughtful ones.

A song band and proud, they turn down the boogie so we're sure to get the lyrics, which except for the two Eddie Hintons are laid out as well in a booklet so handsome the habitual downloader may want one for himself (or herself, I wish).

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.

He sets his sacrilegious writ to muscular melodies that get more fetching as they speed up.

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

"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.

Anticon minimalist Odd Nosdam provides all the beats Geti needs, and when your mind wanders, quite often the music alone carries you along.

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

She's slightly slower and considerably more melodramatic, as is only appropriate. Other times the melodrama appears merely the organic outcome of a larger-than-life voice.

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.

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.

In short, this rocks differently in a year when it's been hard to use that verb without reflecting on the mortality of all things.

Between speed of delivery and brevity of line, Sandman's nonstop tunefulness here tends jingly no matter how gritty his flow.

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

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

I give him extra credit for both preaching to the converted and doing his damnedest to rally the holier-than-thou.

Sweetly skeletal arrangements featuring various bandmates and his bassist dad underpin the quietest and most winning singing of his career, with lyrics so crystalline you never need the booklet.

Even in their overwork, however, they evince an effort that bears a remarkable resemblance to care‑-that is, to caring in the best, broadest, and most emotional sense.

I like the feisty ones, as I generally do. But "Begin Again" and especially "Stay Stay Stay" stay happy and hit just as hard.

A lot of the time he's trying too hard to say too little or trying too clumsily to say too much, sometimes even with his trusty guitar.

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.

If the verse-chorus-verse of these gorgeously understated, quiet but hardly grooveless artsongs makes your teeth hurt, Grizzly Bear will give you something to suck on any year now.

Until the last two songs, whose overwrought drama I don't have to like just because I trust its verisimilitude, they hit every time.

Seth Lorinczi provides the right shades of darkness‑-sometimes enticing, sometimes engulfing‑-as Sleater-Kinney fans long for a bright and cleansing breakout. They get one as "Handed Love" goes out, when Corin shouts her desperation and rips off a riff, then tops the outburst with the even more rousing "Doubt."

There's more space in these tracks, and unlikely hints of sweetening both orchestral and distaff that come as laugh moments whether the lunatics running the asylum think they're funny or not.

The catch is that through all her generalizations it soon becomes clear that she needs that guy much more than a postmodern girl is supposed to. Too bad she can't pin it down and also can't pin him down. I blame the weed.

[Glad Rag Doll] brings out the warmth in a voice that's been chilly, verging on aloof, at times. She calls this her "song and dance record"; I'd call it her nimble, witty, change-of-pace record.

These are so fine you don't mind listening again. And as you do, you start noticing how deftly Brett negotiates lines and stanzas that aren't as blockish as their meter and his voice make you think. And then you listen to this uningratiating music some more.

Reminds me of a painter pal who in the '60s did a whole slipcase of polarized bicolor sex silkscreens--some lovely, some gross, all yummy.

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.

For better or worse, and it's both, this is kind of what you'd figure sort of: a Sonic Youth record dominated by that band's most important member.

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.

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.

Midway through, here comes some madman with the deeply stoopid "31 Flavors" and you realize it wasn't going along fine enough.

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

These 13-songs-in-35-minut​es, cut half in 2008 when he was drunk and half in 2010 when he was sober, are shockingly strong for the first eight or nine, which unfortunately include all the drunk ones.

Given his limitations, his famous friends are a mixed benefit, because they show him up.

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.

For once drum'n'bass's impossible Conlon Nancarrow beats, which Plug does pretty well with on those EPs, are the bed where the real music crinkles, crashes, chimes, swoops, swells, squiggles, gurgles, cracks wise, and just generally hooks you.

Rocky raps over the music without saying a damn thing older, meaner, and sharper rappers haven't said before. Then, bang, three dynamite songs.... Then, aww, three tracks that could be more obvious by half.

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.

Re-examining his past, he imagines a future you can hum in your mind.

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.

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.

On his fourth and least austere album ventures into songlike territory without ever enlisting a vocalist, although vocal sounds do enter the mix.

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

The placeholder EP is blunter and slighter than the album.

Mature my patootie--and that's a good thing.

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.

As usual the songs come clear eventually.

Soon Hammond's "You Smoke Too Much" is fitting right in. As together as can be expected, and as Miller requests with a hint of desperation, "Please Hold On While the Train Is Moving."

These 13 excellent songs are sufficiently specialized to make you realize how classic Volume 1 was--and what a theme statement "Past Time" was.

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.

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.

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

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

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

True, the record shudders to a virtual halt when the ecumenical auteur turns beatmaker midway through, and some may judge the rhymes irresponsibly playful.

I find only the alcoholic's confession "Neon Cathedral" too much, and that one's counteracted by the relapser's confession "Starting Over," just as "Sayin' `That's poetry, it's so well-spoken,' stop it" counteracts his art talk. He's especially good on old cars and old clothes.

Some will surely find this preachy, yucky, or technologically compromised. I'm just happy I can say amen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's like H&S [Holsapple & Stamey] never went away.

Struggling for cred as aging rappers will, they stumble occasionally. Some of these ideas obviously seemed funnier when they brainstormed them.

Many of these songs are merely bemused, and when she revises "I'm just a soul whose intentions are good," all she achieves is a different singalong from the one you expected.

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.

There's a pleasure on the far edge of song in imagining that two DIY purists are making all these musical noises with their guitar collection and their home studio.

Near as I can hear, all that marks these terrific songs as outtakes etc. is that they're slightly less produced and dramatic.

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.

The gears that never quite mesh in this disquieting but hardly apocalyptic industrial ambient may be metal and may be plastic but are probably both.

Despair is very much with us. It'll blow up before it recedes. And this music is intensely committed to escaping it.

Although more far-out referents might arguably block my passway to his freewheeling freestyles, subcontinental beats like Keyboard Kid's electro-Carnatic "Let It Go" and Harry Fraud's serpent-charming "Wild Water Kingdom" mean to create a world of fun for everyone.

Like Illmatic it eschews pop emoluments, and conceptually it's just as canny.

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.

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.

This Leeds-to-Cambridge foursome's unhurried electro-mesh is always more than pleasant and half the time mildly enthralling.

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.

Almost every track offers up at least a snatch of melody you're always glad to hear again.

I decided that Lukas's stoned-hillbilly affect was just what his dad needed to distinguish this particular assortment of what-thes, why-hasn't-he-evers,​ and written-to-orders from rival entries in his unchartable catalogue.

Finally we've reached a tipping point resembling the riot grrrl moment of the early '90s, one in which every feisty hip-hop soprano has a you-go-illygirl edge on her notebook-toting male competitors.

He's got relationship problems so depressing that he thinks calmly about killing himself. Yet even that doesn't stop him from saying what he has to say in under three minutes, with a catchy tune to help the time pass.

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

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

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

Yet as mere listening the best songs here‑-especially "Fish Paste" and the signature "Enter the Ninja"‑-convey the disturbing comic character Watkin Tudor "Waddy" Jones has created.