The tunes are Dawson's because Ae-Rock doesn't do tunes, but his beats beef up those tunes just like his gruff, clotted flow beefs up her itty-bitty soprano.

The riot godmotherrr commands pretty much the same old skinny soprano, only with soft edges that sound tender or thoughtful sometimes.

"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.

An exciting, multivalent Dreijer sibling showcase. Karin provides saving shades of humanity by exercising the vocal cords nature gave her. But Olof's imagination, sense of humor, and bent rebop carry the day.

Just play it a few more times than the fools who clocked dollars for the job and you'll get your money's worth. And I do mean on all 16 new songs‑-three of the four bonus tracks are upper 50th percentile for sure.

Matthew E. White's horn charts are the musical development Darnielle has in store for us. But the dealmaker is Jon Wurster's spare, inescapable drumming.

Cataloguing the perks of power he sounds as geeky as Mark Zuckerberg, and because grandiosity doesn't suit him deep down, the sonic luxuries of this world-beating return to form have no shot at the grace of The Collede Dropout or Late Registration. But because he's shrewd and large, he knows how to use his profits profits to induce Jay-Z, Pusha T, the RZA, Swizz Beats, and his boy Prince CyHi to admit and indeed complain that the whole deal is "f***in' ridiculous."

I love sampled beats. But 90 percent of the time I'd rather ride Ahmir Thompson's hand, feet, and brain.

Gillis's vision becomes less orgiastic and more humanistic.

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.

Quick-tongued, lascivious, catchy, and delighted with itself, there hasn't been a more pleasurable record all year and probably won't be‑-not even by her.

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

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.

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

Each verse/chorus/bridge/​intro melody, each lyric straight or knotty, each sound effect playful or perverse (or both)‑-each is pleasurable in itself and aptly situated in the sturdy songs and tracks, so that the whole signifies without a hint of concept.

Consider me converted, at least until Bradford Cox lurches off in yet another direction.

Two melodies reach back centuries. Strong-voiced frontwoman Amy Sacko delivers the word. And although the ngoni is a mere lute, Kouyate gets more noises you want to hear out of his strings than any two jam-band hotshots you can name.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

There's more distortion, less naturalism.

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.

In vivid contrast to the sanctimonious musicianly overkill of Springsteen's Pete Seeger tribute, Young's overkill leads with its middle finger by ignoring the catchiest tune of the 19th century, the traditional melody of "Oh Susannah."

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.

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.

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

Congrats to Baldi for getting one right.

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

Half rapping and half singing, half bragging and half kowtowing, brazening a "punt" rhyme here and proclaiming commonality with "girls that never thought they could win" there, she's proud to be shameless, with the hooks to back it up.

A succession of enjoyable songs with plenty to offer.

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.

No matter how cleverly he's rhyming, which varies, he could use subject matter beyond married-to-the-game and his traditional obsessions. But with Shady in the shadows, rarely are these themes lifted by Em's long-recessive sense of play.

From "Don't F***ing Tell Me What to Do" to "We Dance to the Beat," her songwriting in that vein is as strong as anybody's. Scattered across her three 2010 CDs is one great album. How I wish this was it.

A lark evolves into a business proposition as an album of 10 inspired three-minute songs eventuates in an album of 12 expert three-and-a-half-min​ute songs.

Though half are also on La Condition Masculine, which is generally deemed Bebey's best album, this selection is hookier from the just-released "New Track," whose subject is white starchy foods, to "The Coffee Cola Song," whose subject is the cash economy.

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.

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.

The follow-up is his party record, and deeper as a consequence, dark and hilarious and gone so fast you're too busy tapping your inner foot to cavil about pitch or timbre.

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.

Boots Riley has at his disposal a rich, seldom-tapped seam of scathing rhetoric and concrete metaphor and fleshes out leftist analysis with humanist muscle and poetic integument.

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.

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

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

White's nominal solo debut is as striking sonically as any album he's ever authorized.

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.

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.

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.

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

Though capable lead vocalist Ricky Likabu and startling high tenor Theo Nzonza don't soar on record the way they do live, both lift audibly out of the wheeled conveyances from which a gang of polio survivors articulated their humanity and launched their inspired hustle.

These grooves vary structurally‑-hooked​ by a bass drone, an insistent drum pattern, some fetching keyb. And they always move.

There are hooks here, folks, and literalism fan that I am, I say they're most effective on the strictly reportorial "Nearly Midnight, Honolulu" and the lost-love "Calling Cards."

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.

You'll soon feel how all those slight musical differentials hoist the group's collective spirit, and how courageously the music's depressive candor strengthens their will to be alive.

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.

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.

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

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.

With beats this straight and stolid, you'd better keep the anthems coming, and they do, almost.

They add up to a song cycle with a happy ending--the joy of which may grow in wisdom or crumble back toward nothingness tomorrow.

There are stories proper galore, plenty more than the three tracked as such, and every one is worth hearing‑-always as narrative and usually as music, where Snider's acquired drawl provides a species of musicality akin to that of prime rapping, especially over a vamp.

The thematic attack here is pretty surgical, cutting most of the time to the gangsta life he's so glad he sidestepped as a youth. The individual pieces are well-defined by his muzzy standards.

After more time than anyone from either camp will be inclined to give it, the album takes on a compelling, sui generis sonic identity, at least for someone from the blues side.

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

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.

Yes, he nails those internal rhymes. Nobody's Rakim. But he earns the brag.

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

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.

He's just a gifted kid who likes his weed and his words, which he twists with palpable delight around sparse synth beats musical enough to layer on some delight of their own.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Slowly you'll realize just how rare it is for a major-label Nashville hopeful to put this much care into every song even if you're not convinced by the one that connects whipped cream and whips.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The physical and even mental diminution enriches the music.

An album that's damn catchy after all.

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.

DeMent craves stuff she can "see and touch," but her songwriting makes do just fine with feeling.

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.

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​!

The finest lyricist to rise up out of conscious country since Miranda Lambert, if not Bobby Pinson himself.

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.

They add muscle to their sound and lose a smidgen of edge in their writing.

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.

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

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.

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