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.