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

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.

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

More than half the songs sound effectively the same. Rocking, absolutely. Tighter, too. Tuneful, in their way.

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

This does wind down into your basic quality country album.

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.

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

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.

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.

You'll grow to love the queen of Bowlmor Lanes, the Jazz Age gangster who takes pride in his work, the souvenirs of dooms past rusting in the back of the sci-fi shop.

Her male partners Bob Stanley and Peter Wiggs provide reliable disco-inflected pop or vice versa that the remixers on the optional bonus disc trick up with more wit and fidelity than we who avoid remixes sagely expect.

Their quietest and most fragile album is also their most orchestrated.

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.

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.

Although overdoing the soulful melodrama doesn't beat overdoing the suave cool as decisively as the retro-nuevo believe, the songwriting here is a big extra difference maker, with enough pop moves to lighten the overall mood.

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

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

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

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

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

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​!

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.

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.

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.

The narrative matters on this album, and as always, newcomers should hear Dennehy first. But Cohn is one of a kind, and he don't stop.

Just when you're thinking not bad at all, come some songs.

After I got over my high I began to feel the rest of the album was a letdown, but far from it--just lesser variations on his trick of deploying short samples as beats without settling for staccato. Kind of like in rock and roll even if you'd never know it to listen to it--only to think about it.