By muting Tool's over-the-top attack, Keenan has more time to devote to deepening the textures throughout.

Lost In Space is packed with Mann's seductively droll delivery that spikes up the melody while it goes down hard on love.

Full of the obscure and deranged moods that made Security alternately delightful and demented, this album revels in craggy vocals, thumping beats, esoteric instrumental sounds and a general feeling of beautiful dread.

This reviewer wishes he could tell you that Skull Ring is as good as his best past highlights--but it just ain't.

The production can be a little too clinical and antiseptic in spots.

This is still an excellent band composed of three excellent musicians who can produce one hell of a noise.

Taking a large step in expanding its lexicon, the group, singer Gaz Coombes in particular, has tightened up its songwriting and come up with tunes that rival the band’s first hit "Caught By The Fuzz."

Gray's idiosyncrasies are sometimes buried beneath the syrupy strings (which may have been the intent), robbing the album of unpredictable highs as well as lows.

While her voice has never sounded better, the lion share of songs she selected for the album are mediocre at best.

A shimmering example of wistful chamber folk-pop.

Much to alarmist indie-rockers everywhere, Martsch has been making his fondness for classic rock--and Neil Young, in particular--more pronounced with each release. Now, he goes one deeper, following the Young vibe into his own world of introspective weirdness.

Wisely, Slim Shady has focused on quality over quantity and delivers a trio of his best-ever tunes.

Reality is easily one of his most emotionally transparent albums.

A MY-T-FINE punk rock album, chock full of swirling harmonies that came into fashion sometime around the Descendents rise in the mid-1980s.

Even in a blindfold test, you'd probably guess it was his creation. That's both how distinctive and predictable he's become.

The B.Coming is no metamorphosis; Beans remains the same powerful but limited rhymer, a blunt object hammering the mic and stumbling after the ghost of Jay-Z.

What Clones proves, beyond its certain hits, is that the Neptunes have to be considered alongside the handful of great artists (Bowie, Prince, et al) who kept pushing boundaries as they pushed up the charts.

It's better than Souljacker, though not quite as good as Electro-Shock Blues and Daisies Of The Galaxy.

Most of these rhymes are too shallow to warrant the hopeful comparisons to Biggie and Tupac. But if you want the best disposable gangsta tunes on the market, 50 Cent offers a definite bargain.

The album never shifts into angular or faster textures but maintains its overall coasting level with clarity, precision and charm.

Length considerations aside, only die-hard Beck devotees and studio nerds are likely to be dazzled by the dithering, technoed-out proceedings here.

The album, produced by her longtime collaborators Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, doesn't drift from their if-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it formula that supplies Janet with dreamy, radio friendly R&B/pop to balance the record's angst and lust.

Not terribly exciting for a long-awaited comeback, but a sensitive collection of songs for people traveling down life's lonely highway hand in hand with themselves, for sure.

By and large, the disc is made up of ambitious but misguided attempts to elevate mundane rock 'n' roll to some kind of higher art form.

What gives Afrodisiac its allure are the confident club jams that mask B-Rocka’s vocal limitations without overpowering her.

While Souljacker is not exactly a great leap forward for the band, it is a satisfying continuum from the superb Daisies Of The Galaxy.

At first listen a morose rumination on the many shapes of love, the album slowly unfurls as a grand, almost gothic epic of vast proportion and luxurious significance.

As a vocalist, she remains somewhat faceless.