True, Green spends more time supplicating than celebrating, and probably fabricated the whole scenario. But he knows his subject, and he doesn't need Jesus to lay it down.

Buy it while you can.

Only one thing's certain -- his songwriting.

This one's solider, more concrete -- even beautiful sometimes.

Right now her main message is just to do all this. If enough people like it, she has the aura of someone who might push the envelope.

With an incongruent Fall Out Boy track set aside for single duty and all those rappers a dream community taking the burden off Black Thought, this is the most accomplished pure hip-hop album in years.

As on most Go-Betweens records, the melodies take time to sink in, though not the Grant McLennan legacy retrofitted with a Robert lyric about Grant's affinity for melody.

Very minor, rather lovely and it rocks.

Nevertheless, the lost lives and loves he sketches are so painfully familiar they feel like truth. And Ant's homey beats enhance the illusion.

Live, McMurtry can still be way too strophic and trad. But he's never made an album so loud or hard.

The subtle flutter of her finest melismatics could give an open-minded person goose bumps. Her coarser melismatics, however, are the usual showoff BS and probably also a commercial prerequisite, like not having a harelip.

Finer minds than mine may find these pieces worthy of continuous attention. I say they're background music, there waiting when your mind drifts speakerward, just distracting enough to change up your mood in a useful way.

They're brainy about their alienation, they're funny about their alienation, and when they bitch about their relationships their post- or pre-alt normality is exceptionally refreshing.

A glockenspiel in a guitar band? Freshens up the sound, they think. And they're right.

These nutty kids turned DOR nostalgia act make their first album in 16 years their sex album. Eeyew, say today's normal kids. 'Bout time, says anybody old enough to know that one lure of the flesh is that it's always decaying.

As vision, still somewhere between narrow and ignant. Yet not a boho archetype for nothing.

Although Nick Urata can't match pipes with Richard Hawley, a plus in a way, he's hawking mellifluous overstatement flavored with a nostalgia far enough past its sell-by date that it stinks a little.

It's that he trivializes his own content--not the gangsta, braggadocio no one takes seriously anymore, but the pimp slime.

One wonders whether 4AD has thrown his critical followers off with its line about how this one abandons autobiography for "mythical creatures" etc.

The turns of phrase are usually cul-de-sacs, the flights into obscurity have bum wings, and do you really prefer, for instance, Vernon's best-in-show "Now all your love is wasted?/Then who the hell was I?" (much less "Only love is all maroon/Lapping lakes like leery loons") to this Creeley ordinaire

Affecting a clarity and delight that pleases the many and confounds the some, their lyrically alluring, structurally hop-skip-and-jumping songs aren't deep. They're just thoughtful fun.

Even doing her humble bit, she yells in your ear.

OK, 19 songs, gotta be filler here somewhere, and there is, only it isn't melodic -- with all music credited to the band, Shonna Tucker's muzzier lyrics and Mike Cooley's more elusive ones sound as well-turned as those of Patterson Hood, who's never written better.

He's made a novelty record that gets deeper with time.

She remains a nice kid whose knowledge of her own limitations doesn't interfere with her self-respect. That's not just because the knowledge helps her make catchy music out of it, either. But the music helps.

Busta Rhymes and Ludacris get her back to where she once belonged for the duration of their openers. After that, it's an expensive, honorable, credible sampler of the hottest current R&B brands.

He makes UNKLE and Fall Out Boy sound fresher than Tricky Stewart.

The album belongs to the hip-hop hippie. And an album it definitely is.

Deconstructing and recontextualizing their tune stock "mais oui," these robot wannabes bathed the unwashed in the blood of the synthesizer, broadening and lowering sounds that in their original substantiations owe not just Detroit techno but Ramada Inn lounge.

By dint of hard work, Ghost now has him a minor career as the classiest crime story writer in a genre that supports plenty of them.

Burbling electronic ticktocks vie with a carillon of bell simulacra, and rarely have vinyl crackle or laser malfunction generated more musicality.

Timelag-wise, the 1957 concept is as if some '60s songpoet had conceived an album about Armistice Day, influenza, the Palmer raids and Mary Pickford. Only that would have been a milestone and this isn't, which you can blame on heightened aesthetic expectations rather than the potency of this Canadian rapper's literary mojo.

Once again its vagaries are its distinction. Doherty makes a case for flat-on-your-ass alienation in an insane wartime culture.

Loaded with talent, heart and personality, he's an eccentric who still thinks the world is his friend, and one more sweet argument for the civilized compromises of democratic socialism.

There are enough sonic strokes here to keep the wrong bizzer in ringtone rappers for a year.

Grohl is hookier than Nickelback, which is saying something.

Through almost as many producers as Mary, this album has a single identity, a contour and a groove that suits its well-inhabited breakup concept.

What the two boil down to is that a parvenu mastering pop music for money has turned into a made man running on vanity. I find that this renders his expert trivialization of murder and such rather less piquant, and I think he does too--that an audacious formal delight has become routine.

Every single track offers up its momentary pleasures--choruses that make you say yeah on songs you've already found wanting, confessional details and emotional aperçus on an album that still reduces to quality product when they're over.

Just when you're ready to give up and apply to graduate school, along comes a simple band who get everything right.

This is a speedier pop suite suitable for dancing or straightening up the flat.

Still a band that improves everyone in it, and more forthcoming this time, though they really ought to risk despoiling their precious graphics with lyrics.

Terse and beaty, with Dr. Dre referral Mike Elizondo going half on the baby, this isn't a pop record, but it does avoid guitar-band shapes, sonics and truisms.

If you don't know much about these 30-year veterans except that they're legendary, this probably isn't where to find out why. If you have any idea what I'm talking about, however, partake.

There's no denying her eye for out-of-the-way details or her ear for a decent tune.

The best music here is so deep it's more powerful than the rhymes.

A trifle brighter, quicker and fuller than "Gimme Fiction."

Polysyllabic and self-aware, this is the best political punk in years.

Playing at world, at heavy, at soul, [Jack White] arts it up plenty and protests a little.

Just when I'd made my peace with pop prog and begun to hope arty prog would prove another casualty of the age of digital instantaneity, these postrock warriors get the bright idea of adding tune and humor to their higher mathematics.

This two-hour double-CD/triple-LP, their first product since 2001, is grand, somber, amelodic, arhythmic and slow, leaving plenty of time to admire the notes' altered states.

They thud rather than thunder. But what a loud and joyous thud it is.

Only two songs ring false. [Feb/Mar 2007]

I still prefer 2004's disreputable "Winchester Cathedral." But this is a proper guitar fix nevertheless. [Feb/Mar 2007]

These are "rock songs" in Ned Rorem's dreams -- they're as ornate as a high-class geisha house.

The fun comes easier when he fools around with the title conceit, and even sometimes when he thinks about it.

This isn't the gauntlet "Fishscale" was. It's just a good bunch of songs. [Feb/Mar 2007]

They're unflinchingly unsensationalistic. But it's the beats that turn this into noir worthy of Jim Thompson. [Feb/Mar 2007]

Sure enough, the first time through, too many [of the songs] had faded on me. Soon, however, even ones I'd given up on were bum-rushing my earhole.

So much that is sprightly about the debut is subsumed here by ambition, to be kind, and privilege, to be brutally accurate. [Feb/Mar 2007]

The album is unlistenable for a simple reason: Roger Daltrey.

Though smarty-pants Lemony Snicket fans may get references I miss, in between there are times when Stephin Merritt's monotonous low baritone seems merely inexpressive.

Unlike "Guero" this one really has some war in it.

This album lays it on too thick... and declines the thematic burden of "Separation Sunday." As stories, on the other hand, the songs could convince anyone that kids have a hard time.

Though I wish the beats were less corny-orchestral, Fiasco marks his own turf in a three-song sequence that would have led the second side back in the day. [Feb/Mar 2007]

Never rousing and too often glum, the album is carried by its intelligence, integrity and terrible beauty. [Feb/Mar 2007]

None of it means a damn thing beyond what it is. Which is just what they were trying so hard to achieve.

What's most remarkable about this stylistic portmanteau is that every song is an original even though you assume several are among their shoulda-been-a-hit-but-wtf-is-it? covers.

If only she was as sophisticated as she thinks she is. Or as funny. [Feb/Mar 2007]

If opulence can signify liberation in this grotesquely materialistic time, as in hip-hop it can, then Beyoncé earns her props with a bunch of songs she says were inspired all in a rush by her "Dreamgirls" character. [Feb/Mar 2007]

The entire construction is a thing of grace -- conservative, and new under the sun.

A joyous mishmash.

As narrative and prophecy, a less coherent response to Christofascism than you might want, but one alt needs, held together and moved ahead by its forthright hooks and beats.

The musical construction is so jaunty that they can't be serious even if they're cutting their alienated fans out of the joke. [Feb/Mar 2007]

Such is the lure of his hypersensitivity that his admirers forgive and even applaud the extreme attenuation of this tastefully decorated click-and-loop.

Once a punky brat, Jemima Pearl now sounds like a punk broad -- like she might join the Donnas if that was a better job. But listen through the bigger voice and louder mix and you'll hear someone who's thinking all the time.