Only a talent as major as Lewis could half bring it off.

Altogether as slow, sad-ass and self-involved as reported, this is a breakup album there's no reason to like except that it's brilliant.

Listen to your body tonight. They made themselves up, and they're strictly for real.

How many great songs about rock and roll can one man write before he gets tiresome? We may find out.

They sure are spry, and Nelson is so delighted to be singing them that the band's expertise lights up.

White's drums duke it out with Dean Fertita's guitar, mostly below the belt. Alison Mosshart doffs her s&m drag to suffer and yelp. Jack Lawrence plays bass. Fierce.

These guys sure can rap and rhyme, and they do.

After what K'naan has been through, bless him for trying--the ebullience he extracts from a life much tougher than North Americans can know is worthy of soukous, mbaqanga, the highlife of Ghana's most punishing inflationary spiral.

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]

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

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.

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.

If you can't get with this expediently excessive piece of rich-get-richer, commercial rap albums are beyond your ken.

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.

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

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

The tunes are consistently fetching, and a few standouts have clever lyrics.

The fourth Dolls album and second of their second life is the first one that's less than epochal. Not all the tunes are surefire.

At least when the bassist ruled they livened up this overworked dynamic with beats. Now they tax it with tunes.

Only one thing's certain -- his songwriting.

On this reassuring piece of big-bottomed exotica, the "Sahara swing" they concocted with Karl Hector is the tipoff. They love the continuity bass-and-drums lay below; I love the content koto and flute and malletophone add on

Low-tune for a pop band, low-momentum for a rock band, they stand a chance of evoking bad Elvis Costello when they take you by surprise or emote on in the background.

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

His plot is so preposterous and unempathetic it's more the appearance of a plot, or an elaborate joke about a plot.

I'm moved nevertheless by what can pass for a concept album about the romantic life of an uncommonly-to-impossibly strong and gifted teenage girl, starting on the first day of high school and gradually shedding naiveté without approaching misery or neurosis.

Mostly it's the tunes that do the slamming. And though their lyrics may be too sincere for sophisticates, they're not sincere enough to suit the Avetts, a disconnect they'll tell you about.

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

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

Striding forward, Cooper won't let that stop her. She hurts, but her chin scarcely trembles at all.

The result is an exceptionally melodic reggae album that's intensified by rapping devoid of dancehall patois and a hard edge unknown to roots revivalism. The result is also an exceptionally political hip-hop album that's most convincing when it doesn't multiply Afrocentric distortion by Rastafarian reasoning.

This airy prog-psych self-indulgence is merely an elaboration of the back half of that debut--the half I tuned out then but appreciate some now, because, even as self-indulgent elaborations go, the follow-up's a doozy.

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

The likes of "Little White Lies" (lost love as spirit death), "Straight Into a Storm" (found love as rock and roll life), and "Song About a Man" (grandpa) translate perfectly into their long-diddled dialect.

A joyous mishmash.

The beats beat Green Lantern's. And what the finale has to say about Obama is so sane I may just check out van Sertima myself.

This is a new direction? It's not even a halfway decent collection of songs.

They're still true believers in the cleansing if not excoriating power of rock and roll.

Sam Coomes is still disgruntled: with whoever he's sleeping with, with running away, with dystopia itself. But he's catchier about it, and rockier. Maturity comes in many forms.

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

Slowed down and keyboarded up, these tunes make what cares they do bear seem lyrical--carefree.

Grohl is hookier than Nickelback, which is saying something.

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.

Detailing his fidelity on one track, elongating a lap dance on another, he's a decent guy in conceptual command of an aesthetic he invented.

The sound is so scrawny it can wear on you, meaning their 34-minute album is probably two songs too long. But there's only one I'd scrap.

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

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.

I don't like right-wing Christianists either. But as every oppressed teen in the right-wing orbit knows full well, they're not as garbled and simplistic as Armstrong's anthems insist.

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 reason we care is that she retains her spunk, tunes, and way with a phrase. And not only is she talented, she's really cute.

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.

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

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.

Very minor, rather lovely and it rocks.

Actual musicians help -- world-beating T-Pain more than world-weary Julian Casablancas. So do other actors.

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

Clipse's smarts and purity are seductive in the manner of a Jim Thompson novel, even a John Donne meditation.

He takes songs easy without throwing them away, and these were written to hold up their end of that bargain.

It's far from a shock but definitely a disappointment to watch Ms. Trained Pianist survey her branding options and choose the bland card over the brains card.

What lyrics there are mourn absence and loss, and many of the effects are achieved by fabricating and then calibrating dirty sonics both electronic and organic.

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.

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

It's touching on a human level. Noble, even. I didn't think he had it in him.

He knows what reality is. It's giving grief a bad name.

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.

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

There are three good songs on this 11-track artifact, and deeply vapid though the split-personality bit is, the trick of dividing the album into two CDs does leave a 17-minute dance disc that can be played without gastric distress by any purchaser who isn't picky about diva gangstaism or videophone porn.

It's also the rare work of art that captures the dizzy infatuation that is dedicated infant care. All that's missing is a song about sleep deprivation.

Songs are his job, and his reserves are apparently inexhaustible.

Maybe this album is dumb on the surface, though not as much as fools claim. But sure as showbiz it isn't dumb underneath.

In which Eddie Argos of Art Brut (!) and Dyan Valdes of the Blood Arm (?) write second-cousin answer songs to, among others, Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Kanye West, the Mamas and the Papas, Avril Lavigne, and P.D. "Creeque Allies" is a capsule history of the Maquis.

Eminem settles for sensationalism straight up, and, worse still, makes you wonder whether he ever truly knew the difference.

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.

The emotion fueling her pretense is cathartic nevertheless.

Soused at the student union bar, licking Haagen-Dazs off her beau in literally filthy foreplay, she's weird and you're weird. That makes you mates.

It's easy out there for an Oscar winner, but you'd never know it from these entertainment moguls, who pretend or report that they're still investing in mayhem, misogyny and sales careers whose main drawback is that they can get you arrested.

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