This slightly progger and grander follow-up bypasses such corny stuff until Track 8 begins a closing sequence of five lyrics-enhanced lite-jazzish tracks.

Only one thing's certain -- his songwriting.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The clincher is how gracefully this klutz skates over the oddly rolling beats of J Dilla, Jake One and the Metal Fingered Villain... Doom (ellipsis in original).

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

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.

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

It's Buenos Aires' Gaby Kerpel without irony, maybe even Barcelona's Manu Chao without hooks -- ecstatic yes, escapist no.

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.

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.

It defines vicinity so broadly that you'll also find Beiderbecke and Reinhardt, two Ellington tunes, songs by a jazz critic and Ed Sullivan's bandleader.

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

Muffling their excellent knowledge of English in jangle and reverb, four theoretical nerds demonstrate why a band is better than grad school.

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

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.

Elegiac rather than dancey, but elegiac about the preconditions of the dance, it states, sustains, and varies a bracing mood. It even has an ending.

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]