Over Thurston and Lee's combustible tunings and Steve's strong beat, they've long since learned to construct memorable tunes track in and track out.

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.

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

He delivers a reprise of the same B part in a more forceful, normal voice: "Why is everything a chore?/I'm too young to be defeated." So far, he isn't. Wish him luck with that riptide.

Here's an album where the marriage ballads are so meaty and convincing that the two exceptionally well-turned breakup songs seem like formal exercises, where a comedy number about fishing and beer would sound just dandy if there weren't so many subtler laughs on the agenda.

Buried at Track 7, the developed rhyme, unkiltered time, unsettling keyboards, and Kenny Garrett sax coda of "Abstractionisms" deliver what the flowery "Caring" and the endless "Do You Dig U?" emphatically do not: the "brand new sound" the finale only brags about.

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.

At his worst, Lewis can be a wise-ass scold. At his best he's a vulnerable master of the humorously ineffable and a tribute to the humanism of a SUNY education and the Lower East Side.

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

Tune and tempo conquer all even if love doesn't, and soon, if you listen up, you'll hear her toss her head and move on, jubilant in her capacity for jubilation.

The fourth and best-by-a-mile folk-rock album from sometime Shin Eric Johnson and his cud-chewing sidemen is a message to the freak-folk from "a broke-legged paint in a herd full of unicorns."

Only after being overwhelmed by the sheer visibility of her warp-speed relaunch did I realize how enjoyable and inescapable her hooks and snatches had turned out to be.

This is literary rock as it should be.

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.

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

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

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).

He's so psyched as he watches those houses get bigger that he invests his excellent story-songs with an emotion their excellent studio versions have never matched--though maybe now they will.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Deprived of Bruce Gilbert's guitar, these fractious lifers return to and improve on their dance-rock '80s.

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

On his third solo album, the thematic focus is intense enough to ignite kindling.

This vibrato-prone romantic is the greatest melodist in contemporary mega-indie.

She has hitched her modest talent to an art-rock wagon she won't outpace anytime soon.