Left to his own devices here, Marr has penned vague lyrics and delivered them in a monotone, coupled with uninspired melodies that only underline the singer's limitations.

Overall, Loose Fur is kinda interesting, especially as a historical document, but it's not much more than that.

This isn't music about angst or ego, hooks or licks, or lyrics we've heard before.

The conversational rawness that drove the previous albums is gone, and the band loses something as a result.

Hate is a beautifully gilded record, thoroughly nice and thoroughly listenable, and a mark higher than a lot of pop music with lofty intentions, but it doesn't move you to extremes.

One Bedroom does tend to lag in parts, perhaps lost in the legacy of the band that created it, but in the end it comes off as an unified organic being, both necessary and pleasant.

One problem: Common is an MC, not a musician. Which makes it difficult for him to achieve his lofty goals. Mostly he fails.

Bobby Gillespie and company come up short here.

With Phrenology, The Roots have finally made an album that lives up to their potential.

What makes Quality worth it is exactly what dragged down Train of Thought -- the slow and syrupy songs.

Sticking to a formula -- a formula that works for them -- the band sounds fiercer than ever on Riot Act.

While these are accomplished musicians distilling their favorite musical influences, they fail to transcend those influences.

Cash might surprise with his choice of covers, but in nearly all of his selections, he locates some personal meaning, or introduces new emotional elements.

Let's face it, no one else today is making music as cool and original as that of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

The music here combines the scrappy, psychedelic folk of Hour of Bewilderbeast with the more melodic and sentimental "About a Boy" soundtrack.

Yanqui U.X.O. is the work of a band that has finally become confident in its popularity and influence.

The album coheres; it's a full body of work intended to be heard holistically, not simply as a collection of songs. But it takes some work. You must be an active listener to appreciate it fully.

A solid album, turgid and at times stormy.

In the midst of its 14 tracks, there are a couple that, if taken on their own, would qualify as throwaways. But the way the album should be heard, as a whole, each piece works with the others.

Like a night taxi ride along a broad, lighted, skyscraper-lined city street, Happyness, the band's latest, feels wondrous, daring and slightly dangerous.

Cruelty Without Beauty is the sound of Soft Cell reclaiming the musical territory they staked out in their 1981 hit debut, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, offering up hooky, dancefloor-oriented synthetic soul, now jacked up into a higher gear for the clublands of the new millennium.

The album's tone and tunes and imagery and such are all still on the same haunted-house/boat-of-the-dead kinda kick they've kicked out on their three previous, numerically-titled jams.

Hot Hot Heat's compelling energy, original hooks and rhythms, and quirky, sometimes indiscernible lyrics combine to make Make Up the Breakdown one of the most energetic and enjoyable listens of the year.

Though it's not quite the folk-pop album that some post-Head Music interviews with Anderson had foreshadowed, the ballads do outweigh the rockers, which puts the lyrics in the spotlight, for better and for worse.

Nextdoorland is one of the rarest of things: a reunion album that captures the spirit of what made the band special in the first place.

Sea Change not only signals a pinnacle in his career but may just be remembered, in an environment fueled by accelerating cycles of disposable culture, as one of this young decade's best records.

The songwriting is self-assured and thoughtful; the album is unified as a pastiche of romantic musings.

His best work since 1997's Built to Spill album, Perfect From Now On.

There are no real shocks or surprises on this album; instead a number of more understated delights come through.

Buried at the 11th track on the compact disc, "Satisfaction" makes everything else on this album seem better by its presence. It's the one true standout cut, giving the album a jewel in the glittering, if ersatz, moving-outta-the-ghetto hip-hop-princess crown that Eve places on her own "bombshell" brow.

It recalls U2's The Joshua Tree, and not just for its stunning guitar work but for its wild passion and spiraling tension-and-release dynamics.

This is a rare record that simply responds to the quiet masses who maybe feel just a bit to much too often, and offers them a soothing, downbeat source of comfort without preaching or apology.

The instant pop buzz Pulp have concocted in the past is largely missing, but each listen reveals another layer, another level, another reason to love it. Highly recommended.

Eternal Youth is broad and ambitious. Merritt's singing is missing; his baritone would have added a male perspective, not to mention an added playfulness. But Gonson suffices.

Blacklisted proves that Case's musicianship has evolved alongside her songwriting skills.

Whether they're shrieking or pleading, dancing or shivering, they're always exuding an intensity that never fails to find a way to hit you hard, really hard.

Moonlight, which grows more and more likeable with repeated listens, is Spoon's strongest effort yet, topping 2001's Girls Can Tell and even 1998's A Series of Sneaks.

All of One Beat is strung loosely together by a common plea: for awareness, for understanding, and, most of all, for holding onto hope.

Throughout the album's dozen tracks, the sentiment Lightbody conjures evokes real pain and real beauty.

It is, in such, truly great, or truly arrogant, or truly conceited, or truly preposterous, or truly confused, or truly bemused, or truly profound, or truly magnificent. Or maybe all of these things. At once. Or at times.

The strength Moorer has shown from first album to second album and finally to this genre-leaping experiment in self-recreation is enough to not only merit a listen, but to make sure we pay attention to the fourth album when it arrives.

Daybreaker bears all the strengths and beauty of the earlier Orton CDs, but it also shows some growth.

Like all his best work, the whole of The Rising is better than the sum of its individual songs.

It's hard to figure out exactly why everybody is so excited about this record.... There is something there to like -- plenty, in fact. But it is also disjointed and sometimes maddening.

While appreciating Yoshimi for its merits poses little problem, actually enjoying it is more difficult.

Their sound is dirty and raw, sexy and wrong.

The chaff-to-wheat ratio remains distressingly unbalanced on Torino.

Written with some basic, inviting rock structures, the album replaces the hyper energy and angst of older material with slowed-down, complex textures and delicate grooves -- but still rocks out intermittently.

[A] tired, uninspired collection of music and songs.

The Last Broadcast is big, intelligent, irony-free music that demands an open mind -- and rewards the heart quite well. Magnificent.

The Private Press is full of rollicking beats, spectral tone colors, and enough subtle textures and supple surfaces to fill a textile warehouse.

There's a lot of empty space in these songs, the better to focus on Kim and Kelley's up-front vocal harmonies and classically off-kilter lyrical ideas.

Their new pop direction finds them drifting about, directionless as opposed to eclectic.

Maladroit is the emo equivalent of '70s arena rock -- a bracingly cocky attitude that tag-teams with its partner, navel-gazing.

TA have now officially run out of original ideas.

With About a Boy, Badly Drawn boy has grown up.

Ultimately, I suspect Costello non-devotees will find that too much effort is required to get into these songs and there may not be sufficient emotional payoff to justify the investment.

Lacking the startling mark of cool-hearted covermongers such as Cat Power and Mark Kozelek, this is still an easeful album of mostly slow-blooded tunes.

YHF is a fierce record.

The set works like a spun-up set of carefully collated cuts, sequenced with stuck-tape-over-the-tabs-in-the-corners mix-tape affection that makes the whole seem like a sticky-sentimented sentimental love letter to the boys' record collections.

It's not bad, it's just so goddamn mediocre.

If you thought Mooney Suzuki's Estrus debut, People Get Ready, rocked, Electric Sweat will blow you away.

It's simultaneously refreshing and amusing. And it rocks hard.

The band is never so consumed by brainy showmanship that they forget to rock -- this album kicks harder in places than Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath ever did, or The Strokes ever will.

Coming up in the discothèque all disco/not-disco, Jackson's perspicacious hindsight gazes back to what was winning back in the day, now dragging it into the drag-and-drop to create pro-tooled playlist pop, its parts glued together into a seamless, shiny, mirroring whole.

The Super Furries have indulgently embraced a collision of musical elements; what we hear is a jarring, yet surprisingly seamless, mix of sounds and exceptional songwriting.... Their best work to date.

More than just a sick joke, Souljacker is a rocking, thought-provoking journey.

Whatever the lyrical content, though, the pleasures of N*E*R*D ultimately come down to their exhilarating production, flush with the breathless energy of rock and starry-eyed with the psychedelic potential of the studio.

An album that is both emotionally powerful and truly beautiful.

While the pair probably had a lot of fun making the record, unfortunately, it isn't the most enjoyable listen.

A work of thematic and dramatic constancy.

Walking With Thee isn't a rehashing of last year's Internal Wrangler; it's actually an inferior version of it.

Lyrically, I suspect that part of the problem is rust, while part of the problem is age — a song about bumping into an ex-girlfriend, then coming home to tell the wife about it ("Jane Allen") just doesn't stick to the ribs, while the more overtly political numbers feel heavy-handed and preachy.

Their finest record to date and the most blistering, blissful album to be released by anyone in years.

His sound, gender-neutral swooning folk dressed in quirky analog jazz keyboards, would fit nicely on a mix tape alongside The Smiths and Nick Drake.

In the future the restless, insecure South-men may perhaps harness their broad tastes into a more cogent sound, but From Here On In finds them a well-produced but overly expansive mess.

Lounge-rock for world-weary sophisticates.

Fans of the group's previous recordings may have trouble accepting the fact that Lost in Revelry doesn't have the high melodic consistency of We're All in This Alone.

In stark contrast to most Nashville and alt.country products, even when the words let it down, Barricades & Brickwalls is carried by its classic sound.

One of the best, if not the best, of the Brooklyn-based, Gang of Four-worshipping lot.

An eclectic, highly promising debut.

Just like an album of guitar solos, an album of battling fancy-fingered trick-pony turntablism is an utterly artless endeavor.

What's particularly exciting about this release is the second compact disc, which features an animation by Katsura Moshino, adding a bizarre visual narrative to Takemura's rich audio playground.

The album is surprisingly consistent despite its unbalanced components.

It's always pretty, but overall, the allure is almost meretricious, considering four or five songs provoke nothing beyond a pleasant ambivalence.

All you can really do is sit back and politely applaud.

Doss on his own delivers a more controlled sound that recognizes quality over quantity without falling off the deep end of electro-dabbling, a fault that plagued some of OTC's later recordings. The result is clear, concise and powerful.

Although much of the record re-verses and re-crafts melodies in the same vein, there are a few gems that can't be missed.

Rock Steady certainly isn't that good, and at times it's rather bad (usually when Ocasek gets a bit Cars). But it does have its moments, most of which come at the hands of [co-producer Nellee] Hooper...

Overall, the melodies are so tight they seem vacuum-packed, and the album delivers a platter of faultless rock songs.

As an EP, the premise of Lovage would flourish.

If you know the Divine Comedy's previous work, it's hard to imagine how Regeneration could disappoint; if they're new to you and you're a fan of literate, orchestrated pop music, give it a try.

Luckily, the album has an easy-going air that lifts it out of the realm of smart-guy assemblage and into sexy, summery territories.

This is pop music pushing the boundaries of what pop music should be, without having to resort to overproduced and mass-marketed gloss.

It's magical and mysterious, compelling and complex.

Alive to Every Smile finds TBS swanning through a set of soft-pop numbers giddy with the misty misery of melancholy and coated with the softest frostings of studio icing-sugar.

Musically, The Argument represents Fugazi's best collection of songs from their 13-year career.

True, only "60 Miles an Hour" sounds like a candidate for New Order's pantheon of hallowed singles; still, Get Ready might be the group's most consistent album from top to bottom.