There are too many special effects surrounding the messages-- Craig B's penchant for preadolescent vocals included.

In terms of a debut record-- and especially given the weight of expectation placed on her to deliver something special-- Alright, Still isnâ??t anything else but a fantastic success.

If Some Loud Thunder isn't as consistent as the debut, it's an adequate follow-up that contains a handful of fantastic songs, a handful of uneven ones, and a handful of duds.

Maybe some thought Busdriver sounded self-satisfied before, but he used to sound one step ahead of the listener instead of running to catch up.

Excusing the album's inherent garishness, 666 expands Hella's core sound to new heights that, although at times hard to stomach, finds the band both at their most playful and regimented.

A slippery, engrossingly genreless take on the old theme of desolation in the city.

While Cryptograms presents its own obstacles, it's easily enjoyed as a whole. Memorable melodies and an awkward, charismatic narrator are often peeking from behind the dissonance-laden mists that self-consciously choke them.

For all the possibilities suggested by their debut album, Clinic are threatening to become the sort of rock band of which you only really need to own one album, and that album remains Internal Wrangler.

Deerhoof, an indie band who have released plenty of discombobulated pop and no wave albums, have lately turned toward accessible, foot-stomping rock. It worked on The Runners Four, but it works better and quicker on their new album, Friend Opportunity.

The results are cohesive almost by default, considering how monochromatic the bulk of the disc comes off. Yet monochrome by design isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially when you're out to challenge rather than entertain.

Wincing the Night Away is a lovely and well-executed album and-- for the first time in the band's career-- nothing more.

An astonishingly good late-period record from Of Montreal that's as uncomfortably savage in its depiction of breakup psychology as it is relentlessly catchy.

Friend and Foe follows through on the potential of their unique sound, proving their wildly great debut was no fluke.

F&M's coy pose comes off as somehow original.

Kind-hearted and disarmingly earnest, Doiron's music remains as resistant to curmudgeonly critique as it is to over-exuberant hype.

If their debut explored the space within, the Earlies' latest, The Enemy Chorus, peers into the void of the final frontier, with a similar kitchen-sink approach and more of the krautrock sprawl that characterized early singles like "Morning Wonder".

And though In Stormy Nights-- with its numerous false leads, over-the-top presentation and undisguised self-indulgence-- can hardly be said to be a perfect work, one has to admire and celebrate Ghost's determination never to step in the same river twice.

Hersh produces the record herself, and she doesn't do her compositions any favors.... Still, her voice has that edgy intimacy it's always had.

Over the course of the record, the resonance of the melodies gradually overrides the initially distracting phrasing, revealing a sometimes exquisite folk-rock album.

Their influences are all immediately recognizable and their songs all hummably predictable, and yet their Merge debut, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On, reveals the band to be confidently inventive and assured in their collective identity.

Is Rob in a Mellow Mood occasionally predictable? Sure, but there's nothing promised here that isn't delivered on, no premise underachieved.

The record fits snugly into a certain nameless musical genre that can be found in martini bars and designer-label boutiques the world over, a mish-mash of recognizable sounds and influences that's enjoyable but ultimately hollow.

Everything about this album is half-assed: From the bafflingly bare packaging to the at-times miserable mix, True Magic is a mess.

More than Illmatic, it represents the real Nas-- not the ideal-- the MC with all the skill, all the rhymes, and all the insight who sabotaged himself with bad decisions.

While More Fish is far from worthless, it's still a diluted product.

Each track offers something worthwhile, yet none raises any question as to why it ended up here.

Throughout The Inspiration, Jeezy shows a muddled desire to transcend the clichés he helped create, to create further complexity without ever resolving it.

One step forward, three steps sideways, one step back, The Sweet Escape continues in Stefani's proud tradition of being caught somewhere between the vanguard and the insipid.

In Ciara's effort to prove herself a diva, her second album flails, bloated with spoken-word interludes and boilerplate pop & b that obscures some truly good songs.

An album that's sonically deep, dark, and one of 2006's finest.

Raised in a library of music and having already dissected his influences, Rollie takes confident first steps as Cadence Weapon.

He's grown up, alright. With the energy Jay brings to most of these tracks, you'd think 30 was the new 60.

Like the best work of its participants, Beast Moans is no pornographer's rubdown; it delivers on its tease.

Love is turning everyone into an audiophile, then, which means it's making younger people a little older. And it's also a mashup remix, which means it's making older people a little younger. They were just a pop band, yes, but if anyone can bring all these music fans together under one tent, it's the Beatles. Which is what Love is ultimately all about.

The end product, neatly compartmentalized into three style-segregated discs, is about as perfect a summary of Waits' appeal as can be found on the open market, a shadow greatest hits that offers testimony to his unique and diverse talents without recycling any of his album material.

What the album actually does is present a calming looseness-- nothing shocking or obscure, and better for it.

By the last two discs, the songwriter finds more success in being less reverent.

Disbanded in their prime before they grew stale or flat, they still feel pregnant with promise, tantalizingly unfinished; like an actor cut down in youth, they've remained an irresistible lure to the imagination of pop romantics ever since.

The people who hear this record will split into two crowds: The ones who think it's silly and precious, and the ones who, once they hear it, won't be able to live without it.

While the band once pushed forward with a strength that seemed to surprise even them, So Divided ultimately feels scattered and flaccid.

As rap music, The Doctor’s Advocate is good; as tangled psychodrama, it's better.

Whenever Rice risks truly touching us emotionally-- say, when he's asking a former lover, "Do you brush your teeth before you kiss?" on "Accidental Babies"-- he undercuts himself with go-nowhere melodies and formulaic arrangements.

It's difficult to slag a folk album for being unoriginal, but the letdown here is that Milkwhite Sheets sounds uninspired at a time when so many musicians are digging treasure from the same ancient, mist-shrouded hills.

Get Evens is as quiet and pretty as its predecessor, but the effortless ease is gone, replaced by a sort of busy anxiety.

A vibrant living record whose nervy, protean spirit pushes it miles beyond mere alt-rock radio nostalgia.

For every moment that Sov's supreme wit and impeccable cadence is fitfully showcased on Public Warning!, there is a moment when her gifts are squandered amidst anxious beats that try to compete with her huge personality.

Pretty Little Head is better than her debut. It's less showy, more confident, tighter, lacking antics-- it's confounding stylistically, just as her debut was, but less an act of throwing ideas at the wall.

Nothing here sounds like it's been fully thought out or planned, and Songbird sounds all the better for it.

Strangely, all the missing elements and nostalgia-grabs that make the first half of Endless Wire such a sad listen organize themselves into a form that is faintly exciting for the second part.

Despite a couple brief dull spots, the ingredients are so carefully selected and masterfully performed that the collection creates a pretty endlessness, existing at its best as one long take of dark-n-stormy post-rock.

The album's overall flow and structure is decidedly disjointed, with a scattering of tiny, demo-quality tracks adding virtually nothing to the record.

The group is a conglomeration of influences that, while pleasant enough, doesn't rise above being anything more than a mixing board of cool-sounding favorites.

While the album isn't arranged chronologically, listening to it as such reveals the series of intuitive leaps between lo-fi bedroom folk that emphasized monotonous gloom and cacophonous samples to comparatively laid-back country biased toward majestic arrangements and electronic beats.

Do they embarrass themselves? Not in the least. But they do raise the question of why this album even needs to be heard outside the band themselves, and why it should be in stores.

While +/- are sharp songwriters and capable mimics, they've gone through one more transformation as a band without arriving at a destination. That said, they remain a step ahead just by their modest ambitions, impulsively coloring and pushing their songs past the comfort level, always adding some detail to keep the listener's interest.

Calamity shows Cohen struggling to balance his twee pop tendencies with experimentation, the same thing Deerhoof mastered on The Runners Four.

Born is his blandest, most non-descript offering yet. Even the so-so Have You Fed the Fish? seems like a masterpiece in comparison to the downtrodden piano banalities that slosh all over this latest nadir.

It's an overwhelmingly agreeable record, if one that's not always gripping.

The sheer size of Hello Everything's scope dictates it's a bit of a sprawling beast, more a collection of moments than a cohesive record. Nonetheless, it's a consistently enthralling listen.

Surrounded by young artists, it's remarkable how well Jansch avoids buying into his myth. The kids add spirit without the avant tendencies of their regular gigs, and Jansch seems rightfully at ease and assured with this new band.

The heavier quick-change songs push several different buttons at unexpected moments, but the more straightforward songs, the ones that should glue the record together, flounder.

Roots and Crowns is bluesy and soulful without reverting to revivalist schtick, and experimental without relying on blind cut-and-pasting.

Micah P. Hinson and the Opera Circuit covers more ground and isn't as unilaterally melancholy as we're used to, though the record contains some of his best work.

While Jurado's records often alternate between vanishing ballads and melancholy pop-rockers, Shadow revolves entirely around the former-- the songs are unstintingly slow, delicate, and sparse to the brink of abstraction.

Normal Happiness is a slightly-above-mediocre release from an artist who never dared to be mediocre; just inconsistent.

What's surprising is that The Tragic Treasury turns out to be the most consistently enjoyable record Merritt has released this century.

McCaughan's confidence, in his talents and his songs, is readily apparent throughout this album, and the result is his best non-Superchunk work to date.

It's a torn and somewhat confused record, but a more decisive one wouldn't have suited them or their subject matter.

Harness doesn't deliver many surprises or follow through on the promise of the debut; it simply refines the sounds they explored and digs its heels in a little deeper.

The Kooks take elements from their up-and-coming peers and a name from Hunky Dory, achieving an adolescent universality that's at once their strongest pitch and greatest failing.

The Akrons' striking group harmonies are at a greater premium here than before, but the grainy, more intimate production retains a sense of communal participation.

Although The Information contains some of his most aware, intriguing lyrical head-scratchers yet, the familiar musical settings are something of a letdown from an artist famous for complete reinvention.

Not fully realizing where their strengths and weaknesses lie makes Sam's Town, despite the drastic makeover, roughly equivalent to Hot Fuss, a mediocre album surrounding a few towering singles.

[Finn] not only has a commanding, rousing voice but he also says something worth hearing, displaying gifts for both scope and depth that are all too rare in contemporary rock-- indie or mainstream.

We know that that the DFA can do dynamic mutation as well as anyone, but Chapter Two reveals that it's their quest to become pioneers of the hypnotic groove that is the more seductive.

The band is, if anything, more confident than ever, but the sound's grandiosity too easily verges on melodrama, a too-bold-to-be-believable misery.

Winsomely balancing frivolity and gravity, the Decemberists assemble an oddball menagerie of the usual rogues and rascals, soldiers and criminals, lovers and baby butchers-- but they've got a lot more tricks up their sleeves than previous albums had hinted.

Olé! Tarantula isn't his best solo record, but it's in the top tier, and after all these years that's certainly something.

Humble and resigned to a fault.

After Run to Ruin, it's difficult to hear Nastasia pull back to a songwriter-with-guitar style.

The chemistry has changed, the music is harder, the frustration's more palable, and you can hear that this is some kind of a make-or-break moment. And this time they made it-- just.

Listening to Joe endlessly bombard the listener with rejiggered cliches and breathless streams of imagery and other examples of his lyrical craft, it sounds less like skillful, effortless writing and more like showy, over-considered craftwork.

Bands like Mazzy Star, Galaxie 500, Spiritualized, and Slowdive will come to mind, but this is neither pastiche nor homage.

For the kind of soul-caressing folk bobbins Adem aspires to deliver, go with Grizzly Bear.

Most listeners with a soft spot for those early-90s Lemonheads records will get a good spin out of The Lemonheads.

Even more streamlined, pop-minded, and high-spirited than their 2004 self-titled debut, it's as if they're single-mindedly attempting to depose the world's problems with a rigorous dance and good times regimen.

Dreamt for Light Years proves less targeted than 2001's It's a Wonderful Life, but this is a check in the plus column: Linkous sounds best when he's warring with structure and sound, when his songs sound unsettled.

etric's clunky riffage and hi-hat beats are replaced by simple piano figures and subtle adornments (strings, feedback, breathing organ) that draw out Haines' most stirring vocal performances to date, and the muted milieu highlights her natural, sensuous whisper, lending a sympathetic thrust to these broken-down anthems for a thirtysomething girl.

When these scientists hit on the right formula of slow-burning anticipation, the bombast that follows has the profundity of a drug-induced epiphany. Previous Wolf Eyes records have struck that magic balance during individual songs or sides, but none have stretched it over an album's length like Human Animal.

Release Therapy is probably Luda's best album since Back for the First Time, but it's not like that's saying much.

Any live show will inevitably have crests and valleys, but besides these specific performances, Okonokos disappoints on a more general level: It too seldom sounds like an actual live album.

This album should alienate virtually everyone who's ever been a Shadow fan.

Even when Dunckel stays closer to type, here he usually relies on unremarkable downtempo beats to support unfortunate space-hippie mewlings.

There's little here that couldn't have been on previous albums; the difference is what's gone missing: the in-your-face homosexuality of Rough Trade debut The Smell of Our Own, the perverse grandiosity of 2004's Mississauga Goddam.

Most sad sack numbers here wallow in a shallow sense of self-pity.

Unlike Oldham's best work, The Letting Go doesn't pull you into its own emotional world; it doesn't ask much, and you're free to take as much from it as you'd like.

Nuclear Daydream sounds placeless, as if striving for universality. At times the music sounds like it could actually achieve that lofty goal; at times it just sounds blanched, drifting into a kind of anonymity.

Where Fiasco misses classic status is his sonic approach.