An album that's full of drama, without the tiresome excess.

The Private Press is more solid an album than anyone dared expect from an older, wiser DJ Shadow, and though it won't be televising another revolution, I'd be lying if I said its celebratory pleasure centers didn't communicate directly with my own.

It's the kind of meet-you-halfway hipster party record the Dismemberment Plan has decided they don't want to make anymore.

The more anthemic crowd-pleasing numbers littered throughout The Beginning Stages of the Polyphonic Spree boast such endlessly repeated refrains as "Hey/ It's the Sun/ And it makes me Shine," which lose a lot of their appeal when taken out of their natural habitat (the live setting) and placed between your headphones.

The band's best release since 1996's whoopass and splashy Firewater, though it just sounds like uninviting racket the first time you hear it, and it continues Firewater's preoccupation with alcohol.

Easy to dismiss, smirk at, or even hate on the fist listen, nine out of The Snare's ten tracks are grind-and-pause, semi-sultry pairings of exotic keyboard settings and mid-tech beats that exploit their refrains and come weirdly close to the patterns of 'risqué' after-dinner radio pop circa 1999-present.

The album does offer the listener the high-quality mix CD that techno purists have long suspected Speedy J could deliver.

He's playing the same old marshall vs shady real-or-fake game as usual and its as interesting and complex as it ever was.

The collaborative nature of Sharpen Your Teeth, of course, yields a few missteps.... There are some damn fine moments here, though.

Title TK picks up where Pod left off in 1989, with a jagged sound nowhere near as tight as the Pixies' but a heartfelt enthusiasm for creating music.

The Golden Dove has moments of significant achievement.

As a follow-up, 18 plays it safer than a quadruple-condomed fundamentalist Christian at an abstinence rally.

On a Wire has that glossy veneer that only happens with the help of a good decisive manager, a fast-talking label guy with All The Answers, and that bloodthirsty, all-encompassing desire for yet another Big Tour.

With Maladroit, Weezer has finally given the full punt to the nerd-rock label they sorta invented and always shunned, settling instead for being our generation's version of Cheap Trick.

It seems now that the band is terrified of change, leaving them to rehash what their first five albums accomplished in lieu of actual progression.

Problem is, where Elf Power previously made every extra instrument sound like an essential part of their songs, here, these things just sound like last-minute additions aimed at making one song sound remotely different from the next.

While better than some of their previous releases, One Time Bells still isn't a mind-blowing album.

While the rest of pop culture infantilizes itself with cussing puppets and manufactured bands who willfully dangle like marionettes, Waits is serving up vintage brittle fusion and somehow breaking the law of diminishing returns. [Review of both Alice and Blood Money]

While the rest of pop culture infantilizes itself with cussing puppets and manufactured bands who willfully dangle like marionettes, Waits is serving up vintage brittle fusion and somehow breaking the law of diminishing returns. [Review of both Alice and Blood Money]

It's Loverboy-style lite-metal meets new wave, without the riffs, melodies or red leather pants. In other words, it's Survivor.

The sound and songs of [Aden's fourth album, Topsiders]... are no different whatsoever from the band's already homogenous and uncharacteristic previous three.

Invention has very few peers, in my opinion. Though Schlammpeitzinger's Collected Simple Songs of My Temporary Past and Andrew Coleman's Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt come close, I'm firmly resigned that I'll not hear a more effortlessly charming album this year.

Instead of coming from noise and chaos, they're rooted in pastiche and show business-- especially on their one midtempo song, the 50s pop knockoff "Find Another Girl." Your parents might dig this album as much as you do.

If anemic blues guitar riffs and half-assed attempts at white-boy soul were the only problems with In Our Gun, it might almost be passable.

Every card Gough plays is painfully transparent from the first time you play the disc. It's elementary stuff. It sounds manufactured, refined, cosmetic and sterile; in a word, silicone, like a pair of Badly Sculpted Breast Implants.

An immediately engrossing and challenging collection of moody, evocative songs-- an entire album of "I Want You" and "Watching the Detectives" for those so inclined.

A charming enough document that fans will almost certainly find worthwhile.

What separates the album from previous Luna product is not so much instrumental alterations as the newly unabashed sentimentality of Wareham's lyrics.

Mono and Stereo would be fine records from any musician-- that Westerberg himself is the source makes it all the sweeter.

Complex and dangerously catchy, lyrically sophisticated and provocative, noisy and somehow serene, Wilco's aging new album is simply a masterpiece; it is equally magnificent in headphones, cars and parties.... No one is too good for this album; it is better than all of us.

Feels more like failed market research than soul searching.

An exhilarating but disorienting ride.

While Millions of Brazilians is easily the most potent and concentrated effort Dianogah has yet to produce, it still lacks tonal variation.

All of Denali consists solely of minor-key electric angst, with languid orchestration and predictable compositions. No crescendos, barely discernable choruses, a dearth of interesting dynamics. The result is stagnancy, kids, and it kills the album.

Where [Winners Never Quit] moved with confidence and conviction of purpose, Control wallows in an amoral netherworld of overamped midtempo ballads and incomplete thoughts.

Though some might say that Armstrong's music is powerfully evocative and serene, such people hate music and all its subtle possibilities and intricacies.

Many tracks come off as retreads or ideas freeze-dried for consumption at the trio's famous exhaustingly intense live shows.

Sure, it's nowhere near his incredible run of the seventies, but it is probably his best album since 1992's Harvest Moon.

On succeeds not in spite of its simplicity, but because of it.

An infectious collection of grooves that proudly utilizes the traditional vocabulary of rock and roll.

Perhaps the Blues Explosion is aware of the garage revival, and looking to claim some kind of Neil Young-esque patriarchal crown. If so, the dozen tracks of Plastic Fang fail miserably, giving off the appearance of a 35 year-old accountant hanging around the old frat house on Homecoming weekend.

An album that emerges as a solid, infectious effort, but eventually collapses under its own weight, unable to keep all its stylistic efforts coherent.

Without sufficient songwriting versatility, things can get pretty mediocre and, well, boring by the end of a ten-song album.

A pleasant, atmospheric diversion.

So then, what is the excuse for a typically elitist music nerd to bow to Andrew WK's blistering tard-rock? That's right, folks: there isn't one.

Now, this is a pretty straightforward album, so the possibilities do exhaust themselves somewhat by the end; there's only so much that can be done with this sort of visceral, no-frills rock.

By co-opting and debasing punk-disco's vitality and sincerity and thereby rendering the style accessible to the botox-and-bulimia set, Jackson betrays the visions of those whose ecstatically powerful music he lavishly degrades.

Their best album to date-- a bold claim to the upper echelon of rock.

There's invention and heart in these tunes, and the range is impressive.

The beats are just fine, but they lack the risk or innovation that could potentially make them truly engaging.

The album is about a quarter filler, but the songs that hit on Too Late to Die Young make the tedium worth sitting out.

A band that displays a fine grasp of orchestral pop and baroque studio flourishes on some tracks should be delivering something better than Souljacker.

While Rap-Metal 101 drums bang away in the background, the basslines are replaced by chugging guitar riffs reminiscent of your high school hardcore band. What remains, though, is the exceptional quality of Pharrell's voice, which, unlike the bass sound, doesn't lose its intensity due to repeated radio exposure.

Although its best moments don't reach quite the altitudes of his prior releases, Skyscraper National Park, as a whole, is the most complete and coherent album in Hayden's catalog, a delightful listen from track one through track eleven.

All the clichés from French pop and house music collected in one shiny package.

Buzzkunst doesn't exactly offer any revelatory music, but it certainly is good, sometimes even great.

Buffalo Daughter produce exceptional-sounding tracks that cover a wide spectrum of genres, texture and mood; they perform well on a variety of instruments, and their voices blend nicely most of the time. But they don't write great songs-- too often, they don't even write good ones.

In the process of recording another incredible album, he's discovered that light is most visible when it's flickering alone in the dark.

Slightly-too-frequent derivative moments can be mostly forgiven thanks to heaping helpings of youthful earnestness.

Walking with Thee is neither an album of triumph nor of disappointment.

The good stuff aside, if hard whiskey, hard women and aboveground pools aren't your thing-- and I would imagine not-- it's tough to recommend Lucky 7.

But the thing is, somewhere between all the vamping and forced attempts at being hip and irreverent, they found the time to write and record a fine record.

Dense, beautiful, intricate, haunting, explosive, and dangerous, this is everything rock music aspires to be: intense, incredible songs arranged perfectly and performed with skill and passion.

Jump Leads has a few more slip-ups than its immediate predecessor, A Touch of Cloth, but I'd like to think they result from the addition of a vocalist (Steve Edwards of Presence) rather than being an indication of pending obsolescence.

It's Broder's careful balancing act between the traditional and the abnormal that makes his music so interesting.

From Here On In is inches away from being a success. It's just that it's weighed down by so many repetitive textures and songs that fail to impact.

Lacking any dynamism, complexity, or invention, the relentless drone of most of these tracks is a shallow, reactionary statement to the progress of the post-rock genre, and completely unedifying.

Is a Woman is a disappointment.

Monkey comes off resembling either a padded greatest-hits comp or an "inspired by" soundtrack for a non-existent movie. What it certainly isn't is a DJ mix where previously hidden links between seemingly unrelated songs are unearthed through the ancient art of juxtaposition.

Beautysleep's weakness is that so many songs are pretty instead of awe-inspiring-- that she gives us only a little greatness.

The majority of the album's highlights come courtesy of the songwriting tandem of Bracy and Hoffman, whose maturity as songsmiths is notable-- this record is consistently concise, punchy and poignant.

While some will complain about Boards of Canada's failure to cover new territory, the rest of us will delight in what we see as a very accomplished album packed with great music.

It's not a bad album by most standards-- in fact it's pretty good at points-- but in the end slides into a mire of adequacy after generating high expectations early on.

It's surprising to see how well Holes in the Wall holds up under the weight of its own hype.

Though thoroughly enjoyable, the album isn't always riveting, either, and occasionally the attention does stray.

There are certain things they do very well, yet they don't seem to be content with being pigeonholed as one-dimensional. Unfortunately, one-dimensional is about the only thing they can pull off convincingly.

You've got your acoustic guitar base, your occasional slide guitar fill, your Dylan-esque organ, your chug-a-lug drums, and your mildly catchy melodies. It would be offensive if it wasn't so obvious that Cracker doesn't aspire to much more than this sort of rustic middle-America mediocrity act.

It's the first good 2002 album I've heard.

Taking into account the sometimes spotty songwriting and its overtly dreamy similarities to Mojave 3 (like if they'd had a back massage and 1200mg's of Valium), there isn't much to save it from solo slump status.

Their music,... while pretending to be candy-coated pop-rock, shares all of emo's key indicators, including melodramatic vocal delivery, seamless production, and shameless overambition.

Working outside of the framework of the pop song, Merritt is left to explore more exotic sound sources and song structures. Unfortunately, without that framework, these elements often fail to amount to anything significant, providing somewhat interesting, meandering background music, but little more.

The cleverness, technical mastery and ping-pong stereo effects are all there in spades, but this time they're all much more mellow than you'd think. Listen right and you'll hardly notice them, because you'll be wrapped up by the thing I initially completely missed-- some of these tracks are just plain lovely as songs.

Kittenz and Thee Glitz is Housecat watered down by trivia and outside egos.

There's lots of good stuff on Age of the Sun. It's just that sometimes, there's a bit too much of it.

While the band has a very developed sense of texture and sound, though, they rather desperately need to work on changing things up a bit more with regard to the songs themselves.

Dead Media works on occasion, but primarily when Hefner revert to the traditional pop trio format of bass, guitar, drums.

Lyrics aside, there's nothing distinctly unappealing or half-assed about this album.... It just feels awfully familiar.

Love Is Here isn't bad, and its prospect for radio play is far more appealing than, say, Train. The four just don't have the depth of their admitted influences.

It's the most solid Wu album in years.

AOI:Bionix takes a belt sander to hip-hop's rougher edges, resulting in refinement, sophistication and undeniable accessibility.

A shockingly insightful and resonant look at the workings of a musician generally more given to hiding behind absurdly twisted turns of musical phrase than letting us in on the inner-workings of his mind.

While some moments are absolutely stellar, I Might Be Wrong is only a shadow of what a Radiohead live album could have been.

Cold House takes a fantastic batch of songs and intelligently mixes in cutting edge electronic elements a la Autechre and Nobukazu Takemura, a couple of west coast underground hip-hop artists, and some delicate backing arrangements, and creates one of the most innovative releases of the past year.

Party Music is an effort both entertaining and politically motivating, a feat which many have attempted but few have successfully pulled off.

It's all pretty silly stuff, but if nothing else, it manages to establish Flickerstick as a frontrunner for the Varsity Blues II soundtrack.

My biggest gripe about Lovage is that it finds a number of clearly talented artists constructing the same song continually without variation.

There's not a bad song to be found anywhere on this disc, and it remains engaging for nearly its entire duration, only falling into the background in a few isolated spots.

The Avalanches have managed to build a totally unique context for all these sounds, while still allowing each to retain its own distinct flavor. As a result, Since I Left You sounds like nothing else.