With Body Talk, Robyn ups the ante for pop stars across the radio dial and raises her own chances of appearing on yours. And for all her three-album talk, she never forgets that cardinal rule of showmanship: Always leave them wanting more.

With his music and persona both marked by a flawed honesty, Kanye's man-myth dichotomy is at once modern and truly classic.

Think of Sports, then, as a freshly taken Polaroid with a lit cigarette stuck straight in the middle of it-- a burning hole bridging the distance between then and right now.

Ironically, if there is one thing holding these songs back, it's Lyrics Born himself. Shimura spits sparingly, often just to shake a little life into the imaginary crowd once the groove settles.

More than a stocking stuffer but less than an idol, Rihanna has grown into one of the most reliable pop stars we've got.

Heart Ache suggests a sense of ambition and movement grander than that of any Jesu LP. Dethroned, meanwhile, suggests a deliberate move toward the middle, with relatively compact song structures and dynamic and textural variety. If Broadrick can unite those ideas into one 40-minute Jesu blast, this band might finally have its full-length masterpiece.

he point is that there are lots of people who haven't yet had the occasion to discover Elliott Smith, and ultimately this gives them a chance to scratch away at the bittersweet reality of his work, at how conflicted he sounded, at how bitterly unresolved his career remains, and how every single song still somehow feels like both a confection and a dagger.

Codename: Rondo sounds like two people doing the least amount of work possible before something can be considered a "song."

Stereolab's last effort was among the most concise and tightly focused of the band's career, distilling their baroque, buzzing aesthetic into breathless, three-minute pop songs. Not Music mostly echoes that change, but also sprawls like vintage Stereolab when it needs to.

New Chain, with it's gorgeous smattering of vivid synth patterns, is "Despicable Dogs" reupholstered: It still feels like a sunrise bike ride with a head full of weed, but this time in full-blown technicolor.

Mostly, though, the shock of Funeral Mariachi is that it's the friendliest record in their catalogue. It doesn't have the twitching intensity of a lot of their other work--that's both an asset and a deficit--but they couldn't have made a sweeter farewell.

To some extent, WYWH can get by on vibe, but really, a listener can do much better, even without going further back into the Concretes catalog.

While Violens may know their sonic touchstones inside and out, they're better sticking to the haircut-obsessed sounds showcased on Amoral's standouts.

There isn't a lot left on Nothing, apart from these faint reminders, to indicate that these two guys were the same pair who once revolutionized the sound of hip-hop.

With few exceptions, Small Craft on a Milk Sea's 15 songs fall roughly into one of two categories: ambient and active.

Sidewalks often inflates the worst attributes of Matt & Kim's big sound (overly simplistic lyrics, crude synth melodies, shouty singing) and smothers much of its sugar-rush energy and joyously defiant attitude in studio flourishes.

Whether bellowed by Philip Cope or sung with witchy intensity by Laura Pleasants, just about every song has a chorus that immediately stamps itself on your brain. In that sense, Spiral Shadow is damn near a pop album.

While The Fool doesn't fully capture their brain-melded performances, it's a worthy simulacrum.

North is definitely Hyperdub's most pop-friendly release, but it's also one of its most conservative-- not a bad thing, just an interesting one given the importance label integrity plays in the electronic dance music world.

The particulars of the feelings evoked here will vary from one set of ears to another, but above all, Knoxville offers an opportunity to lose yourself in a rush of highly detailed and overpowering sound. And the spaces it builds come across as beautiful and celebratory, no matter how crazy things get.

Given the history he's forged with them and Ponytail, Wong likely won't sit still for long, and even the most rigid parts of Infinite Love suggest he's got a lot more ideas to draw on.

It's a good album, and without the pressure of making it under the Roxy Music name, Ferry has made a confident and remarkably fresh-sounding record simply by doing what he's done best for over three decades.

Incidentally, this is what the title Innundir Skinni translates to loosely in English-- "under the skin"-- an apt description for Arnalds' gentle, peculiar and powerful music itself.

Down There is less accessible than latter-day Animal Collective and harder to wrap your head around, but it isn't a callback to the more difficult sound that marked the band early on.

As is the case on most of the album, Hill's distorted vocals can sometimes seem like an afterthought, but perhaps they are intended to be just one of the many ingredients squashed into the album's vibrant mixture, to be heard as one final act of creation-through-destruction.

His latest album, a collaboration with the saxophonist Gilad Atzmon and the violinist Ros Stephen, is again evasive, seeming at once defiantly old-fashioned and defiantly quirky.

With that title, Songs for Singles practically announces itself as a stopgap release, a breather after the breakthrough. If it doesn't shake the earth the way Meanderthal did, it's not really supposed to. But the EP does show that this band remains in fine working condition, and another full-on album from these guys would be a welcome thing indeed. Until then, this will do just fine.

That stuff was fun on their debut, 2002's Thought for Food, but today those easy jokes seem like a waste of their skills. Better to seek out the greater mystery of those weird and splendiferous sounds, and those voices that seem so close and so unknowable in the same breath.