Filled with the sort of aggressive, testosterone-fueled rage that has helped make DMX the Henry Rollins of hardcore hip-hop.

The dearth of memorable melodies ruins the once-successful formula.

Ultimately, the four-on-the-floor rhythm and riffing quickly become repetitive, blunting Get Ready's impact.

Feminist Sweepstakes does occasionally stumble.

A smart, sensitive blend of head and heart.

Casablancas is all old-school rocker in the Mick Jagger/Chris Robinson mold -- an ugly/pretty boy out to beg, borrow and bleed for even prettier women while acting like nothing ever satisfies.

It's not inappropriate to think of Ten New Songs as an audio book of poetry with musical accompaniment.

Without resorting to sappy new age or yuppie lounge cliches, Hebden has created a blissed-out ambient album for the post-rave generation.

Garbage have finally discovered a hint of the blood-pumping human heart underneath their icy exterior.

Rule's scattered third album mixes love and war with uneven results, as his simple lyrics and unimaginative storytelling outweigh the stellar musical moments on this 16-cut collection.

Vega's been good before, especially on her eponymous 1985 debut and its '87 follow-up, Solitude Standing, but never as consistently good as she is here.

A curious time warp of a recording: loud, soft, tender, mean, thoughtful, reckless.

On Let It Come Down, Jason Pierce successfully peels away layers of pretension and exposes the humanity at the heart of his music.

On the surface, Callahan sounds like he's getting out more.

Even though one can hear echoes of everything from "The Threepenny Opera" to Bitches Brew here, the funk is in her DNA.

V doesn't bring Live right back to earth, but it does find the group playing to strengths, experimenting with recording techniques, and striving for renewed relevance.

Surprisingly, Strange Little Girls is a street project -- daring, visceral and engaging, even when it's not fully successful.

In sharing its predecessor's desire to cover every musical base, Goodbye Country (Hello Nightclub) suggests a continued identity crisis.

It's been a good three decades since Dylan has sounded as footloose and, er, freewheeling as he does on much of Love and Theft. That it comes on the heels of '97's haunted, hellhound-on-my-trail-vibed Time Out of Mind makes it all the more remarkable.

Continues in the bucolic vein of Deserter's Songs, and sounds almost as wondrous.

The album never truly develops, as the group prefers to rehash old stuff rather than break new ground.

The new Ben Folds is a lot like the old one: as unpredictable as he is talented.

While the result is hit-or-miss, the Charlatans manage to hit much more than they miss.

Mink Car is all over the map, an ideal piece of entertainment for listeners simultaneously blessed and cursed with high IQs and attention deficit disorder.

Even darker and more emotionally resonant than its impressive predecessors.

The Blueprint is not a perfect album. Some of the material is undoubtedly filler. But this recording makes it clear that hip-hop is supposed to be fun -- and that Jay-Z is having a ball.

Slayer return to the knuckle-busting fury of their demonic 1986 speed metal classic, Reign in Blood, while still somehow managing to spike their sonic mayhem with some catchy riffing and the odd melodic vocal line.

While Carey has never been a particularly confessional musician, Glitter seems a step in a more cathartic direction, from which subsequent albums should no doubt benefit.

Date of Birth is packed with hard-driving, repetitive beats that are equal parts Wu-Tang Clan and Gang Starr, yet the music lacks either of those groups' charms.

When System's at their best, the Los Angeles four-piece evokes most vividly punk politicos the Dead Kennedys.... Yet the band sputters out when the lyrics are awash in vagueness.

The duo's most commercial and downright joyous album to date.

Although he's the primary MC throughout this album, it's his studio skills that keep listeners on their toes...

The Surfers teeter on the brink of conventional rock values. However, throughout the new album, singer Gibby Haynes drives the proverbial truck into the ditch with rambling psychotic speeches.

A lot of what distinguishes Wonderful Life is its fragility. At its best, the music feels as though it could blow apart at any moment.

Because her samples are so shameless, so out in the open, what No More Drama sounds like in the end is Blige singing along to the radio: equal parts fan and artist.

1997's Homogenic, also a mixture of heavy beats and strings, was not as varied or complete as this album, and while Selmasongs, last year's soundtrack to "Dancer in the Dark" (in which Björk starred), was lovely in its own sweeping, cinematic way, Björk has surpassed herself with this new work.

Lacking Pierce's unifying vision, The Carnivorous Lunar Activities Of ... tries hard to make a virtue out of stylistic schizophrenia, and only partly succeeds.

She lets [the songs] drift off into the kind of embalmed chamber music respectability often synonymous with the Nonesuch label.

Alison Krauss & Union Station are one of the best instrumental bands in acoustic music today.

Now is Maxwell's best album, because he's learned that while soul can be suggested by a good groove, it really lives in a song.

A strong, expressive singer, Usher is particularly adroit at seductive, late-night ballads.

Unfortunately, this newest attempt at expanding the group's musical horizons is more a lateral move than a vertical one, and the same problems that have plagued Better Than Ezra since Deluxe -- mawkish, derivative material -- undermine this effort as well.

Tweekend isn't a giant leap forward for the Crystal Method, but it certainly doesn't keep them trapped in the past.

Whenever the delicious sensuality of the music threatens to take over, the anxiety and restless intelligence that drive it return to the surface, creating a quietly riveting tension. Fan Dance could be Sam Phillips' best album yet -- and that's really saying something.

Welch has become a notable talent on that long, rootsy highway, and she and Rawlings have fashioned their own unique sound.

Celebrity is a few good songs short of becoming a new gold pop standard (Michael Jackson's all-hits Thriller still holds that distinction), but with its well-balanced dance track-to-ballad ratio and uniformly infectious grooves, it does come within moonwalk striking distance...

Cake at times manage to counterbalance the smart-aleck cynicism with skilled musicianship, and when [John] McCrea drops the monotone bombast and actually sings, the songs really work.

His most consistently slamming release since 1990's Brick by Brick.

While Bilal's vocal gymnastics -- high-arching notes, off-rhythm choruses and complex harmonies -- add texture to these songs, many of them sound too musically similar to everything else in the neo-soul movement. He's at his best on the tracks that he or his partner, Dahoud Darien, have produced themselves.

Take away the album's lone misfire -- the cliché-filled "Rock the Boat," produced by Rapture and E. Seats -- and this work is nearly perfect.

This maturing band is getting closer to a fully realized vision.

Ivy specialize in nebulously oriented dream-pop: too ethereal for straight pop fans, too structured for the 4AD crowd. The result is rather like Swing Out Sister playing with all the rock and roll abandon of, say, the Sundays.

Ancient Melodies... acknowledges the importance of ongoing adult relationships. This may reduce the music's hipness quotient, but it greatly increases its emotional resonance.

Melissa Etheridge's Skin belongs in a tradition of breakup albums that includes Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love and Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear.

While the album stays true to the group's legacy of alcohol-themed, head-nodding party anthems, it falls short by schematically aping other artists' music.

By broadening both their emotional and musical spectrums, Tindersticks have come up with their best album yet -- and a classic of its kind.

It's too lightweight and silly to appeal to those looking for musical innovation, and the songs aren't focused or fully developed enough to grab new fans. Mostly, it's just a really annoying album.

Basement Jaxx create real songs around their chugging house beats.

The album is short on the wistful melodies and jazz overtones that have made Squarepusher stand out from his fellow post-everything experimentalists, making Go Plastic -- notwithstanding "My Red Hot Car" -- something of a disappointment.

Shangri-La Dee Da stands with the band's best work -- a furious tug of war between strychnine-laced grunge and acid-stoked psychedelic pop. In fact, it may be well be the brooding California group's pinnacle.

While fans expecting "Thong Redux" might be disappointed, there are flashes of (dare one say it?) integrity and substance nestled deep in the banging beats and big-time excesses that make Sisqó, well, Sisqó.

Mandy Moore is a pop album to be proud of: every song has a good melody, a solid hook, and dramatically improved singing from its star.

Devils Night is nothing special, and it's only saved from the slush pile by Eminem's inventive, cutting-edge raps and Dr. Dre's so-funky-it's-evil production.

Much of the album has the odd, rehashed sound of a Blur record produced by the Automator, but the diverse guests keep at least every other song fresh and new.

Sugar Ray actually sound like a band -- a quality missing from most of their earlier work.

In toeing the fine line between clever and dumb, they've always worn their "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts with goofy pride. But don't cry for them, as this time they've polished their musical turd to a brilliant sheen.

The album would have benefited from a few less midtempo grooves; the closest drummer Neil Primrose and bassist Dougie Payne get to really rocking is on the peppier rhythms of "Follow the Light" and "Flowers in the Window" -- not surprisingly, two of the album's highlights.

Deep Down & Dirty is the group's hardest, most animated and strongest-sounding album to date.

Overall, Poses is more daring (and, at times, more mellow) than its predecessor, mostly because Wainwright has densely packed images and sounds in a way that is less immediately catchy and more complex.

It sounds like she couldn't care less if anyone's listening.

Ron Sexsmith actually rocks, albeit only sort of and irregularly.

Radiohead have remembered how to feel, and do so without relying on the arena rock bluster of The Bends, the Orwellian remoteness of OK Computer or Kid A's pretense as a sort of MC Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. That's why Amnesiac sounds like their best album.

Happily deviates from the Moon Safari mold of new wave kitsch and sugary pop, guiding the knob-twisting duo's retro-synth sensibilities into a darker, more brooding realm.

A landmark album that is Carpenter's best effort since 1994's Stones in the Road -- and, quite possibly, her best ever.

With Flowers, Ian McCulloch finally finds the proper musical vehicle for the older-but-wiser (but not that much wiser) persona he's been trying on for the last few years.

The funk-by-numbers grooves of Everybody's Got Their Something borrow heavily from the likes of Sly Stone, Chaka Khan and early Prince, but do so with such affection and spirit that it's hard to take offense.

While the San Francisco-based songwriter is still crafting unmistakably Eitzel-esque gloom tunes, his latest, The Invisible Man, is his most eclectic outing to date, veering from the low-key electronica of the opening track to the understated atmospherics of "Sleep."

For the most part, Malpractice unfortunately matches Redman's pro forma boasts and refreshing modesty with pro forma music and not-so-refreshing beats.

Looks and charm can only do so much, and without a distinctive sound or banging tracks, Tyrese tends to get lost in the shuffle...

If it's energy that it is the single strongest selling point of God Bless the Go-Go's, well, that's kind of where they came in anyway, back in the day when lead singer Belinda Carlisle was a butch-haircutted pudge and "We Got the Beat" was, literally, just about all the Go-Gos had going for them musically.

Agaetis Byrjun is an impressively unself-conscious record that would have been difficult to make in a trend-obsessive center like London or New York. It is sincere and though its influences may be familiar, its beauty and tenderness are refreshingly new.

Miss E... So Addictive shows another side of Missy Elliott, yet unlike the calculations of other artists who morph themselves mainly as a marketing scheme, her dancing-sex-queen moves come through more like revelation than reinvention.

Longtime fans will no doubt be initially thrown by the lack of "motorik" beats and general rock action here. Yet after a couple of listens, many of Exciter's songs begin to worm their way into the subconscious.

Such lightness of touch is missing from the between-song skits, which have Franti posing as a DJ on a community-radio show, conducting interviews and dispensing commentary on the death penalty. But the between-skit songs are terrific.

A 28-minute, 10-song romantic pop album that includes two gems that handily best their early geek anthems "Buddy Holly" and "Undone (The Sweater Song)."

On the plus side, the album sounds really nice.... The problem is, things get a little too lazy and hazy; Reveal's 12 tracks all move with almost the exact same dreamy, midtempo lope.

The band continues to rock in the Rush/Metallica eight-minute flexathon tradition: it may impress you with individual lines, but in the end, it excels mainly at musical gymnastics.

A work that retains their signature sound while embracing a more mature and cautiously positive outlook on matters of the heart.

On Bridge, they're still traveling down the long and winding improvisational road, with most of the tracks averaging around five minutes in length (as is true with most of their studio albums). This time out, though, the songs feel like they're twice that.

With Lewis' weighty, tuneful voice and Mike Mushok's meaty, anthemic guitar, Staind recall the Soundgarden/Alice in Chains era of early-'90s rock. Free of phony posturing, DJ scratching and over-reliance on vapid thrash riffs, they're almost like an alternative version of today's mainstream metal.

Perhaps his most humane album and warmest work to date.

While Placebo's latest, Black Market Music, doesn't have any single track as galvanizing as "Pure Morning," Molko, Swedish bassist Stefan Olsdal, and English drummer Steve Hewitt have again crafted a hip-hop-laced collection of hard-driving rock that effectively mixes clever wordplay with solid musicianship.

Lions has got style to spare, but ends up light on meaty hooks.

Between the songs sung by the cast and those by famous popsters, Music From Baz Luhrmann's Film "Moulin Rouge" has a split personality, but this purposefully assembled collection is more cohesive than you'd think -- and that's something that can't really be said for most modern film albums.

While Beyoncé is credited with co-writing and co-producing the entire album, merging the Destiny's Child camp with a stronger guiding hand (say, the Rodney Jerkins tribe) might've helped weed out the weaker material -- and kept the flame going throughout this uneven album.

All told, eight producers (including Nicks) were involved in the production of Trouble in Shangri-La, and not everybody is up to the challenge.

Fans of new British bands like Gomez or Minibar should find plenty to like.

Here, country twang knocks against rap, funk basslines and blues harmonicas, and liberal lashings of reggae, ska and dub are added -- all adding up to a groove jam congealed into a multi-faceted but consistent and accomplished sound.