Except for Ghostface, he's probably rhyming as well as anyone around right now.

There’s a cohesion and a simplicity to this collection that makes it a must for any fan of the label.

Thanks to some subtly disquieting diction it’s almost as disturbingly memorable as a cuddly cartoon blood orgy.

Too many songs are caught between the band’s fading post-punk tension and their more professional desires.

The music from the Envelopes’ first LP, Demon, is so loose and frivolous it feels like the Swedish group wasn’t even aware that the mics were hot.

In small doses it’ll absolutely cure what ails you. Unfortunately, taken in one album-sized chunk, the effect tends to wear thin—a doubly damning criticism since Dancing With Daggers is only ten seconds shy of being thirty minutes long.

They want to be every band to every bloke, shuffling between genres in an effort to jack all and master nada.

Part of the problem is that the melodies are spicy, but the riffs are pedestrian, almost nu-metal.

The few tracks on Show Your Bones that sound like they might have fit on Fever to Tell clearly constitute the new album’s weaker links.

Fishscale intermingles skewed narratives, expert guest choices, exquisitely conflicting production, and a concept and focus—the drug trade is the near exclusive subject mater—that, while somewhat reductive in scope, sharpens the album into an immense, furious, and focused album.

Even on the tracks with mediocre melodies and concepts, T.I. plugs away at the beat and never loses control of King.

Each of their albums so far has been misleading because none of them have really caught what Embrace are about properly, who they are. This New Day, warts and all, finally does that.

They’re good at what they do, but what they’re doing is painting-by-numbers from someone else’s book.

The combination of Treacy’s back-story and the complexity of My Dark Places makes it hard to live with at times; it is a supremely disquieting record.

A manically strange, darkly and violently beautiful, and deliriously pop album.

An immensely pleasing and happy album.

A bit uneven.

They sound laid back. They sound like they’re having a blast. They sound, well, loose.

There’s a really good EP waiting to be edited out of this.

But despite better production and the unbeatable chemistry of Coomes and Weiss, When the Going Gets Dark just doesn’t have as many memorable songs, nor does it spark the same kind of curious sympathy their best micro-miseries have.

This is the Prince album we wanted Musicology to be.

A remarkably notable debut.

Murray’s Revenge feels tired, the work of a mind either distracted or unwilling to commit to any one thing.

All at Once is still challenging, but it’s a challenge without much reward.

Morph the Cat is too complacent, too enamored with its own lacquered contours.

For fans of indie-rock with a poppy slant, Stars of CCTV is an absolute necessity.

Mercury Rev... mostly eschew their distinctive brand of chamber pop, scaling back the saturated psychedelic orchestral flourishes for something a bit more terrestrial. In doing so they’ve fashioned the perfect complement to Dunger’s emotional voice and poignant songs of love lost.

Cuts Across offers a surprisingly persuasive clutch of rock ‘n roll that beg for barnstorming live performances.

So the form of vaguely electroclash pop delivered with frighteningly robotic efficiency has been mastered, but the content itself is the problem.

[A] lean, effective debut.

There’s little to differentiate Mr. Beast from Happy Songs, and less to recommend it in the face of Mogwai’s potent catalog.

That’s why there’s no cacophony and very little white noise: the finished product is essentially of a common mind.

Unsurprisingly, everything on Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is sublimated beneath Case’s vocals: music, momentum, the need for tunes.

His wheels may not leave the traction marks they once did, but the evidence here suggests the ride isn’t over yet.

Axis is an easygoing, engaging listen, an album whose relative triviality easily forgives its flaws.

I wouldn't want to call it a "return to form" because Lil' Beethoven was actually pretty good, but it certainly perfects that album's aesthetic and infuses it with some of the giddy energy of the earlier Sparks stuff.

The result aims for a “shitty is pretty” messthetic that is more novelty than anything else.

Sure, the songs are serviceable, even great at times, but if you take away the new instruments, the tracks are spitting images of their younger brethren.

The album achieves a great deal of its success from the relaxed collaboration, but it does suffer from it, as well. Reid and Hebden interact so casually that they don't find the friction to really propel great improvisational music.

Witch manage to do a lot more in forty minutes with little more than a bunch of badass riffs and a decent rhythm section than most metal bands these days can do with seventy minutes.

Kotche delivers on all accounts, tastefully propelling the music into timelessness, nearly filling the shoes of his faves: The Band’s Levon Helm, Beefheart’s Drumbo.

The Maginot Line has a title almost as dreary and foreboding as The North Sea had, a sense of vast futility and inescapable fate, and like that first album, the title belies the often bright and sparkling parts of the music.

So much here rests on formulaic indie tropes.

Some of the sonic twists and turns that Delays pull on You See Colours--the multi-tracked vocals, the airy guitars, the pulsing synths--are jaw-dropping.

No matter how many literary allusions or whimsically witty turns of phrase he packs into a verse, The Believer lacks the balance and blood of his previous work.

Soft Money is full of the sort of guitar riffs that mutter their notes and beats that knock about to break themselves free from dumpsters.

Pencil Ne-Yo in as R&B rookie of the year--and don’t be surprised if no one trumps him before 2006 is gone.

If you’re so inclined toward this type of music, you’ll assuredly love Precious Memories. But if you think you’re not, you may be surprised.

[Their] debut, a scrappy collection of twee garage-pop, isn’t bad. It is half-bad, though. Which isn’t to say that every song isn’t good—they’re just fine, the emphasis on ambivalence.

What makes OK Cowboy worthwhile is not a greater emphasis on the chilly tones that made Vitalic’s initial singles so impressive and characterized some of his savage DJ sets, but the demonstration of a surprising degree of variety and even humanity within those seemingly narrow colonnades of rising and whiplash synths over soulless, mechanical drums.

Right now Elbow are hitting an emotional pitch no one else is managing; one more personal and more potent than those that might be considered their competition.

Put it this way: do you think "Panic (Hang the DJ)" with its unique branch of bitterness, provincialism, and notions of white pride was the Smiths' best song? You'll be like a hog in shit here, then. If not... avoid. Like the plague.

Its lack of focus often mutes its attempts to strike hard.

The biggest flaw with Other People’s Lives is that the songs play to Davies’ weaknesses rather than his strengths, coupled with overproduction that veils any remaining virtue under a gauzy blanket of unnecessary studio witchcraft.

Bejar is so wound up in his own idiosyncratic mythologies, so hopelessly himself that some fans have already said it sounds like a greatest hits record; appropriate that a meta-rocker’s final frontier is his own reflection in the mirror.

It doesn’t try to scrape the lofty heights of the two or three masterpieces in Heasley’s catalogue, but by not making the effort, it doesn’t sink as low as his least impressive stuff.

A subtle improvement on the band’s debut.

Congotronics 2 sticks closely to the sonics of the first volume, possibly because the bands do actually sound similar, or possibly because the bands have been recorded in similar fashion.

This increased humanism lends Fleischmann’s compositions an evolutionary sense of dynamism, thawing out his stern soundscapes.

They make a better Shins than a Stooges. For anyone looking for a relative of the former with an interestingly rough sound and loads of potential, the M's are good to go right now; but the rest of us are stuck mining gems from amidst muck, like normal.

Unfortunately, Now is the Time! short-circuits early, leaving us with an empty gimmick and a few good synth-zapped riffs.

It is a measure of Albion’s strengths that it can make itself heard above the crumpy distortion and shrill feedback generated by its author.

Young for Eternity is the record that US labelmates the Von Bondies should have made to follow-up Pawn Shoppe Heart, and the album that the White Stripes should make period.

Timeless falls awkwardly between Buena Vista Social Club and Santana’s latter-day Rolodex albums, deftly combining multi-culti good intentions with the bathos of a great artist aiming squarely at commercial revival.

This is the best pop album of the year and what Ashlee Simpson wishes to be.

It's a smooth, cohesive ride that never lapses into boredom.

Not every classic song from the era is here, but yes, if you do choose to own only one Tropicália disc, then this should be the one.

It's not as much a progress as DCW, but it's easily its equal.

At 14 tracks long, Orton could have trimmed three or four cuts and left a near-flawless, efficient package that was all killer and no filler. As it stands, it is merely excellent.

Of the album’s 13 tracks, not one feels like filler.

Prefuse 73 is in a rut. And a bad one at that.

When RJ sticks to the bounce aesthetic and Acey keeps his writing lucid and/or topical, the record becomes the most listenable of the emcee's recent output.

Idols is not quite “country” enough to tackle the road to the prairies, but the headspace of the album is clearly in a place with plenty of room to breathe.

It's like a medicinal tonic cleansing your system of the toxic effects of 10+ years of boring, bloated rap full-lengths.

Stoltz's musicianship and songwriting are engaging and technically inspired while remaining loose and comfortable. It's just there are too many obvious references.

He exudes a level of charisma matched only by Ludacris on a global scale.

Even if [some] of it gets a little one-note, it's an addictive note.

An endlessly enjoyable sophisticated pop album.

This is nearly half of a really good follow up to their debut, but that first sequence of tracks is so lackluster, so full of swagger and bile meaning nothing, that fans may not get to the good stuff.

The Greatest isn’t perfect, but its stumbles are neither intrusive nor damning.

Clearlake are clearly talented and still capable of making a groundswelling record. Amber, however, is not only not it, but it’s reason to wonder if they’ve lost their own sense of identity in an effort to sell records to pint-swilling British punters.

While Sennett is often compared to Elliott Smith, at least vocally, there’s far more Badly Drawn Boy in his persona; his voice warbles meekly about waking up with the sun, eating butter, and smiling oceans, even while the egotism lingers.

An album of rich country, folk, and gospel music.

The vast majority of this release just doesn’t stick together coherently and suffers because of it.

Whether it’s the end of an era, the beginning of a new one, or just a lucky break in what looks to be a still-incessant deluge of output, From a Compound Eye bypasses the earlier seven LPs-plus released in his name to mark the emergence of Robert Pollard as a solo artist proper.

A highly enjoyable album... one that’s louder than the Liars, more fun than the (new) Strokes, and ten times more dynamic than the Arctic Monkeys.

Cash takes time to recapture these relationships through simple, detailed moments; at times with grief, and other times with the joy of their memory.

Fun and frequently powerful.

Like every East River Pipe album it’s blemished by imperfections, but Cornog’s lonely, home-recorded drabness goes beyond the "sun, sun, sun" of other retro-oriented musicians to remind us that sunlight reflecting off slabs of urban concrete remains as bleak in 2006 as it was in 1974.

Morningwood does a great job at imitating, and they have spirit. But their spirit does not translate well to good listening, nor does it provoke the underwear-dancing and air guitar it hopes to achieve.

By no means have We Are Scientists made a great record, but it shows enough promise to make us believe that it might just be possible in the future.

First Impressions of Earth is the first pretty good album of the year.

This is probably the least fun of all his albums, but also among his most rewarding.

The Breakthrough is easily Blige’s finest full-length since ‘99’s Mary.

Only half of these tracks provide truly valuable alternatives to Guero songs.

So what if the Darkness are nothing but a bunch of playacting nancy boys. They have an outstanding penchant for hooks [and] write witty and possibly sometimes moving lyrics.

Above all else, Shakira shows that highly individual, original pop songwriting can co-exist splendidly with commercial interests, and on both of those scales, this album is something of a triumph.

Fans of novelty pop and slapdash spunk will undoubtedly enjoy their debut record, Coming on Strong; for those who prefer their records a little less morning-breath, you’ll smell this one’s approach and smother the light with a pillow.