Ben Kweller may not sum up Kweller, but it’s a worthy personal statement from a popster whose chops keep getting better.

It’s been years since he sounded this responsive and attentive.

Fiasco is actually an absolutely dazzling emcee and a genuinely nuanced personality, and both of these things are incredibly rare in hip-hop in 2006.

TV on the Radio have crafted a work of immense, cataclysmic, almost overwhelming power and righteous fire.

It seems to prove a cardinal rule about art and ambition; if you paint in too many colors, you end up with mud brown. The Mars Volta could fill up whole galleries with canvases this color, and with Amputechture, have constructed another monochromatic monument to wild, uninhibited excess.

The transition from tracks to songs forces the group to rein in a style that needs to be no-holds-barred. When Basement Jaxx uses this restraint to their advantage... it’s easy to buy the direction they taken. When it doesn’t, Crazy Itch Radio just makes the group appear dense.

Where Last Exit was indebted to the clubbier side of dance pop--with its tendency to wind songs around Dark’s close-clipped beats--So This Is Goodbye is a post-aught pop record first and foremost, an elegant, spacious collection of flash-frozen R&B and soft disco laments.

He calmly circles the same career themes with the same warmed-over, palatable guitar weavings: girls are scary, girls are sad, getting older is weird, home is nice.

Pieces of the People We Love is a great funky dance record with guitars, and not much more. Luckily, it doesn’t need to be.

No dispute: Usher, Beyonce, Christina, Britney were just keeping the seat warm: The King’s back on his throne.

Mostly though, it’s status quo.

Into the Blue Again is more stylistically cohesive than his previous works, but the songs are ossified and interchangeable; while the one-man band aesthetic of Album Leaf implies meticulous approach to craft, there's an assembly line feel that makes you feel like he cranks out a tune in ten minutes and spends the rest of the week tweaking EQ.

Always a wee bit more clever than anyone gave them credit for, the Keys are now a pretty good Zeppelin knockoff for the indie crowd, and little more.

It’s a natural inclination for LeMaster to experiment, but it makes the songs often difficult and unengaging, giving off the impression that they’re half-formed.

Buckner’s interest here is in a wallowing mouthful of atmosphere—dominant drums, throbbing guitar, and a fair amount of piano. This has always been the case, but the compositions are seamlessly edited and cleanly brought from instrument to recording.

An album of many highlights but not much visceral or emotional impact.

The growing sense that Molina released this record last year--and will probably release it again next year--is frustrating.

The songs are breezy to the point of vapidity.

The language barrier and discord makes the record incomprehensible, but nearly everything is still as intoxicating and entertaining as hell.

Electric Six make junk music for junk times, and they’d be nigh-unbearable if they weren’t so much fun.

Beyoncé has a presence, a character which is totally unique to her, and B’Day’s utterly imbued with it.

A masterful record.

Gala Mill realizes rock polemicist Joe Carducci’s ideal of real-time give-and-take as fully as many of the SST releases he touts in his 1990 book Rock and the Pop Narcotic.

It’s an intriguing and thoughtful and occasionally lively record, but it’s not the rollicking, randy good time some folks would lead you to believe.

With Game Theory, the Roots have finally delivered on nearly every once-broken promise.

It’s a trad, tried, and tested sound that they truck around town, exemplified by guest appearances by Conor Deasy of The Thrills and, a little more inexplicably, Maroon 5’s bass player. It’s the middle ground bewteen these two groups which The Tyde occupy.

Wu diehards will see it as a 35-minute core of classic Method Man, while critics should view it as a 60-minute behemoth that's a marked improvement over Tical O and Judgment Day, but still padded with pointless skits and Charmin-soft rap & bullshit.

They make two kinds of albums. File Riot City Blues under "Shite."