Even when the forced pronunciations turn gauche, she remains a good egg who's not afraid to put herself on the line.

A glorious phantasmagoria of flow.

Often seems fragile, offhand, tentative, even enervated. But this isn't a weakness--it only makes their sound more their own.

But though this may be pretension, it's also delight, strange and humorous verbally and aurally.

A band record, a groove record, a riff record; something lowdown, dirty, smoky.

[Bell Orchestre] varies its cunningly sequenced, gratifyingly brief instrumental tracks with such old-fashioned amenities as textured melodies, pleasing dynamic shifts, and passages that, if they don't actually r-o-c-k, at least bound down the road in an excited manner.

The voice asserts itself as the record sinks in, however, and not only does each song stand out, but the production variegates a sonic grandeur grounded in the rock verities.

Not counting Stephin Merritt, no other under-40 approaches McKay's gift for cabaret.

These aren't indelible tunes like "At Home He's a Tourist" or "Suspect Device." But months later they're still getting not just stronger but rawer, which isn't how this game usually works.

There's plenty of detail, and feeling too--not just anger, tenderness.

They woke up one day, glanced around a marketplace where art wasn't mega anymore, and figured that since they'd been calling themselves pop for half of their two-decade run, maybe they'd better sit down and write some catchy songs. So they did.

Charming, civilized, childish, Kieran Hebden imagines an aural space in which electronic malfunction is cute rather than annoying or ominous.

Despite its lack of an anthem to replace "Start Me Up," it certainly beats Tattoo You or anything else going back to Exile except Some Girls.

Here's one new rock record whose optimistic abandon is specifically conceived as a response to deprivation and attack.

The attitude is tougher and the material thinner, but you have to love it for not falling flat on its heightened expectations.

For any Upper West Side showbiz kid, musical comedy is mother's milk, more "natural" than the rude attack of rock or the polite confessional of folk ... With crucial help from Jon Brion, she's got the Richard Rodgers/Kurt Weill part down, and will surely tackle the Dorothy Fields/Lorenz Hart part later.

The brightest actual pop album of 2003.

They've gotten unmistakably louder and unmistakably gayer--or perhaps I mean, hate the term, more metrosexual.

Throughout they succeed in rendering Southern gothic as social realism.

Mouthy, destructive, confused, sexed-up but no sex object, Jemima Pearl is the pearl.

They exist only to rock your world. If you don't let them, you're the stupid one.

This literature with power chords addresses not only the crucial matter of vanishing bohemias as cultural myth but also the crucial matter of re-emerging spiritualities as cultural fact.

Many details are too U.K.-specific for Yank-yob gratification. But aesthetes will come to enjoy Taylor's nuanced adenoids and his bandmates' thought-through arrangements.

Their warmest album ever.

Though the singer-with-backup music relies on formula that won't set anyone's life straight, her melodic chops--sweet as a writer, supple as a singer--put the songs across.

But for all its rapped W-Unity, this is RZA's record.... Far from straining, he's gone sensei, achieving a craft in which the hand leads the mind.

Obviously it's not perky enough, funky enough either, but their best (and third) album in 15 years (and probably last ever) sounds an awful lot like what kids today call pop.

For all his overreliance on dramatic drawls, Southwestern locales, and mother love, Springsteen has stories to tell.

Here, their structures adamantly circular and their tunes less catchy but more durable, they make dandy mystagogues on an album that begins inarticulate and attains the nirvana of total nonverbality.

An album as invigorating in its contempt for rock professionalism as Neil Young's Tonight's the Night.

Rarely do the settings distinguish themselves.... But a distinct voice delivering noticeable verbal content is a setting too--that's why you notice the content.

White's commercial success has nothing to do with de Stijl or da blooze--just a strong, emotive voice delivering simple yet distinctive songs, which are fairly numerous here.

Some observers classify these ditties "country-punk," while other crankily insist they're "anti-folk," proving mainly that nobody knows what to make of simple little guitar-band songs on a scene where everyone's busy refining his or her artistic vision.

The collection doesn't cohere the way it should, and I still say seek out Talkin' Honky Blues. But wherever you start, he's a major rhymer, performer, storyteller, humanist visionary, and student of the DJ arts.

This makes engrossing listening if the effort suits you, but it's useless as background music.

Consistently enjoyable, predictably inconsequential.

Tremendous craft, winning enthusiasm.

Half God's gift to hip-hop, half man of the people, he never quite puts all his good tracks together or across.

What carries the album is, I swear, the skits.

Now, done with that id shit, she finds her voice by pleading with her man to stay or come back as the case may be.

There's an early-Stones feel here it would be perverse to deny: 12 songs in 36 minutes, each with an indelible identiriff and its own seductive rhythmic shape.

The main problem with this background tour de force is that you understand not just how good it is but how pretty it is only when you listen up.

This is so pretty it's almost a poem about quiet lyricism--and so passive you want to put crystal meth in its apple juice.

Eventually, the tunes fall into place. What never materialize in sufficient number are the billowing climaxes and cutting remarks that mark their best albums, meaning most of them.

Her best bunch of songs since--not Broken English, that's ridiculous, but Strange Weather or A Child's Adventure.

There's that Ramones sense that songs should be short like life, and that XTC sense that songs should be complicated like life.

two about his parents are juicier than the mother love gushing from God's Son. The Afrocentric pep song is so much deeper than the mawkish, misinformed new "I Can" that you believe he might yet get politics.

When the songs are not just clever but lively--most spectacularly on the unrelenting "I Thought You Were My Boyfriend"--Stephin Merritt's demo-ready monotone could pass for a singing voice.

Grae can rhyme, and if she had a male larynx and a production budget, her hype men, chipmunk soul, minor-key piano hooks, and "I wanna rock a fella so bad" might stand underground on its head.

Though I can imagine putting this on at year's end and remembering every song with a kind of surprised admiration, I can't imagine doing it any sooner--or any later either.

Morrison's predictably intelligent solo debut puts personality where the Dismemberment Plan's synergy used to be.

After a 34-minute art project that ended up a great album, a 17-minute EP ends up an art project.

OK, more news event than musical milestone. But a really great news event.

Definitely not dead yet.

David Berman joins a pickup band that includes his close personal friend Stephen Malkmus to explore realms of vocal inexpressiveness undreamt by Stephin Merritt or the Handsome Family.

If anything, it's more a dance record, leaving those of us with a sentimental weakness for distinct parts a little lost.

To care about this band you have to find Karen O's fuck-me persona provocative if not seductive, and since I've never been one for the sex-is-combat thing, I find it silly or obnoxious depending on who's taking it seriously.

No, she hasn't regained her sense of humor, but aren't you fast losing yours?

A thematically linked work where some of the sonic landscapes were entrancing (although not warm).

Certainly he understands things about this society that his better-adjusted contemporaries don't. But he's woefully short on not just empathy but humorous self-deprecation.

We shall overkill, he means.

Leonard Cohen has had No Voice since he began recording at 33. But he has more No Voice today, at 70, than he did on Ten New Songs, at 67.

All told, pretty dull--unless you're so desperate that you'll sing hosanna for every piece of intelligent-honest-original that comes down the circuit.

He shows off discreetly, underplaying his vocal chops and musical command, even his familiarity with scientific arcana--nay, his intelligence itself.... But discretion exacts a price in identity, clarity, and meaning.

Precise, bland, and banal, their sensitivity emotionless and their musicality never surprising, they're the definition of a pleasant bore--easy to tune out, impossible to care for.

Outfitted in this music, however, Common's pretensions stand up and do jumping jacks.

Pond's songs are the alt-rock equivalent of what used to be called New Yorker short stories: subtly realized domestic epiphanies often involving tame nature imagery.

Proficient, bland, and dauntingly dull, their only threat is a promise to "take it back to the days of Mantronix" (no, please, anything but that).

I don't get this.

It's not enough for Anthony Keidis to get all mature--he's supposed to say something interesting about maturity. And he's never had thing one to say about anything else.

Not only is his willingness to express emotion commoner than indie denizens imagine, his failure to undercut that emotion with irony or humor is a spiritual weakness.

The latest Old Person to forge Honest Music in the teeth of a Youth-Orientated Marketplace has lost his legendary voice, so what's the attraction?

Young people who think Kraftwerk were more important than the Ramones are free to satisfy their craving for the neu with this retreat into simplicity. But even Radiohead and Mouse on Mars contain more chaos.

At its most generous, this may be the music of the young Brian Wilson's dysfunctional dreams. But at its most pretentious it's his bad trip.

Sure they're clever, but they're also as shallow as Britney Spears.

This is a double album where the best songwriting never meshes with the best horn writing, which is what gets her juices going these days.

Though he comes up with strong melodies, he's hardly a match for Ben Folds or Elliott Smith, both of whom frame their catchy stuff more idiosyncratically and neither of whom is terribly interesting even so.

It's wish fulfillment for boys who make passes at girls who wear glasses.

Every once in a while a drone or pattern emerges, reminding me of what I treasure most in "world music"-- articulated rhythm. Then he gets some tech genie or steel player to throw on another synth substitute and it's back to the miasma.

It's hard to imagine any of the suckers who fell for the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot hype striving to identify with, say, "Muzzle of Bees." Not impossible. Just hard.

This is too classical, too romantic, and too I-yam-what-I-yam all at once.

Granted his major-label production budget in the sky, Tim DeLaughter hones his tunes and dispels woozy comparisons to the Flaming Lips.

Gibbons's failure to leave the likes of "And I only hear/Only hear the rain" and "Time is but a memory" in her notebook suggests one limitation of her songcraft.

While the songwriting ain't bad, it also ain't that good.

Working on the humane assumption that all screamo records can't be equally horrible, the reviewerati have singled out this big-ticket effort... Unburdened by theory, however, I find that its distinction boils down to slightly subtler tunecraft and dynamic range.

Like most schmoograssers they're committed to virtuosity for its own sake, and like most young musos they've been too focused on technique to learn much about how music interacts with life.

His voice devoid of Newman-Waits grit, his eclecticism even and controlled where theirs bristles with jokes, oddity, and gusto, how does he expect to connect with anyone but other likable progressives, and rather detached and inscrutable ones at that?

For her fans, the news is that she's invested her profits in studio musicians. Takes talent to make that more boring than solo acoustic, no?

Face it, folks--when it comes to putting good old rock 'n' roll on record, a bass player really helps.

No dolt, she figures it's in her best interest to sound like one--as well as an insider outsider like Gush and Bore, whose horrible lessons in playing it safe she takes to heart.

Beyond some rich-and-famous irony, not a single suburban detail soils an hour of good intentions. And you know the music overreaches too.

Occasionally her pushing-30 doubts about the single life are touching, like when she imagines Gavin Rossdale would make a good dad. But after five years, two producers, one Spin cover, and one lead review in Rolling Stone, the single Interscope sent her back to the salt mines for is the best thing on her automatic-platinum follow-up.

It's not that these songs are all obvious or overdone--this nonfolkie had never heard a few of them. It's that they're so soft they squish even when Alvin tries to rev one past you, which usually he doesn't.

There are better beats on the damn Jadakiss CD.

Norah Jones is herself, give her that. I hate to think what this phenom will have to go through to get that far.

Mediocre pop songs with pretensions.

Where once these Norwegians were extolled for their subtle melodicism, here their schlock candidly attacks the jugular.

When she goes ragga on the way out I wish she hadn't been groomed for something bigger and blander. But she made her choice.