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

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

Not only does he create a unique role model, that role model is dangerous--his arguments against education are as market-targeted as other rappers' arguments for thug life.

A singer's record.

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.

His adolescent gulps and yowls are street-Brit with a Jamaican liquidity, as lean, eccentric, and arresting as the beats.

[A] sentimental cutesification of surf and country.

This is mannerist DOR more accomplished and less sentimental than its sources.

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.

No "Ms. Jackson," no "Rosa Parks," no "Bombs Over Baghdad," no "The Whole World" either. Just commercial ebullience, creative confidence, and wretched excess, blessed excess, impressive excess.

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

He claims his Dave Matthews-sponsored major- label debut was his chance to make a true band record, and I guess his boys are trickier than Crazy Horse, just not in any way you haven't heard before.

Everyone who says this isn't a sentimental record is right. But it admits sentiment, hold the hygiene, and suggests that he knows more about love dying than he did when he was immortal.

Their warmest album ever.

Clever and droll but also hypnotic and mysterious.

These Danes aren't tuned-in enough for stereotype play.

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.

Three thin voices rap-sing-chant over the same bare-bones electro that sophisticates equate with two-headed dildos and black leatherette. But here, it intensifies the toughness, naïveté, moralism, sentimentality, ambition, ebullience, and sex drive all high school girls know but few have the sass to project and none have forged into art, especially with a Brooklyn accent.

The sole outright attraction of her pathologically modest follow-up is "Then Ya Gone."

The brightest actual pop album of 2003.

Throughout they succeed in rendering Southern gothic as social realism.

Their tunes have always seemed too facile, but seven years divided by three albums doesn't equal glib, especially with those years deepening their lyricism rather than their cynicism.

Their beats beat Stetsasonic's.

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

Liliput is the analogy even if Nikki Colk has never heard of them either. Kaito are noisier, faster, girlier; Colk mispronounces her English not as a Marlene Marder homage but so people will think she's from Sweden. But the two share a rare, rambunctious sense that noise is fun and life is livable.

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

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

Tremendous craft, winning enthusiasm.

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.

In short, they "rock." Finally.

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.

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

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.

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.

Gibbard's delicate voice matches the subtle electro arrangements far more precisely than it does the folky guitars of his real group.

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.

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.

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

They've found it in their talent to put black music's long tradition of tune and structure into practice.

This gentle, suave, insistent smoothie parlayed his direct lyrics and tricky beats into a strong straight r&b album in a year when contenders Raphael Saadig and Me'shell NdegéOcello got tangled up in form.

The selection here is at once so obvious and so inappropriate it feels redemptive.

It's the rare guitar geek who acts like strings and horns are where he's always belonged rather than where he hopes he'll fit in.

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

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

The best of these seven songs is a Stones cover, only not by as much as you first think, and the second-best is the opener ["Astronaut"], ditto.

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.

It fleshes out its cohesive narrative and cogent ideas with beats that respect the spare antipop ethos without abjuring such wayward rhythm elements as femme chorus, bass-drum-whoop jam, and $20 synth loop.

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?

Their best album in a decade.

Something much bigger than last year's Girls Can Tell, the breakthrough album skeptics like me took for a fluke peak.

Sleater-Kinney... go for defiant uplift and seem energized by the challenge.

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

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?

The old sound is hard in new ways.

Bad laptop Blondie.

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.

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

Without resorting to anything so obvious as a hook she manages to maintain continuity and interest over an hour-plus of poetry-with-funk.

Deeply anonymous.

The overall effect is less grand than that of Endtroducing six years ago, popper and rocker and r&ber. But an overall effect there is, grounded in Shadow's trademark-tremendous bass 'n' drum.

Skeletal, fragmented, stumblebum, Kim and Kelley retain their knack for righting themselves with a tuneburst just when you thought they'd never do the limbo again.

He's at his best in the fictional-mythic mode that prevails here.

The Hives explode where a hundred other punk bands are proud to rock.

Mood music, maybe. How to be conscious and happy at the same time.

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.

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.

Pop isn't an ambition for these smart people with other things to do, it's a discipline--the tunes strong, the beats solid, the vocals lightly yearning and pungently sweet.

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

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

These are pop songs in the sense that they deliver their payloads in 90 seconds. But they're also confessional, dark, downtempo--and, OK, a little gauche sometimes, which just makes them seem realer.

Imperfect, definitely. But only because perfection is on the table.

At 78 minutes this is too long, and especially given his history, "The Lost Children" is offensive. But the first three tracks are the Rodney Jerkins of the year, "2000 Watts" is the Teddy Riley of the past five years, and even the prunables offer small surprises.

Mediocre pop songs with pretensions.

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.

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

The Strokes' privileged formalism is annoying, so too their delight in romantic dysfunction. But they're smarter than the playa haters who aren't smart enough to target these blatant shortcomings.

The first four tracks... [are] as powerful as any he's written.

No catchier collection of jingles has come to my attention since Steve Miller made his mint off jet airliners.

[Crosses] PG-13 thug and subpar Luther Vandross.

These ill jockeys are just a two-inch ruler for Marshall Mathers to measure his dick against.

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

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.

There are better beats on the damn Jadakiss CD.

Exactly the unpredictable effort you'd expect, it utilizes a new bunch of Portland buddies to render the old noises into background music as it explores such themes as Yul Brynner's makeover and piracy on the coast of Montenegro.

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

Rainer Maria is the genuine collegiate article: impressionistic and overwrought.

Definitely not dead yet.

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.

She scores over and over on 14-tracks-in-72-minutes that miss maybe twice and only seem long-winded when she gives the flautist some.

Reduced to a tuneful 18-song essence that watches too much television, their mildness seems diverting and their Englishness definitive.

Yanni is Tchaikovsky by comparison, Sarah McLachlan Ella Fitzgerald, treacle Smithfield ham.... Like Master P or Michael Bolton only worse, she tests one's faith in democracy itself.

All shallow, all pure as a result--pure escape, pure delight, and, as the cavalcade of gospel postures at the end makes clear, pure spiritual yearning.

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.

There's more bounce-to-the-ounce and less molasses in the jams, more delight and less braggadocio in the raps.

If Nirvana and Robert Johnson are rock's essence for you, so's To Bring You My Love. But if you believe the Beatles and George Clinton had more to say in the end, this could be the first PJ album you adore as well as admire.

The album moves the way you always hope jungle will, like a cross between a tiger and a snake, yet it's also a kind of mix record, with five showcases for Reprazent's serviceable MC Dynamite, who's as useful as the inevitable Method Man in the crucial matter of providing rap sounds. Size has his own Chaka, too. Her name is Onallee, and she takes the record out.

Aiming to fill the Queenhole by injecting video-game sci-fi and radio-head sonics into a pop-metal base, the Korn protégés forge a "startling vision of a future world in which communications technology has been turned against us, becoming a tool for government surveillance rather than personal convenience." Gosh, how'd they think of that?

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.