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.

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

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

There's no economics, no race, hardly any compassion. Joe name-checks America as if his hometown of Berkeley was in the middle of it, then name-checks Jesus as if he's never met anyone who's attended church. And to lend his maunderings rock grandeur, he ties them together with devices that sunk under their own weight back when the Who invented them.

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.

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.

His lesser songs would be dookie gold on an ordinary undie-rap album.

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?

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

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.

Consistently enjoyable, predictably inconsequential.

Since all the lines make sense, and almost all the stanzas almost make sense, you keep waiting for the songs to make sense. And waiting, and waiting, through calm, memorable arrangements that are never in a hurry.

The loveliest album of Pernice's pretty career.

The music is so minimal that you won't return that often. But when you do, you'll remember she loves you.

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

Disable your prejudgment button and you'll hear a work of art whose immense entertainment value in no way compromises its intimations of a pathology that's both personal and political, created by one of those charming rogues you encounter so much more often on the page...

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.

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.

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

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.

Their beats beat Stetsasonic's.

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.

This unusually songful set is well up among their late good ones, its dissonances a lingua franca deployed less atmospherically than has been their recent practice.

Their second album isn't quite as good as their first album because its hooks are slightly less inescapable.... But the difference is slight, and other differences are positive.

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

The drums get busy at times, but never fear--this sounds more like Rounds than it does like anything else. Just a little funkier.

In a bad time for young guitar bands, including many barely forgettable ones lumped under the trade name "emo," these ambitious yowlers are reason for hope.

A singer's record.

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.

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.

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.

Boring strummed singer-songwritering with not terribly interesting electronica.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

The lyrics are intelligent of course, clever and moral and street-conscious and just gnomic enough, but their art is in their beats and flow and tunes too.

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.

There are better beats on the damn Jadakiss CD.

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?

In a time when so many bands don't know why they exist but keep on vanning anyway, his honest tale is touching and instructive.

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

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

It's vital beginning to end--vital even when it's misguided.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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

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).

Once his political songs fell flat because he wasn't scared or angry enough. Now when he's a shit you wonder why you should care--which is kind of hip-hop, don't you think?--but Bush has him so scared and angry he makes up for it, with a dedicated posse of El Lay studio vets getting in their licks.

Her chin-up ditties don't connect every time, but her abandonment of home recording will win new listeners anyway.

For once he makes sure he's understood--a matter in which melodies that might otherwise seem overfamiliar are of great service.

What a weird (dishonest? ironic? clueless?) name for a record that's all literature and arty sound effects.

Clever and droll but also hypnotic and mysterious.

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.

These 10 well-culled copyrights, two from the '80s and only four from 2000, are something new and ominous, because they're dull. They smell of equine methane: the old-fart hegemony that fuels alt-country, AC radio, and literary anthologies canonizing Ry Cooder, Ernie K-Doe, and Spooner Oldham.

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

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.

His comic timing and mixture of slangs--not to mention his musical conception... are all so much more fully developed that he's actually made a record that's fun to play in the background.

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.

This no-talent is masscult rock at its most brazen.

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

[A] sentimental cutesification of surf and country.

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.

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.

Crucially, his knack for simple punk tunes remains unchanged; also crucially, these do fine at moderate tempos, and one even gives off a whiff of Brecht-Weill. There are worse ways to come down off a multiplatinum high-lots of them.

Foolhardy though it was to saddle such an uncrucial record with a title that dares the young and the restless to bitch about how it doesn't change the world, the rest of us are free to enjoy how confidently it develops a groove.

They turn in their best album since 1996 even though some schmuck from the Charlatans ruins track two.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

With American Idol rampant, it's nice to have this emotional hipster sticking her celebrity cred in the stupid world's face.

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

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

It could be argued that music this masterful waives all claim to the sound of surprise--until you pay attention.

The music on this feisty, funny rap album isn't new--just irresistible.

These meanderings are the kind of indulgence that ends label deals.

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

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

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.

If you thought they were bad when they were cute, or even that they were cute when they were good, believe me, you don't want to hear them mature.

He sings roughly but warmly, and makes up as many hooks as he samples...

The melodies don't falter, and Wonder's unexpectedly and perhaps unfortunately influential vocal attack is as mellifluous as ever.

All the ugly gangsta lies are here, especially as regards the brutalization of women and the business of death. But they're incidental to the mood of the piece, which is friendly, relaxed, good-humored, and in the groove.

His productivity isn't exuberance, it's greed; his PG rating isn't scruples, it's cowardice.

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.

Its avant parts are more listenable--nay, beautiful--than anything on Washing Machine if not A Thousand Leaves.

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

The brightest actual pop album of 2003.

The old sound is hard in new ways.

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.

He thinks he belongs up there in front of that expert new band, singing or shouting whatever banality, profundity, or turn of phrase he's written down, and his level of enthusiasm combined with his level of craft will convince anyone who still likes, you know, songs.