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

There's no more accomplished crew in alt-rap, and though that can make their messages seem slick sometimes, on ['The Craft'] their booming beats, lucid raps, and articulate rhymes are technically miraculous.

At her best--which must not come easy, or they'd release more and more consistent albums--Rennie Sparks is a great American realist.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

More trip- than hip-hop in that its irresistibility is atmospheric -- a sound that pits industrial textures against quiet piano samples/parts.

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.