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.