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.