Like the empathy of so many young men, especially artists, his is more self-involved than saints like us prefer. But at least he expresses empathy--to memorable melodies that very nearly bear up under the repetitions his rarely witless or superfluous lyrics require.

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

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 no-talent is masscult rock at its most brazen.

Its double-CD sprawl is ambitious not hubristic, imposing not indigestible.

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

Funny, catchy, clever, and irreverent past his allotted time.

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

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.

I don't get this.

There's that Ramones sense that songs should be short like life, and that XTC sense that songs should be complicated like life.

Here the defining flow is sonic--a shadowy, guitar-drenched tone poem of the streets.

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

Beyond some rich-and-famous irony, not a single suburban detail soils an hour of good intentions. And you know the music overreaches too.

Morrison's predictably intelligent solo debut puts personality where the Dismemberment Plan's synergy used to be.

Smile's post-adolescent utopia isn't disfigured by Brian's thickened, soured 62-year-old voice. It's ennobled--the material limitations of its sunny artifice and pretentious tomfoolery acknowledged and joyfully engaged.

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.

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.

And that's how the album goes--too fond of drama, but aware of its small place in the big world, and usually beautiful.

Often seems fragile, offhand, tentative, even enervated. But this isn't a weakness--it only makes their sound more their own.

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.

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.

Class warfare meets gangsta-rock.

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

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

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.

It's hard to imagine any of the suckers who fell for the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot hype striving to identify with, say, "Muzzle of Bees." Not impossible. Just hard.