There's not much fat here, but there's not much meat and bone, either. If the Offspring, still the most successful of all the latter-day Southern California punkers, once had interest in teasing and amusing its fans, it has largely hidden those qualities this time around.

While Lovers Rock is not any sort of departure from the quiet ballads that marked the group's first three albums, there is an element of freshness that aligns Sade with the current electronic music insurgence while still maintaining a distinctly analog outlook on love's foibles.

Manson's most ambitious, musically accomplished, and -- dare we say it? -- mature album to date. Holy Wood treads too much over the same nihilistic territory, raging against a God he claims doesn't exist, and describing in detail a life that he says isn't worth living. That said, there are some musically powerful moments on the album, notably the eviscerating power chords on "The Fight Song" and the galloping rhythms of "Disposable Teens."

That Sylvian has managed to fashion his extensive career into a fulfilling double disc is impressive enough. But the fact he manages to do so while still coming off as a vibrant, vital artist -- some 22 years after making his recorded debut -- is what makes Everything and Nothing especially exquisite.

Parachutes is a fully realized and expertly crafted masterpiece, each song holding its own quite well, but when grouped with the rest, they make up an impenetrable fortress of sadly beautiful, melodic, glorious Britpop.

The perfect soundtrack for workers clearing out their cubicles and trudging away after their short-lived high-tech careers abruptly ended. The 11 songs capture a bittersweet tone perfectly -- sadly witnessing cultural wreckage and detritus but finding glimmers of beauty.

An album of bland and relatively anonymous adult pop that rarely gets racier than offering to "keep you up all night" and "make you holler."

Kelly's new work offers about as much stylistic variety as he could possibly be expected to, while still remaining in territory familiar to his panting fans.... All in all, the production is sharp, with some fairly clever vocal and percussion arrangement ideas throughout.

Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars won't prompt the inauguration of a Nobel Prize category for dance music, but like Armand Van Helden's Killing Puritans and the Chemical Brothers' 1999 gem Surrender, its another great example of a maturing dance artist learning to harness the ecstatic abandon of late night dance floor epiphanies to sentiments -- musical and emotional -- inventive and universal enough to flourish in the light of day.

This is as base as it gets, friends, a frantic, frenetic, and unapologetically adolescent orgy of sexual and scatological tomfoolery.

If you look beyond the ludicrous lyrics, you almost come to respect them as pop barometers. The music draws on everything from alternative rock to funk, but the result is not a melee of sounds but rather well-crafted syntheses.

Tomorrow's Sounds Today belies its promising title by breaking no new ground, and, in fact, retracing some pretty well-known boot-scootin' steps.... If nothing else, it's still a pleasure to hear on Tomorrow's Sounds Today what producer and guitarist extraordinaire Pete Anderson can do with material that is only average.

Now, as the group starts its third decade, U2 has found what it's looking for is good music, songs that ring with melody and hooks -- and meaning -- while still weaving in some of the ambient and electronic textures it explored on releases such as Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Pop. The result is a richly crafted and filler-free pop album on which each song sounds like an individual work, calling to mind mid-period Beatles titles such as Rubber Soul.

Outkast's fourth album, Stankonia, is a far more complex effort than the critically acclaimed Aquemini. While Aquemini dealt with Big Boi and Dre's -- the self-described "player and poet," respectively -- contradictory personalities, Stankonia addresses the contradictory impulses of hip-hop itself.

The concept album is more than an afterthought, it's musically revelatory and one of the best records of the year.

The irony, of course, is that More Light is a perfect fit within the Dinosaur Jr catalog and, in fact, would rank as one of its better entries, a spirited, 11-song outing on which Mascis' writing and performing sound fresher and more muscular than they have in years, certainly since the early end of the '90s.

Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea has to rank as a work more musically accessible than her early material and more emotionally direct than her later stuff. It's an intriguing song cycle that stands up to -- and in fact, demands -- repeated listenings.

Though not much older than Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, Nelly Furtado is an artist whose music stands head and shoulders above the manufactured pop pap that rules the charts right now.

Unlike his previous efforts, the guitar isn't the focal point here; instead, it's the ambience created by tape loops, scratching, and Burnside's singing and talking that makes the record both edgy and relevant.

When Mullins hits his mark (as he often does on Beneath the Velvet Sun), the results constitute Southern-flavored pop at its finest. Just don't expect your world to be rocked by lyrical insights or musical innovation.

If one wanted to quibble, one could say that the Cash-Rubin collaboration is starting to feel just a little formulaic.... yet Cash continually surprises with his ability to completely inhabit material by writers much younger than him.

Building on Whitey Ford's organic folk-pop rap, Eat at Whitey's develops the songwriter's street-style troubadour fixation even further. This time, there's more singing than rapping, and his gruff vocals actually sound stylish, especially on the provocative "Black Jesus" and the memorable "Black Coffee."

Well, if nothing else, the search for the year's dumbest album title is over. And in some respects, the search for the year's dumbest album, too. True, Limp Bizkit's third release is filled with thrashworthy hooks, hardcore beats, and plenty of blind rage, but frontman Fred Durst is so inarticulate about exactly what is pissing him off that it's tough to take him seriously.

This disc is all over the map, in terms of style, energy, and overall execution.... the band sounds fine but too often lapses into cuteness with songs that don't hold up beyond novelty appeal.

An album awash in old new wave sonics, borrowed Ziggy-isms, and facile science fiction claptrap. As you'd expect with an album called Vapor Transmission, it suffers from quite a bit of gas.

Not only is this "collection of previously unreleased material, rarities, and B-sides" far better than most such discs, but, quite frankly, it's also superior to most regular albums.

Soul Daddy offers the real spirit of the Daddies, a blend of styles that rocks as much as it swings, taking side trips into soul reggae and smoky lounge blues along the way. The combination makes for a much more potent recording.

Instead of serving up another platter laden with goopy ballads or attempts to revivify '40s swing, Midler sets her sights on more ambitious and varied targets this time, with engaging covers of easygoing soul tunes and a few spicier selections tossed in. The results, while promising, are a mixed bag.

Listening to Breach, the meat-and-potatoes rock of Bruce Springsteen and especially Tom Petty comes immediately to mind... Breach is one of the most anticipated rock releases of the year, and it clearly is worthy of all the talk it has generated.

Bowie at the Beeb isn't just a historic document; it's a fascinating portrait of a man ascending to the height of his musical powers.

Unfortunately, Rule 3:36, which does feature a few worthwhile moments, doesn't string enough strong tracks together to be a cohesive, effective listen.

An ardent and successful attempt by the British quintet to divorce and distance itself from its past and to reinvent both itself and our notions of pop music, using soundscapes rather than songs, and instrumental choices that are a far cry from the group's previous forays into its own brand of guitar rock.... odd, perplexing, and utterly fascinating...

The stripped-down arrangements and meditative flavor of the songs bring to mind such uncluttered efforts as 1983's Hearts and Bones or even Simon's 1972 solo debut.

Sailing to Philadelphia represents yet another high watermark in his impressive recording career.... If there's anything to quibble about here, it's that the CD's energy sags because it contains so many ballads and mood pieces.

The lack of quality material here isn't the only problem with Revelation; the entire production lags as well.

The Black Eyed Peas are much better musicians and rappers, and play the majority of the instruments on Bridging the Gap. Their songwriting, however, is somewhat suspect...

Ratdog is... weighed down on its debut by a sense of its own mortality.... And, like the Dead, Ratdog's forays into spirituality, notably the dippy "Two Djinn," only serve to give unbelievers more fodder for ridicule.

An album of stunning acoustic folk-blues... Hiatt is at his absolute sharpest in terms of songwriting, and the arrangements, most often just guitar, bass, and mandolin or a second guitar, are fully fleshed out and never feel spare or slight.

Edited and mixed with Sandman's oversight prior to his death, Bootleg: Detroit was taped by a Morphine fan at the band's March 3, 1994, show at Detroit's St. Andrew's Hall, capturing the band and its hyper-aware fans at the height of pleasure.

Working from a crate stuffed with quality cuts that blur the lines between trance, techno, and tribal house, Oakenfold deliberately showcases selections that err on the melancholy or contemplative side... Contrasted against the sometimes formulaic feel of Oakenfold's other comps, this is a stellar reminder of why he's remained a superstar for so long in a genre that's notorious for its short attention span.

As always, the acoustic pop tracks remain the Go-Between's most effective.... It's clear that the band's heyday, those heady times that supplied fans with a surfeit of astonishingly good pop songs... are over, but there's also no doubt that McLennan and Forster can still turn out quality goods.

Well-constructed but largely uninspiring... Its lyrics offer little that's dynamic or artful, so what are listeners really left with? Decent melodies, to be sure, and nicely produced tracks... But deep down, the music and lyrics rarely match up, and few songs establish a mood for long enough to hang your heart on.

The surprise is how extraordinarily well it all fits together, songs and guest vocalists pulled from all over the landscape, all blues and all inescapably Willie.

[Co-producer Mirwais Ahmadzai's] deft touch for crafting disarmingly warm songs out of synthetic tools gives Music a rich, human quality that nicely underscores Madonna's quietly personal -- if purposefully vague -- lyrics.... it's the music that ultimately sucks us into Music.

Without the context of the film, the songs don't stand particularly well on their own for the purposes of casual listening.

Divorced from the event's theatrics, this 2-CD set is immensely unsatisfying.... it's as if the life has been choreographed out of the performances.

Maroon is BNL's grown-up album, still full of clever wordplay and winking couplets, but also dealing with dark and sometimes disarming matters of adulthood.

She still suffers under the Whitney-Mariah delusion that Volume equals Passion, which proves to be her greatest undoing on this 11-song set.

She's older, wiser, and more steadied in her approach across the 11 songs that make up the album, but had this disc come out in 1997 or 1998, it would've been seen as a somewhat less-impressive follow-up to Relish.

Some of the strangest lyrical fodder ever to inhabit radio-ready fare.

Jones' fans may be disappointed at the lack of original material and the shortness of the set -- just over 37 minutes -- but as a showcase for the singer's interpretive talents, it's dynamite.

Harris is making music that stands with -- and perhaps eclipses -- her most well-regarded work.

Every track is at least fleetingly familiar, often having that feeling of the B-side that you haven't heard in years.... Still, adding a few hits wouldn't have hurt the soundtrack's shot at longevity...

Everything, Everything is a solid live album, and a great introduction to the music of Underworld, even if its most transcendent moments prove to be all too fleeting.

Though clever in origin, once these sounds have been identified, the songs themselves are rarely compelling enough to prompt return visits.

Not only does every song here work beautifully on its own, but the recording listens cohesively front to back, from the frosty chime of "Unsound" to the enchanting blues of the closing "Healer."

These 14 tracks forego the polish that distinguishes today's chart-topping fare, but each one bristles with a frisson in which honesty and artifice fuse, fashioning an enduring mini-masterpiece of pop.

Gerald's mastery of his own sound and style generally triumphs over his occasional lapses in focus.

A welcome antidote to the hard rock and bubble-gum pop flooding today's airwaves.

The lyricism is, as always, witty, wry, and full of cleverly deployed twists, along with literary and cultural allusions and smart metaphors...

Teddy Thompson, son of veteran singer-songwriter Richard Thompson, avoids the tracks laid out on his father's Celtic-tinged, guitar-centered folk rock and instead mines a pop-lite style framed in a gentle vibe.... Surprisingly, the results are better than one might expect.

The record succeeds on the strength of Williams' tremendously appealing musical personality and her winning songs.

But while The Mirror Conspiracy is lush relaxation music, it can be too relaxed at times. Some of the tracks, such as "So Com Voce," feel bland and lack the rhythmic ideas driving standout cuts like "Lebanese Blonde" and "Le Monde."

There will be few albums released this year that are as exciting, artistic, and, yes, eclectic as this one, and it's scary to think of what Wyclef will be capable of when he gets all of the elements in their perfect proportions.

Although its moods swing across the dial, it more than delivers on the group's initial promise.

Taken individually, the tracks on G.O.A.T. often stand tall, and as a rapper, LL Cool J is unparalleled -- his delivery is unique and totally familiar. Brought together as a whole, however, the record falls short of the near perfection he's found in the past...

Spring Heel Jack's latest seems so willfully irritating, careening from one idea to the next, with little regard for such pop conventions as melody, rhythm, or harmony, that one can't help but wonder -- albeit fleetingly -- if it just might point toward a whole new style of music.

Like far too many bands whose members bring strong musical pedigrees to the project, Unified Theory's sum is less than its parts -- despite, or perhaps because of, an abundance of adventurous spirit and experimental zeal.

Too often Coxon's sketches-in-song come off as coy experiments -- fascinating to himself, perhaps, but holding little interest for those of us outside the lab.

As always, Alvin's guitar work is wonderfully supple and emotive, and stands out as the centerpiece of his arrangements. But, even more gratifying, a decade after leaving the Blasters, in which his brother Phil handled the vocal duties, Alvin has finally found his voice as a singer.

By most standards, Mosaic Thump would be considered an excellent album, but this is De La Soul.

As best-of joints go, The Evidence is solid, featuring a bevy of T's greatest cuts, as well as a few left-field inclusions.

It seems that the usual brilliant, blunted band has been replaced by an upbeat upstart that's only recently discovered this thing called funk, while also becoming increasingly enamored by rap -- all at the expense of its sultry, seductive star vocalist, Skye Edwards...

Without a doubt one of the best pop records of the year.

But as the songs blow by like so much sonic shrapnel, Rancid runs the risk of trying to say too much too quickly and losing its voice amid the ranting, raging blur.

An energetic and ambitious collection-

A rousing, driving smack in the face of all things pop, punk, and hard rock.

His impressively relentless battle raps offer a barrage of metaphorical violence delivered with a vehement rat-a-tat-tat.

The band has introduced cleanser and furniture polish into the summer cleaning, sweeping away the rough edges and brightening up the melodies, which results in the group's best-sounding album to date.

A perfectly serviceable modern-rock record-

Beenie Man's smooth adaptability works against him, as the 17 tracks almost inevitably contain a few less than stellar ones. For the most part, however, Art and Life has more good than bad.

The result is not only a more ambitious album than one might have expected, it's also a substantial step forward from Urban Hymns, the Verve's own crowning achievement.

The 10-song album... hits and misses in equal quantities, though even at its worst moments, there's at least a germ of a good idea that simply wasn't realized -- or, in the case of some of the album's longer tracks, was overdone.

What is meant to sound languid and trippy instead comes across as overwrought and pretentious?

The band is beguilingly hypnotic, making music that is decidedly off-kilter. Guitars swirl, grind, and mesh with fluid rhythms and haunting melodies.

A dense and textured rock affair that builds a bridge between grunge, goth, and industrial stylings.

Enter Faith and Courage, an album that reclaims O'Connor's status and stature as it presents us with a kinder, gentler, and matured artist who still sings like a wily archangel and writes with passionate, purposeful clarity.

The disc's first single, "Someone Else Not Me," makes it clear that although the band often sticks to the same songwriting formula, there are still new melodies left to explore.

Plaintive, nakedly honest lyrics collide with keen observation... an hour of enrapturing atmosphere.

Moves with a quick tempo that whips through the album's 15 songs and assorted skits.... There's something innately joyous about many of the group's songs, whether it's how the J5 MCs play verbal double-dutch over the pulsating "Jurass Finish First" or the assembly of sampled snippets that drive the playground anthem "Monkey Bars."

It's not precisely rock and roll, more a summary of the stylistic fusion that has evolved over his last five albums: unequal parts rock, bluegrass, folk, Irish, and punk.

Scottish pop whizzes Belle and Sebastian have finally found a way to rid themselves of their onerous rep as critics' darlings: They've made an album that isn't very good.

Van Helden's compositional modus operandi doesn't vary much between the 11 tracks, but it's a combination that rarely fails to deliver a knockout punch. He introduces one element -- a vocal snippet or a jazzy drum break -- and milks it for a spell, before introducing a contrasting timbre. The two begin to climb in and around each other, as Van Helden tweaks and twists various effects, bringing the music and momentum to a dizzy, unsettling pitch.

Rock affirms that he is no overnight sensation...

Displays a broader sonic reach than its predecessor.

A melange of rather unremarkable vocals; ambitious, overwrought dance-pop; and lyrics that occasionally read and sound like English as a second language.

The Platform, for all its individual strengths, never hits any kind of synergy as an album.

Matchbox Twenty never claimed to be original or challenging or anything more than a lightweight and entertaining pop band. Which is why Mad Season, with its rather casual and jammy feel, is so surprising, so substantial, and much more satisfying than expected.