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

Too often it sounds only half completed...

Oops! does succeed in making Spears sound sexier and meatier -- and not that innocent -- as its team of top-shelf producers (particularly Max Martin and Rodney Jerkins) supports her adenoidal vocals and breathy hiccups with bottom-heavy arrangements that provide a bit more thrust and pump to the proceedings.

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.

These songs don't require repeated listening to foster appreciation; they affect immediately -- and relentlessly.

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."

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.

Despite the initial futuristic impression, Cole proves himself to be guilty of the same superficial high concepts that taint far too many dance music albums. Still, there's much to recommend here, especially when Cole sticks to the grooves.

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.

The Donnas do what they do just fine, but, four albums into their career, you can't help but want to see a little bit of growth in place of arrested development.

It's one of the best rock and roll records in years... the disc is a layered, beautiful thing that touches on every influence the band has revealed through its years with a refined production style that sounds at once edgy and glitteringly smooth.

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.

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.

The sort of disc that inevitably prompts skeptics to ask, "You call that music?"

Scorpion, her second solo album in three years, stands a good chance of blowing up the airwaves and charts, though it still battles with the hardcore elements that made her first album such a disappointment.

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...

Flowers features the familiar psychedelic-tinged pop songwriting, chiming guitars, and unmistakable voice that have always been the group's trademark, but 20 years down the road, experience, nostalgia, and longing have tempered the band's sound.

The Electric Mile more than meets expectations because this fifth effort is the group's most fully realized.

Nicks' sixth solo album is her strongest since 1983's The Wild Heart.

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.

A formless collection that drifts from one tune to the next, weighed down by a general sense of murk that pervades everything from Tchad Blake's production to the song arrangements and the lyrics.

Fans who have waited patiently for a proper follow-up to 1989's acclaimed Disintegration should be pleased, if not necessarily bowled over by Bloodflowers, a deeply felt album with a similarly downcast mood.

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

With its grove of synthesizers, sequencers, and sonically treated vocals, it's music without pulp -- or a great deal of heart.

The results are not bad -- nor are they dynamic. It's shiny and it shimmers, but there's no fizz, no explosion.

Reed has lost neither his lyrical bite nor his sonic perfectionism.

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.

The members of the group craft melodic grooves that mesh with unpolished but tuneful guitars and mellow vocals into a lo-fi ambient sound that grows on the listener.

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

Fifth Release is an intoxicating cocktail of beats and colors that swirl and explode like a Roy Lichtenstein collage. When Pizzicato Five gets in this zone, which they do repeatedly here, all the world's a runway, and everyone's a size four and working it on pinpoint stilettos.

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.

Overall, God Bless the Go-Go's is a spirited, entertaining album that was worth the wait.

This is an album about textures, grooves, and sounds, but it's not really about songs. Once one is done decoding its structure, Look Into the Eyeball is an elegant but empty building.

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.

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.

Uncompromising and wildly unpredictable, but only intermittently entertaining.

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

The music on Return of Saturn... is a bit darker than it was on Tragic Kingdom, but it's no less energetic.

[Glen] Ballard's production, arrangements, and co-writing duties have massaged the 12 songs into a searing rock album.

The blond brothers' creative maturity is evident all over the disc's 13 songs.

God Says No maintains the attributes of its predecessor but also delves deeper into the groove-y psychedelia that's also part of the band's makeup.

But while it contains its fair share of hypnotic pop gems, The Geometrid is missing that extra something...

In a genre that is often as repetitive as it is flighty, the witty and musically well-informed Essential Mix, though unrevelatory, works beyond the club floor, too.

Ultimately, 999 Levels of Undo is a fascinating study of a visionary musician -- unfortunately, it's not an especially compelling listen.

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.

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."

Time Bomb packs an incendiary wallop that's as noisy as nighttime on the Fourth of July.

Occasionally, it all works, coalescing into something with passion and imagination... In other spots, however, Frusciante's amateur (and sometimes listless) singing proves to be a major letdown, even with souped-up reverbs and megaphonic EQ-ing.

The songs, however, are principally concerned with creating atmosphere, as has always been the band's strength. Only this time the atmosphere is centered on Michae [Timmins's] contemplations of his own mortality, and it seeks musical complexity, not simplicity.

A smooth and engaging affair, with consistently strong singing and playing from Clapton.

But other selections feel more like skeletal sketches than finished songs, composed of interesting components but short on fully developed ideas and momentum. Great stuff for background noise at a party, or in a TV commercia, but not necessarily compelling headphone fare.

The band members unleash meditative, self-consciously poetic jams, solidifying their status as the hipster's Phish.

White Pepper may make listeners put off by Ween's crudeness give them another chance.

At nearly an hour and a quarter, the album does feel a little long, especially when it falls prey to the ponderousness that made Adore drag...

Some of Hatfield's best work ever... [v]irtually every track here is memorable, and often heart-rending, revolving around Hatfield's strengths as an artist: her baby-girl voice; her frank, naive lyrics; and her acoustic melodies.

Bright, punchy, and well crafted, it slathers an extra layer of grinding guitars on top of the Vol. One sound while maintaining the group's melodic trademarks.

Though his voice and attitude crosses Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant's nasally histrionics with Gary Numan's clinical whelp, [Brian] Molko generally keeps his guitar playing tight and tough with Gothic overtones.

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.

An energetic and ambitious collection-

It gets tiresome, sure, but should this Dogg be put to sleep? Not yet. He's still coming up with funky beats and rhymes (like every single day).

Lyrically, they've got a ways to go.... That said, Alien Ant Farm shows some real potential.

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

It's just, well, it's just another Depeche Mode album -- a solid near-hour's worth of moody, darkly insidious tunes about such time-honored topics as love, death, and pain... and love and death.

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

One of the group's most adventurous outings...

And while there's a temptation to write this -- and Martin -- off as just another pop-tart confection reprising a proven sonic formula, the fact remains that the singer and his cohorts craft music that's undeniably engaging, tuneful, and, quite often, lots of fun.

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.

Pretty self-indulgent and insular, sounding at times like it was made for its creators' pleasure and little else.

Rock affirms that he is no overnight sensation...

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.

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.

Destiny's Child vamps, stamps, and oozes its way through a set of sparely arranged showcases for its layered vocal weave...

Like so many of Master P's own productions, the music here stems almost completely from synthesizers, a fact that diminishes the potency of the grooves on My World, My Way. With so many of the right elements in place on tracks like "Beef" and "Uh Ha," it's a shame to hear cheesy synth lines where a shattering bass should have been.

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.

A deeply contemplative album...

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.

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...

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.

A grab-bag set of videos and live and unreleased recordings that are more of an enhancement for devotees' collections than an introduction for neophytes.

Surprisingly and disappointingly tame.

Pitching in on Road Rock are such longstanding Young cohorts as Spooner Oldham (keyboards), Jim Keltner (drums), and Ben Keith (guitars), but such is the CD's murky sound that the contributions of all are rendered a bit flat. Moreover, although the collection clocks in at 65 minutes, the performance feels truncated and lacks thematic unity.

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

OCS is quite simply straight-up and ultra-refreshing, expert in crafting great pop songs and equally adept at letting the music do its talking.

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.

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.

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

Not only do many of the tunes have a similar feel, but Monahan, whose dusty vocals put the band on the map with the hit single "Meet Virginia" in 1999, is regularly drowned out by the soaring guitars and effects.

From the start, Because We Hate You presents itself as a rawer, more blustery affair.

On the group's first live album --a two-CD set recorded during triumphant return shows at London's Wembley Arena this summer -- however, the maturity that has started to pervade their personal lives, and Noel's music, is evident.

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.

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.

They've offered us more inventive, more substantial work in the past...

The only significant problem with Kidman and McGregor's numbers, which constitute half of this 15-track set, is that they don't work as well without the accompanying visuals.

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.

Since Headache doesn't go for any of Rush's extended instrumental outings or skewed dynamics, the onus is on Lee and Mink's melodies, which are generally strong and taut, building on familiar elements but adding a bit more sheen and smoothly executed changes to the mix.

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.

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.

Stewart is surely a fine singer, but not quite at that level of being able to make the phone book sound like a masterpiece. He needs the songs, and on Human, he's only as good as the material that others provide.