This ambitious project explores roots music without the scholarly subtext of an Alan Lomax recording, offering instead a simple but powerful reinterpretation of the originals.

An outrageously accomplished and daring album-

P's best effort yet, a 70-minute affair with not quite as much filler as he's weighed in with on past projects.

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.

Surprisingly and disappointingly tame.

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.

Musically, the group goes way beyond Britpop, a movement largely of its own invention, to survey Burt Bacharach-style suavity on "The Universal" and "To the End," hedonistic dance pop on "Girls and Boys," and Lennon-esque soul-baring on "Tender."

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.

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.

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.

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.