There’s desperation (like when a Latin pop star suddenly goes hip-hop with Scott Storch), and then there’s desperación. Ricky Martin knows both on the misguided, lopsided “I Don’t Care.” With Amerie and Fat Joe providing vacant counterpoints, Ricky’s maximal emotion clashes with Storch’s sitarlike minimalism. It’s less comeback single and…

As brilliantly laid-back as her flow on the agitated “Shut Up,” Lil’ Kim won’t survive the slammer by acting this soft. Over Nintendo-meets-reggaeton minimalism (think the Neptunes with spice), Kim sharpens her shiv for gossips like Wendy Williams and Star Jones. But when jail takes up your foreseeable future, it’s…

If musical styles are skyscrapers, then Degenerate is the sound of towers falling. Though it traverses the ruins of dubstep, industrial, hip-hop, and jungle, the album is mostly defined by its aggressive sparseness, the product of the pair’s Timbalandesque reverence for between-beat space. It’s so desolate there isn’t even a…

Usually when a music man becomes a businessman (say, by being named an executive at Virgin Records), the music that plays loudest in his head goes cha-ching. And no disrespect to Clive, Quincy, or Jigga, but Jermaine Dupri hears this music clearer than most. Over the past year, J.D. has…

Babyface knows a thing or two about catching flies with sugar. He almost single-handedly sweetened Nineties pop music with a string of hits that delighted audiences and angered critics. The then-derided, now-ignored, and consequently underrated super-songwriter/producer’s seventh album, Grown & Sexy, is a tasty, subtle rebuttal to pop culture’s youth…

Childlike wonder swarms around Ladybug Mecca’s solo debut, Trip the Light Fantastic, as she skips from genre to genre and her voice flutters between singing and rapping. With each recollection of grade school, each whimsical protagonist, and each jump-rope-rhyme chorus, it’s clearer that for this member of the newly reformed…

When given the right backdrop, Guru’s relaxed purr is the picture of effortless force. When it’s not, the ex-Gang Starr/would-be superstar simply sounds bored. Not that you could blame him for yawning through the overstuffed Version 7.0. “If I sold out/I coulda sold millions,” he claims on “Hall of Fame,”…

Leave it to a pair of wacky Germans to encapsulate dance music’s Roland TB-303 revival/regression (the 303 is the bass line machine that started it all in house music and is responsible for the squelchy “acid” sound) into a single album. The Return to Acid Planet finds the usually IDM-leaning…

Fat Joe’s lips move, his made-for-music timbre bellows, and, in the end, little is said. The Bronx native’s lyrical vacancy is tragic considering his intellect, pummeling flow, and infectious charisma. His music should be better. But enough’s enough. On his sixth album, All or Nothing, it’s as though even his…

Norwegian pop extraordinaire Annie Lilia Berge Strand’s blog-darling status means the U.S. release of her debut, Anniemal, is virtually irrelevant; it’s been out in Europe since last fall, so you probably downloaded it already. But that’s okay, since Anniemal revels in the past. Annie, along with producers such as Richard…

On her sophomore album, The Golden Morning Breaks, Parisian Cécile Schott (a.k.a. Colleen) ditches the samples that dominated her 2003 debut, Everyone Alive Wants Answers, for some found sounds of her own making. Like a one-woman Animal Collective, Schott composes her music to sound spontaneous, as if each lovely melody…

Because 2005 seems to be the year when scattered is the new focused, Gorillaz’s sophomore album, Demon Days, couldn’t sound savvier. Damon Albarn’s melodies burst with stop-on-a-dime aplomb, while coproducer Danger Mouse incorporates every genre in the pop-music rainbow in his sound palette and still manages to keep things lean…

“They say the crocheted pants and the sweater was wack/Seen ‘The Corner,’ now they say that nigga’s back,” raps Common on “They Say,” a jingling track on his sixth album, Be. The consciously scaled-down Be, then, is yin to 2002’s Electric Circus, an album of avant- and acid-hop yang that…

With his Headphones project, Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan goes in like a lamb, completely replacing his lovingly strummed guitars with something even gauzier and nicer: warm, analog-sounding electronics. With help from Lion drummer Tim Walsh, Bazan creates some of his most understated work, lulling with his cottony voice and…

When some kids look under their beds, they see monsters; when 26-year-old Matthew Adam Hart looks under his, he hears symphonies. His third album under his Russian Futurists moniker, the charming Our Thickness, bursts with a bedroom sound that’s so lo-fi and grandiose it’s warm just from the overheating of…

The IDM-pioneering British pair Autechre is never boring. Its eighth full-length, Untilted, is a simultaneously impressive and intimidating study in rhythm. Barely-there melodies season a succession of ominous beats. Frenetic kicks hit lithely like thousands of points of death, and snares snap like bear traps. The epic tracks are more…

The biggest statement Fischerspooner could have made regarding a second album would have been to not make it at all. The lip-synching, Wire-covering, Italo-loving icons never met a concept too high — in their dance hit “Emerge,” they championed “hyper-mediocrity,” the most succinct description of electroclash’s driving force. They could…

If U.K. acid house and drum and bass pioneer Gerald Simpson (a.k.a. A Guy Called Gerald) was in top shape on 1995’s Black Secret Technology, then To All Things What They Need finds him soft in the middle. At best, To All Things What They Need has the distinct sound…

When Chic told dancers to find a spot out on the floor and “Awwwwww, freak out!” it’s doubtful the group expected anyone to take it quite as literally as MU frontwoman Mutsumi Kanamori. Like a career diva on a perpetual comedown, Kanamori hits the ground (make that four-on-the-floor) ranting. With…

Too often, parades amount to a whole lot of waiting around and not very much action. Unfortunately, Ellen Allien’s My Parade is no different. At first, it seems like anything goes on her second official DJ mix. The Berlinette opens with Midi Rain’s “Always,” an early Nineties house number with…

Psapp’s Galia Durant and Carim Clasmann don’t wanna grow up, but they’re more like garage-sale kids than Toys ‘R Us brats. The London-based duo’s debut album, Tiger, My Friend, is full of toy keyboards, and squeaks and rattles sound off as Durant sings tales of separation anxiety, ponies, and zoos…