By the time of 2004's Body Language, Kylie Minogue was seemingly unassailable, with three hit albums (both critically and commercially), a number of hit singles, and a recharged career that only a few years before had seemed precarious at best. She backed up the new material with a collection (Ultimate Kylie) that boasted excellent new material as well. All things seemed to be destined for further glory. And then, unfortunately, cancer hit. While she did recover fully from her illness and ordeal, there was some speculation on how she would deal with this event, and how her music and choice of collaborators would be affected. Many artists have come back from a potentially life-threatening disease with work that is a flat-out declaration of victory, songs and images that are thinly shrouded metaphors for rebirth or newfound strength. Therefore, it must have surprised many that the leadoff from Kylie's new record would be "2 Hearts," a '70s-style Roxy Music-esque glam jam that clocks in at under three minutes, and is -- seemingly -- devoid of any sort of "I'm back from the brink" anthemizing. Couple this pop gem with the gaudy early-'80s artwork, and the buzz was that Kylie was not only back, but back with a Me Decade swagger and ready to take back the momentum she'd been building since 2000. But to call X an '80s record is really only getting halfway there. Sure, the cover art is vintage 1982, and the majority of the record calls on production tricks and techniques that are of the same time, but much of the record calls on different eras -- not generalized decades as such, but eras in Kylie's own career. Most of the tracks could have fit in on earlier work, answering the question: what does a pop artist do when she's come full circle? She's been influenced as of late by '70s disco and '80s electro, but with X, it feels like Kylie has decided to take inspiration from Kylie herself.

The Eraser, Thom Yorke's first album away from Radiohead, is intensely focused and steady. It doesn't have the dynamics -- the shifts of mood, tempo, volume -- held by any Radiohead album, and it's predominantly electronic, so it's bound to rankle many of the fans who thought Kid A was too unhinged from rock & roll. It's definitely not the kind of album you put on to get an instant shot of energy, and at the same time, it doesn't contain anything as sullen as "How to Disappear Completely." Since it is so balanced, it might initially seem unwavering, but the details that differentiate the songs become increasingly apparent with each successive listen. Despite a reliance on machine beats and synthetic textures, Yorke's untouched, upfront vocals and relatively straightforward lyrics should be enough to bring back some of the detractors; he would have no trouble taking these songs on the road with a piano and an acoustic guitar. "Black Swan," the standout, comes across as a less guitar-heavy and more subdued version of Amnesiac's "I Might Be Wrong." Peek beneath the surface and you'll see that there's a lot more seething involved: "You have tried your best to please everyone/But it just isn't happening/No, it just isn't happening/And it's f*cked up, f*cked up." The opener, the title track, asks the album's first set of probing questions, including "Are you only being nice because you want something?" Along with the thoroughly sweet "Atoms for Peace," it vies for the album's prettiest-sounding five minutes, elevating into a chorus of hovering sighs as Yorke projects lightly with a matter-of-fact tone, "The more I try to erase you, the more, the more, the more that you appear." On the explicitly political end is "Harrowdown Hill," anchored by a snapping bass riff and percussive accents that skitter and slide back and forth between the left and right channels. Yorke defeatedly states, "You will be dispensed with when you become inconvenient," and asks "Did I fall or was I pushed?" referring to Dr. David Kelly, a whistle-blowing U.N. weapons inspector whose death -- which took place following a sequence of events that led to a testimonial before a parliamentary committee -- was ruled a suicide. It's no shock that the album entails some heavy subject matter and sounds as close to a version of Radiohead minus four of its members as one can imagine. What distinguishes The Eraser from the Radiohead albums, beyond the aspects mentioned above, is its ability to function in the background or as light listening without the requirement of deep concentration. The constant stream of soft, intricately layered sounds, while not without a great deal of tension in most spots, can be very comforting. Yorke's assertion that the album isn't truly a solo release is accurate. Producer Nigel Godrich, whose relationship with Radiohead exceeds a decade, played a major role, contributing arrangements, "extra instruments," and enough influence to guide the album into its tight song-oriented structure. Without him, the well-executed album would've likely sounded a lot closer to the kind of stray-idea patchwork experiment that so many other long-boiling side projects resemble. And, to a somewhat lesser extent, Yorke needed his bandmates as well; some of the sounds were pulled and manipulated from a bank of the band's unused recordings. (review by Andy Kellman at allmusic.com)

Hard Candy is the sound of a band at a creative and poetic summit. Over three previous studio recordings, Counting Crows have moved through varied musical territories as a way of conveying emotion through performance, texture, and nuance, the place where the mood meets the heart meets the mind. Hard Candy is both a radical departure from the band's previous method of recording, and contextually an affirmation of what sets them apart from virtually every other band on the rock & roll scene: their commitment to songwriting as craft. These 13 tracks are strongly committed to conveying a song in the hook rather than in the lyric. They are tight, crisp, and razor-sharp pop songs on a bright, shiny, rock record. Every backing vocal, every lilting string, trumpet line, or piano run, was meticulously crafted and scripted into this invigorating musical architecture -- and lyrically, Adam Duritz offers at least as much as he's given on any other album. The set opens with the title track, a wide-open 4/4 rocker illustrated by shimmering piano lines and ringing Byrds-like 12-string electric guitars punching up the middle. Duritz sings with an Allen Ginsberg-like heroic candor: "On certain Sundays in November when the weather bothers me/I empty drawers of other summers/where my shadows used to be...You send your lover off to China and you wait for her to call/You put your girl up on a pedestal and you wait for her to fall/I put my summers back in a letter/All the regrets you can't forget are somehow pressed upon a picture in the face of such an ordinary girl." These lines reflect the entwined themes that run through virtually every song on the record: memory, the regret of loss due to ignorance, and pervasive loneliness in everyday life. Even the humorous songs here, such as the first single, "American Girls," offer candid meditations on these subjects. Other tracks, such as "Butterfly Reverse," co-written with Ryan Adams, offer stunningly textured instrumentation and wondrously pastoral pop melodies accented by a grand piano holding the middle against a huge wash of fawning strings and rim shots as the lyrics drip like dirty rainwater into a puddle in the middle of the street. Ultimately, this record, with its many seeming aberrations, will no doubt attract new fans without alienating the old. These 13 stories are as wondrously accessible in their sheeny glory, yet as moving and profound as anything pop music has to offer. (Review by Thom Jurek at allmusic.com)

Breathless praise is a time-honored tradition in British pop music, but even so, the whole brouhaha surrounding the 2006 debut of the Arctic Monkeys bordered on the absurd. It wasn't enough for the Arctic Monkeys to be the best new band of 2006; they had to be the saviors of rock & roll. Lead singer/songwriter Alex Turner had to be the best songwriter since Noel Gallagher or perhaps even Paul Weller, and their debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, at first was hailed as one of the most important albums of the decade, and then, just months after its release, NME called it one of the Top Five British albums ever. Heady stuff for a group just out of their teens, and they weathered the storm with minimal damage, losing their bassist but not their sense of purpose as they coped in the time-honored method for young bands riding the wave of enormous success: they kept on working. All year long they toured, rapidly writing and recording their second album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, getting it out just a little over a year after their debut, a speedy turnaround by any measure. Some may call it striking when the iron is hot, cashing in while there's still interest, but Favourite Worst Nightmare is the opposite of opportunism: it's the vibrant, thrilling sound of a band coming into its own.