Kristin The Island Girl's Pick:
OneRepublic - Dreaming Out Loud
If, like most of the pop-listening public, you heard Timbaland's chart-topping remix of OneRepublic's single "Apologize" before you heard the original, you may be mildly confused about what kind of music the band makes. Timabaland's signature electronic swizzles and "eh-eh-eh"s leave the impression that OneRepublic is a style-heavy outfit a la Maroon 5, but frontman Ryan Tedder's plaintive words and woebegone themes don't fall far from forerunners Keane, Coldplay, and the Fray. Dreaming Out Loud chisels away at the dichotomy. "Apologize," stripped of its swizzles, is a gorgeous modern rock song made all the more gorgeous by the urgency in Tedder's striking, unscuffed voice, and a lot of the songs on this record stack up similarly. --Tammy La Gorce for Amazon.com
Tyler's Pick:
Linkin Park - Minutes To Midnight
Rap-metal's sell-by date expired many, many years ago, and no one noticed more than Linkin Park, whose "Minutes to Midnight" finds the band throwing all manner of styles at the wall to distance it from a genre that currently enjoys a lower approval rating than Cheney. Linkin Park's ambitions are nearly palpable, but songs likely conceived as homages end up sounding too close to their sources. One can detect bits of Metallica ("No More Sorrow"), the theme from "Halloween" (first single "What I've Done"), "With or Without You" ("Shadow of the Day") and a breakup ballad that could have been written by the Matrix ("Leave Out All the Rest"). Sometimes the band hits: The hand clap-powered "Bleed It Out" works up a nice lather, and Shinoda's anti-war monologue "Hands Held High" proves there might yet be more in Linkin Park's backpack than self-doubt and identity crises. ~Jeff Vrabel for Billboard.com
Doormatt's Pick:
Lupe Fiasco - The Cool
A lot of musicians claim to ignore their critics, but Lupe Fiasco evidently not only reads them, but organizes his response into album form: "Robots and skateboards, nigga? GQ Man of the Year, G?" intones a group of many fictional haters on "The Cool." A semi-concept record soaking with ambition and featuring characters named the Streets, the Cool and the Game, "The Cool" is also a sprawling term paper on most of the problems with mainstream hip-hop ("I'm brainless, which means I'm headless, like Ichabod Crane is . . . with no neck left to hang a chain with," he scowls in character), and why he is the man to fix it. At times it's a bit snobby, but never less than listenable and frequently gripping. His flow has certainly limbered up ("Go Go Gadget Flow" and the funky, near-playful "Gold Watch"), and his pitfalls-of-fame riffs (first single "Superstar") are bemused and cautionary rather than gloaty. ~Jeff Vrabel for Billboard.com
