LL Cool J, Barenaked Ladies Lead New Releases

Rap is built on boasting, but LL Cool J takes hip-hop hubris to the bridge on his eighth album, G.O.A.T. The title is an acronym for "the greatest of all time." But LL has been rocking the bells since his 1985 debut, Radio, which is a century in rap years. "I'm on a hot streak," he boasts in "Take It Off," and G.O.A.T. glows with the heat of his rhymes.

G.O.A.T. also finds LL hot under the collar. LL's enemies, like Canibus and Jamie Foxx, get charred like bad barbecue. And LL's songwriting doesn't go much beyond "the life of a legend and all the drama it brings" ("Back Where I Belong"). On "Imagine That," he rhymes, "You can read The Iliad and the whole Odyssey/But no Trojan soldier scold ya like me."

LL's social consciousness is as subtle as a Scud missile. "I don't mean this in a disrespectful way/But Columbine happens in the ghetto every day," he states in "Homicide." When it comes to love rhymes, he favors raunchy fantasies like the one in "Imagine That": "Imagine I'm your teacher and you stayed after school/You've been a bad girl, you broke all the rules/Forgot your homework, chewed gum in class/And the only way to fix it is to give me some ass." But LL's delivery is so sly and seductive, he can be as nasty as he wants to be. And he has the beats to back it up, courtesy of top hip-hop studio hands like Rockwilder, Trackmasters and, on the title track, British drum-and-bass groove rider Adam F.

LL not only believes he's the greatest of all time, he tests himself against the best. "Fuhgidabowdit" finds him exchanging verse with DMX, Method Man and Redman; "U Can't F**K With Me" features West Coast titans Snoop Dogg, Xzibit and Jayo Felony. In both cases, the veteran holds his own and more. In fact, G.O.A.T. highlights LL's greatest talent: to be everything to everybody. A freaky hybrid of bad boy and good guy, LL is as hard as any gangsta but can also be cuddly and sincere. And he's got showmanship to spare. (MATT DIEHL -- RS 850)

Barenaked Ladies Maroon (Reprise)

The pros call them "placeholders" -- nonsense words used by songwriters to keep the rhythm on track until the real lyrics come along. Barenaked Ladies have built a lucrative career out of such throwaway lyrics. 1998's aptly named Stunt found songwriters Ed Robertson and Steven Page feeding phrase after disconnected phrase into the one-liner machine, churning out the kind of convoluted couplets only a student of game theory could love. Their fans recognized "One Week" and other wordy missives as the musical equivalent of Instant Messages -- incomplete but heartfelt, dashed off and opaque, open to multiple interpretations.

Now the reigning kings of geek pop, Canadian division, have decided to start making sense. There are still plenty of adolescent asides on their fifth studio album, Maroon -- the first single, a faintly dub-influenced bonbon called "Pinch Me," alternates between riffs on the existential blankness of modern puberty and such third-grade taunts as "I just made you say underwear." But there are more moments when all-too-human messes lurk beneath the veneer of producer Don Was' perfect pop tracks, moments when the relentless sunniness of the music is pierced by sober themes (the last song, "Tonight Is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel," is a graphic account of car-wreck carnage) and dark, psychological-profile assessments. In turning the snarky level down a notch, Robertson and Page haven't sacrificed the band's good-time giddiness -- they've just opened things up a bit. (CONTINUED)

Emmylou Harris Red Dirt Girl (Nonesuch)

It's telling that Emmylou Harris' new record company is a predominantly classical-music label. By now, Harris is a high-end institution: enduring and refined. Her ethereal voice, with its silken core and ragged edges, is the perfect delivery system for the tastefully chosen songs she has purveyed for three decades. On her latest, the singer who brought country music to intellectuals and intellect to country music has distilled her justifiably well-regarded chops into a smooth-running singer-songwriter machine. This collection of mostly originals, her first since 1985's The Ballad of Sally Rose, is swamped in beauty: swooning vocal harmonies; delicate poetics; lilting Celticisms. Down-home recording touches -- the squeak of a finger on a guitar string; "one-two-three-four" song countdowns -- attest to the just-folks poise of Harris and her band. But Red Dirt Girl is stiflingly exquisite. The songs, lovely as they are, are emotional dead ends, clear-eyed odes to transcendence or heartfelt expressions of empathy -- dewy with biblical and poetic borrowings, free of tension, excitement or ambiguity. If Emmylou Harris was ever a product of the rich red Southern soil, all the grit has washed off by now. (ARION BERGER -- RS 850)

At the Drive-In Relationship of Command (Grand Royal)

Great rock bands emerge from unlikely Valhallas. El Paso, Texas, for instance, inspires the loud desperation of Relationship of Command, At the Drive-In's third album and Grand Royal debut. This quintet of howling Texans has concocted a bracing tonic for our millennial malaise, wrought from equal doses punk, politico-metal-rap and vintage White Panther rage (dig the wild licks and righteous MC5 Afros). Producer Ross Robinson (Korn, Slipknot) adds some arena sheen, true. But it's not enough to smooth the edges off "Arc Arsenal," a primal tantrum against rebels "robbed . . . of their cause," or to homogenize the ragged beats and mind-bending guitar flurries of "Enfilade." When vocalist Cedric Bixler sings about "dancing on the corpse's ashes" on "Invalid Litter Dept.," he's not just discussing the aftermath of a street hassle gone wrong. He's stating his anti-Top Forty manifesto for an ornery rock resurrection. (NEVA CHONIN -- RS 850)

Joan Osborne Righteous Love (Interscope)

What if God were a one-hit wonder? That question must have occurred to Joan Osborne in the years since her spiritually poignant left-field smash "One of Us" -- from her 1995 album, Relish -- turned this Kentucky-born bar-band veteran into an unlikely pop star. And her long-delayed follow-up, Righteous Love, hardly sounds like a sure thing in the context of today's charts. But the record is a good reminder of why Osborne broke through in the first place. The sound of Righteous Love, produced by Mitchell Froom (Crowded House, Los Lobos), often recalls the churchy grace of Al Green's great old Willie Mitchell-produced albums. And while slightly uneven as a writer, Osborne is a convincing, soulful singer in the Bonnie Raitt tradition; she shines in her cover of Bob Dylan's stately "To Make You Feel My Love." Even after such a long wait between records, Osborne impresses with the warmth and human embrace of her voice. She seems like one of us, but with a better set of pipes. (DAVID WILD -- RS 850)

Mudvayne L.D. 50 (Epic)

Mudvayne, a Peoria, Ill., band whose major-label debut, L.D. 50, is executive-produced by Slipknot percussionist Shawn Crahan, paint their faces in kooky designs and cite Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as inspiration. Mudvayne's big songwriting device is the old Nirvana strategy: vulnerability in verses, ape-shit aggression in choruses and a pregnant moment in between, when you hear the voice cracking with the swell of adrenalin. The interesting thing about Mudvayne is that some of them are fancy musicians: Bassist Ryknow has got jazz fusion somewhere in his background, and the band uses disquieting sounds and spoken words to form collages that are clearly influenced by, and better than, the ones on Slipknot's second album. Mudvayne's biggest drawback, though, is that we might not want to know their psychodramas.

"Blame Mother for the sickness," screams singer Kud in "Nothing to Gein" (the title is a reference to Fifties killer Ed Gein). It's one of the many songs these days sung by angry guys with shaved heads about parental figures, real or imagined. "Hypnotizing the ignorant/A little boy's best friend's always his mother/At least, that's what she said. . . ./I'm just a soiled, dirty boy." These are the least aggressive lyrics on the album, but they are clearly the basis of Kud's anger, which tumbles out in lines like, "Let me help you tie the rope around your neck/Let me help to talk you the wrong way off the ledge." (BEN RATLIFF -- RS 850)

Various Artists Music from the Motion Picture "Almost Famous" (Dreamworks)

With classic tracks by Led Zeppelin, the Beach Boys, the Who, Simon and Garfunkel, Lynyrd Skynyrd and their brethren, the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe's new film sounds a lot like a Seventies classic rock radio station. Heck, even the new tunes by Heart's Nancy Wilson (an instrumental excerpted from her film score) and the movie's fictional band Stillwater (who, on album, are Wilson, Pearl Jam's Mike McCready and friends) have that familiar feel. And while that makes this collection seem kind of pointless -- who doesn't have every Zeppelin album? -- some of these tunes are so good that you'll soon be writing "Skynyrd Rules!" and "Led Zep #1" on your checkbook. The Who's "Sparks" and Rod Stewart's "Every Picture Tells A Story" will have you dusting off their albums, while Yes' "I've Seen All Good People/Your Move" will have you regretting that you sold theirs a few years back. (PAUL SEMEL)

Rickie Lee Jones It's Like This (Artemis)

Rickie Lee Jones likes to mess with musical tradition. After the tweaked trip-hop of 1997's unjustly dissed Ghostyhead, she returns to her tangled roots for another album of retooled pop standards. These are not radical deconstructions a la Cat Power -- just Jones lending her slurred, cozy drawl to material ranging from Traffic's "Low Spark of High Heeled Boys," delivered as a jazzy torch song, to a stripped-down take on Charlie Chaplin's "Smile." Jones' subversion is so delicate that her covers often seem closer to tribute than to interpretation. But while her reading of the Beatles' "For No One" (with Joe Jackson on piano) is true to the original, there is a sly wink in there. Jones leaves the narrator's original gender intact, transforming an innocuous love song into a suggestive Sapphic plaint delivered in the second person. She's seditious, this Rickie chick, even if she does have a sophisticate's cheekbones. (CHONIN -- RS 850)

Underworld Everything, Everything (V2/JBO)

Underworld's brand of techno is slick, well-crafted, a blend of enormous gestures and a little anonymous recycling of Giorgio Moroder and house-music cliches. But the best way to understand Underworld is to know that they are not a band but part of a multimedia company that makes, among other things, Levi's ads and MTV spots. Underworld are a total experience: That's why their biggest hit, "Born Slippy," became an anthem to club kids after it had been smartly combined with pictures in the film Trainspotting.

Underworld's live shows -- rock dynamics, high-design visuals, Karl Hyde's monotonous New Wave-y vocals -- are rave culture for the untrained. In concert, Underworld work according to an improvisatory plan, moving from one piece of music to another by means of samples, rhythm programs and riffs that can turn up at any point. For them, making a live record is little more than doing a remix album, except with Hyde's intermittent crowd-rousing chants. The DVD version of Everything, Everything, which V2 releases next month -- that's the thing to get, especially if you have a home-theater system that is up to the disc's surround-sound technology.

But for obvious reasons, Everything, Everything is a lonely listening experience. As a document, it's hard to refute; a track like "Pearl's Girl" keeps unfolding into different layers of aural spotlessness, finally tapering into silence. Still, there's a problem with sitting down and hearing it. It's not audio verite; the band has taken pains not to thread audience sounds through the entire recording. But when the crowd does explode, divining the flow, the home listener feels left out of the party. (RATLIFF -- RS 850)

Harvey Danger King James Version (Sire/London)

Harvey Danger became the subject of a claws-out bidding war a few years back when its ridiculously catchy independent single "Flagpole Sitta" became an unexpected summer anthem, leading to countless airings in teen movies and trendy mall clothing stores. Nearly three years later, the band is back and fighting against one-hit-wonder damnation. King James Version, Harvey Danger's second album, is jam-packed with the same spitfire new-wave riffs and shouty choruses that made its predecessor, Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone?, such a success. But it's not hard to discern that this is a different band now. Their gawky faces are airbrushed, their unaffected enthusiasm is replaced with a certain degree of restraint, and judging by overwrought songs like "Sad Sweetheart Of The Rodeo" and "Authenticity," desperation is the new order of the day. Only the abbreviated, urgent "(This Is) The Thrilling Conversation You've Been Waiting For" offers a glimpse back at past glories. (AIDIN VAZIRI)

Amanda Ghost Ghost Stories (Warner Bros.)

Although it's helped the careers and creativity of Bjork, Macy Gray, Tori Amos and Madonna, England hasn't produced a major solo female rocker since Polly Jean Harvey. The U.K.'s best bid for renewed femme respect is a category-defying firebrand whose Ghost Stories evokes all those icons, yet asserts its own dark splendor. A Londoner of Indian and Spanish heritage, blessed with a husky vibrato from the house of Stevie Nicks, Amanda Ghost revels in classic singer-songwriter introspection, drama, melody and tough lyricism. On her debut album, former EMF guitarist Ian Dench and house remixer Lukas Burton twiddle today's techno toys. The result is a rock-dance-folk studio marvel with songs as intrepid as the sonics. Swinging from the club-rock stomp of "Filthy Mind" to the orchestral grandeur of "Numb," this beautiful outcast makes each track matter with a sweeping emotional range that suits the arrangements' ornate bombast. "Cellophane" wraps her sprawling angst into one concise, Stones-y argument: Ghost's talent is spooky. (BARRY WALTERS -- RS 849)

Patty Loveless Strong Heart (Epic)

As the most consistent first-rate singer in Nashville, Patty Loveless has made herself a difficult artist to review; the "best album since" template is tough to slap over her ten-album body of work, which has been remarkably void of a clunker. But Strong Heart does stand out, as it's the first album in more than three years from an artist who has never exceeded two between projects. While Loveless's previous album, Long Stretch of Lonesome, was another terrific outing, she sounds particularly refreshed on Strong Heart. There may be no better opening three tracks on a Nashville album this year than those Loveless offers here, each of the three tunes trumping the last. The layered opening track, "You're So Cool" with its bouncing harmonica, and background "yeah yeah yeah"s gives way to the irresistibly catchy, twangy, two-stepping chorus on "Last Thing On My Mind" (which would be a mother of a hit in most any other Nashville music era) which then segues into the beautiful, delicate "My Heart Will Never Break." It's refreshing to know there are still country purists in Music City. (ANDREW DANSBY)

Various Artists Music From the Motion Picture "Duets" (Hollywood)

When your day job involves starring in massive Hollywood blockbusters and generally looking gorgeous, people are going to take notice if you jeopardize it all by playing karaoke alongside Huey Lewis and releasing the evidence in the form of a soundtrack album for your latest movie. Because, let's face it, nobody is going to pick up this album to hear Arnold McCuller's version of "Free Bird" (which, incidentally, is quite good). No, the main draw here is Gwyneth Paltrow, who rises to the occasion with remarkable poise. Unleashing a robust voice that falls somewhere between Fiona Apple and Joni Mitchell, she turns in an absolutely stunning version of "Bette Davis Eyes," duets with Babyface on "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)" and then Lewis on a knock-out run through Smokey Robinson's "Cruisin." Paltrow may very well be the new Barbie. (VAZIRI)

Tom Tom Club The Good the Bad and the Funky (Tip Top/Rykodisc)

Tom Tom Club's strength has always been its limitation: This is a band led by its rhythm section. With their nu-funk classics "Wordy Rappinghood" and "Genius of Love," Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth -- formerly of Talking Heads -- laid down grooves sampled by everyone from Grandmaster Flash to Mariah Carey. But otherwise, the worthy tunes have been few and far between, and the duo's breathy vocals have often been monotonous. Happily, that's not the case on their first album in eight years: Frantz and Weymouth have teamed up with a melting pot of songwriting, vocal and instrumental talent, who have supplied offbeat but on-point, ever-changing flavors. Charles Pettigrew, of Charles and Eddie's "Would I Lie to You?" fame, spins his sweet soul falsetto across the serene reggae of "Let There Be Love" and two other slinky jams, while Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals brings some authentic Jamaican spice to "She's Dangerous." These funky Heads are fresher than ever. (WALTERS -- RS 850)

Eleventh Dream Day Stalled Parade (Thrill Jockey)

In a city overwhelmed with musical riches, Eleventh Dream Day continue to be the treasure chest on the ocean floor. It's been three years since this guitar-driven Chicago unit released Eight, their finest album to date. Though there are some tasteful experimental excursions, like the spooky almost Waits-ian "Valrico74" with drummer Janet Beveridge Bean (who also fronts the neo-Appalachian unit Freakwater) taking a turn on vox, Stalled Parade predominantly finds frontman/guitarist Rick Rizzo continuing to dress some lovely melodies in a beautiful cacophony of guitar washes. Indie rock is too often marred by a clumsy minimalism. Eleventh Dream Day take the genre back from the ninety-second-noodlers and prove that indie can rock and roll with the best of them by combining the guitar-muscle of Crazy Horse with the stripped down moodiness of the VU. (DANSBY)

Voodoo Glow Skulls Symbolic (Epitaph)

Ska and its offshoots (Oi!, ska-core, rock-steady) are the Haley's Comet of pop music, dropping out of the cosmos (or rising up from the underground, as it were) every now and again and fading just as quickly. The true test of any band's ska-ness then, is their ability or willingness to keep it real even whence the fickle spotlight has swung elsewhere, like, say, to Jennifer Lopez's butt. So while publicists across the nation crank out press releases swearing their acts have "turned a corner from 1998's, ska-influenced (insert album title here)," the folks at Epitaph need make no such promise. If you still like your punk with horns you'll cherish album number five from this SoCal sextet who get even ruder on this stripped raw collection of skankable thrash courtesy Brett Gurewitz's very Albini, emotion-over-perfection production. Tailor-made for mosh-happy teens in comically oversized shorts, Symbolic breaks nary an inch of new ground in a hopelessly myopic genre. But the pace is impressively breakneck from start to finish, the trombone and sax wail in timeless Madness fashion and more than ever before singer Frank Casillas spits his old school rallying cries with fury and passion. (GREG HELLER)