New CDs: 50 Cent, Priest

50 Cent The Massacre (Shady/Aftermath/G Unit)

Ever since he rode to fame on the epochal party groove of "In Da Club" two years ago, 50 Cent has been living a double life. On the one hand, he's the former crack dealer who, as he claims on his new album, has your mama hogtied in the other room. At the same time, he is -- as Beyonce put it in one of the many versions of "In Da Club" that followed 50's smash -- a "sexy little thug."

It helps that 50 Cent is the most likable rapper ever to need a bulletproof vest. Like his Kevlar-wearing predecessor and idol, Tupac Shakur, 50 has charisma up the muzzle-hole. But where Tupac could be manic and unpredictable, 50 is cool and easy to be around -- you get the sense that if he weren't so busy getting shot, stabbed and selling millions of albums, he would be an enormously successful fraternity president or restaurateur.

50's bullet-riddled resume provides cover for the fact that he's a major piece of hip-hop beefcake. He works that angle more than ever on The Massacre, the follow-up to 2003's Get Rich or Die Tryin'. The new album's first two singles -- the lascivious, midtempo grinder "Candy Shop" and speaker-shaking party track "Disco Inferno" -- are mostly for the ladies. The tracks display how 50 has it both ways: Only a rapper who's been shot nine times can get away with describing the dance floor as "hot as a tea kettle." That's not G Unit, it's G-rated. The next single, "Out of Control," produced by Dr. Dre, is the best of the party tracks: As 50 chants the hook of the Eighties electro-funk classic "Set It Off," Dre pumps up the tension -- like "In Da Club," it's the kind of track that seems to bear down on you while you listen.

Not all of Massacre is as immediately catchy as Get Rich, but it's close. 50 is so entertaining that you don't mind hearing him wallow in Fat City (usually the very place where these kinds of megahit follow-ups hit the shoals). On "Piggy Bank," he gloats hilariously about how well he's doing, thanks to his G Unit soldiers Lloyd Banks, Young Buck and the Game: "Banks' shit sells/Buck's shit sells/Game's shit sells/I'm rich as -- hell." The gun-waving and menacing talk haven't gone away, but 50 appears to have mellowed a little; you can hear more enthusiasm in his West Coast-style chill-out track "Ryder Music" than in the standard-issue homicide homily "I'm Supposed to Die Tonight."

50 almost never lets you see him sweat -- he wants you to believe that he could be doing something else, like being a drug kingpin; rhyming is just something he happens to be good at. Don't believe him: He works to vary his flow on Massacre, faking a muddy Southern drawl on "This Is 50," assuming a soft, confidential tone on "Ryder Music," going for a dry bark on "I Don't Need 'Em." For someone as prolific as 50 -- he shares Tupac's work habits, recording more than sixty tracks for this album -- he's also very efficient. Tracks like "Gunz Come Out" don't have sky-high ambitions, but there are no wasted words on them.

As always, 50's secret weapon is his singing voice -- the deceptively amateur-sounding tenor croon that he deploys on almost every chorus here. 50 knows perfectly the limitations of his voice -- he stays within his register and more than makes up in personality what he lacks in technique. Unlike many rappers who sing off-key with perverse joy, 50 shows a jazzy touch when he sings the title hook to "God Gave Me Style."

50 doesn't muck up his albums with too many guest spots; even his squad of G Unit platinum earners appear on only one track here, a remix of Game's "Hate It or Love It." So it's a surprise that Eminem's cameo, on "Gatman and Robbin'," is one of the few flat tracks here; the song, also produced by Eminem, uses a variation of the Batman TV show theme (get it?) and just feels shticky. Jamie Foxx turns up singing the hook on "Build You Up," further paving the way for his inevitable debut album of hot-tub classics.

You are required to forgive 50's shortcomings -- namely his egomania and apparent lack of a conscience. Most rappers (like, say, Jay-Z) hold out the illusion that, underneath all the tough talk, they're basically good guys; with 50, you're not so sure. Whenever he bemoans the violence of the streets, it's never because he hates what crime and poverty have done to his friends, the kids, his city or his people -- it's because he's worried about his own skin. Or maybe, on a very empathetic day, his grandmother.

The most empathetic track on The Massacre, "A Baltimore Love Thing," is also its most ambitious. Over slow-grooving, flute-driven funk, the supposed former drug dealer assumes the voice of heroin itself, speaking directly to a female addict. "We have a bond that cannot be broken," he says. "Promise me you'll come and see me/Even if it means you'll have to sell your momma's TV." But it isn't just a drug metaphor; it covers the relationship a lot of fans have with 50 himself. Yes, I'm a bad habit, he's saying, but try and stop listening. Why can't you? "God gave me style," he says later. "It ain't my fault." (NATHAN BRACKETT)

Judas Priest Angel of Retribution (Epic)

Good metal bands usually kick ass early on, then remain on a proven path until the albums stop selling or the band implodes. Judas Priest, born thirty-five years ago in the same Birmingham, England, factory shadows that sired Black Sabbath, have a much more complex history -- one that spans Seventies prog-rock, Eighties arena metal (which they more or less invented) and the thrash that came after. They survey that history on Angel of Retribution, the band's fifteenth studio album and first with iconic singer Rob Halford since 1990's Pain Killer.

The quintet celebrates its return on the throttling opener "Judas Rising," revisits its Eighties heyday on the speedy "Deal With the Devil" and alludes to vintage song titles throughout. Instead of trend-hopping, there's "Lochness," a grinding thirteen-and-a-half-minute metal-folk tune devoted to the mythical Scottish water beast. You cannot get any more old-school than that.

Amazingly, these fiftysomething headbangers pull it off. On "Hellrider," guitarists Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing revive the well-conceived solos that most heavy bands avoid these days. Halford is in excellent form, particularly on the ballads. His gayness has for decades given semihidden weight to the group's outlaw lyrical metaphors (not to mention its leather dress code). Here it baldly informs "Angel," where Halford calls out to a gender-indeterminate spirit he prays will bring him to a better place. It's an honest power ballad from a band that understands power like few others, the centerpiece to an album that holds up well next to Priest's strongest, most sustained recordings. Now that's retribution. (BARRY WALTERS)

The Mars Volta Frances the Mute (GSL/Strummer/Universal)

In a big-riff age when punk is pop, in the worst fizzy-drink sense, and most heavy metal is as wild as a night at home playing Grand Theft Auto, the Mars Volta's second album is an exhilarating transgression: concussive, nonlinear rhythms; mad-dog guitar algebra; bloody-nightmare suites sung in bilingual free verse. In short, the beastly spawn of Radiohead's OK Computer and Rush's 2112. The only word singer-lyricist Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist-producer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez don't care to understand, in any tongue, is compromise.

The furious horror of Frances the Mute (a pun on Fifties-screwball-comedy film star Francis the Talking Mule) is only part fiction. Bixler-Zavala's images of flayed skin and maggot rain were inspired by a diary found in a car by band member Jeremy Ward: an orphan's story of the search for his biological parents. It is easy to hear the band's own anguish, too (Ward died in 2003, of a drug overdose), in Rodriguez-Lopez's homicidal guitar seizures and Bixler-Zavala's high, wrenched tenor -- the closest thing in post-rock to Robert Plant's banzai-blues wail in Led Zeppelin.

The album's excessive earphone theater and contrary mood jolts (like the Cuban-jazz languor in "L'Via L'Viaquez") may make you impatient. But in both the terse fire of "The Widow" (5:50) and the thrilling eternity of "Cassandra Gemini" (32:32), the Mars Volta show off an intensity of focus -- on hooks that kill and the cleansing powers of thundering whiplash -- that will drive your devils from the room as you're pinned to the wall. (DAVID FRICKE)

Kathleen Edwards Back to Me (Zoe/Rounder)

On her 2003 debut, Kathleen Edwards was a twenty-three-year-old folkie trawling dead-end bars and the ashtray of her mind for character sketches and tough, heart-rending tunes. She sang of alcoholism, bad parents and a gun-toting lover, and managed to sound older than she was. On Back to Me she still does, for good and bad. The roots-rock downers are blander than her admirers would hope, full of sepia-toned melodies and abstractions about old mistakes and never going home again. When she's on, her tunes suggest an unavoidable presence, as on the opening one-two punch of "In State" and "Back to Me," which recalls Lucinda Williams' "Joy" in its bar-ready, man-defying feistiness. But Edwards' mix of bravado and beauty is epitomized by "What Are You Waiting For?" a midtempo rocker in which she gracefully harmonizes, "You've gotta be fucking kidding me." (CHRISTIAN HOARD)

Jack Johnson In Between Dreams (Brushfire)

Johnson appears to think that his smooth acoustic surfer music might need a retooling to reflect this scary new world. He still sounds mellow 'n' yellow on escapist cuts like "Banana Pancakes," and he occasionally still fakes a Caribbean accent that's groovy for Harry Belafonte but not for dudes as white as Johnson. But on "Crying Shame" and "Staple It Together," he attacks warmongers and the chronically denial-ridden. Don't try to take his waves, either! (BARRY WALTERS)

Jessi Alexander Honeysuckle Sweet (Sony Nashville)

Singer-songwriter Jessi Alexander is named after Outlaw country star Jessi Colter, but she sounds like the gifted love child of Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt. On her radiant debut, Alexander marries a clear appreciation for the great SoCal singer-songwriters of the Seventies with a more pronounced Southern accent that suits a woman from Jackson, Tennessee. Honeysuckle Sweet showcases Alexander's promising songwriting and heartfelt, unforced singing. Standout tracks such as the twangy, aching "This World Is Crazy" (written with Gary Louris of the Jayhawks) and "Everywhere" (a stately piano ballad penned with Benmont Tench) are accessible enough to make it onto country radio, but they also place her in the grand Emmylou Harris/Rosanne Cash tradition of country class acts. (DAVID WILD)

Heartless Bastards Stairs and Elevators (Fat Possum)

Erika Wennerstrom badly needs a stage name, something better suited for her rock-goddess voice. The papers in her hometown of Dayton, Ohio, say that Wennerstrom is petite and shy, but when she opens her throat on Stairs and Elevators, the Heartless Bastards' debut, she sounds like she's wailing on the shoulders of giants; her sad and angry vocals channeling all the swagger and spit of a young Robert Plant, with none of the blues histrionics. "I don't even like myself half the time," she sneers on "New Resolution": "What's the use of worrying what's on other people's minds?" Elsewhere, the sleepy heartland dreamer peeks through: "Someday I'd like to play a part," she sings in "Autonomy," "in the life I waited to start." Factor in the commendable garage-rock pummeling of drummer Kevin Vaughn and bassist Mike Lamping, and the Heartless Bastards are a small-town band who are ready to show the big city no mercy. (BILL WERDE)

Doves Some Cities (Heavenly)

A chart-topper in their native England, Doves' latest record brightens up the widescreen gloom of their 2000 debut, Lost Souls, dishing out hopeful, multitracked choruses and liquid guitars. Some Cities is less self-consciously arty than Souls, though the murky atmospherics and nondistinct Brit voices here will likely confine the album to the nether regions of America's Top 100. But delicately rocking tunes such as "Black and White Town" and "Sky Starts Falling" reach a happy compromise between romantic beauty and groundedness, the sound of young urbanites having fun with music without forgetting about the real world. "Snowden" makes room for breezy, chiming verses, a Flaming Lips-esque synth choir and a crunchy guitar break, and if the odd mix of balladry and disco on "Walk in Fire" suggests they're slightly confused, it also suggests these guys are willing to follow their whims rather than try too damn hard. (CHRISTIAN HOARD)