New CDs: Pink, Flaming Lips

Pink is ambitious the way Madonna used to be: a mess of contradictions and complications with a knack for making those inner conflicts bolster her art. It took guts for her to follow her 2001 smash Missundaztood with 2003's Try This -- an uneven album that included punky collaborations with Rancid's Tim Armstrong -- when she could have coasted with more of the same Destiny's Child-like grooves that first charmed radio on songs such as 2000's "There You Go."

Try This fell flat in record stores, but with I'm Not Dead Pink returns to reclaim her chart destiny. The album is proof that you don't necessarily need to work with rock guys if you want to rock: Pink teams here with producer Max Martin -- the Swedish studio dynamo behind countless Britney, Backstreet and 'NSync hits -- and B-level pop confectioner Billy Mann, but I'm Not Dead swaggers with a cockiness that most dudes in bands can't match. Whether she sings rock, pop, R&B or her usual combination of all three, the twenty-six-year-old Doylestown, Pennsylvania, native is belting more urgently and taking more risks than her pop-radio contemporaries.

Both Martin and Mann rise to the challenge with hooks and guitars that rarely relent. The loose musical blueprint here is Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone," that Martin-produced marvel that proved the teen-pop shift away from synths and hip-hop beats to guitars and live drums could finally outgrow its disposable Avril Lavigne phase. Having watched lesser acts pillage her own rock-pop fusion, Pink comes out swinging both high and low. She sets the album's proudly bitchy tone with the Martin cut "U + Ur Hand." Claiming an uncharted space between today's dance rock and yesterday's hair metal, power chords and cowbell pound home the singer's ball-busting riposte to an overly confident cocksmith on one of the album's many savvy put-downs. Pink takes on "Stupid Girls" ("What happened to the dream of a girl president?/She's dancing in the video next to 50 Cent") and writes a scathing letter in "Dear Mr. President" ("You've come a long way from whiskey and cocaine!"), cooing righteous folk harmonies with Lilith Fair icons the Indigo Girls. Sporting the same defiant sass that yanked former 4 Non Blondes' Linda Perry out of rock's dustheap to write and produce "Get the Party Started," Pink even duets with her dad, Jim Moore, on the old-school anti-war hidden track "I Have Seen the Rain." Unhip? This populist iconoclast cares not. Only on Mann's empty arena-rock "Runaway" does her fourth album seem anything less than Pink's own.

For all her bravado, Pink can still cut herself down to size, pretending that she "wouldn't trade a dollar for some sense" in "I Got Money Now." While "Conversations With My 13-Year-Old Self" nurses wounds exposed on Missundaztood's "Family Portrait," and "Leave Me Alone (I'm Lonely)" suggests a mood-swinging Strokes mash-up, "'Cuz I Can" flaunts one of the disc's goofiest, most endearing bits: Over Martin's glam-rock stomp, Pink drops an irreverent but apropos chorus of "Ice cream, ice cream, we all want ice cream," savagely satirizing her own aspirations. Like Courtney Love, this loose cannon wants to be the girl with the most cake. Unlike Love, Pink knows how to hold on to it. (BARRY WALTERS)

The Flaming Lips At War With the Mystics (Warner Bros.)

Last time out, these unlikely psych-rock heroes strung together gurgling electronics, widescreen space funk and cushy soft stuff for a song suite about evil robots. With producer Dave Fridmann again in tow, their eleventh full-length album draws on many of the same sounds but feels almost homespun, with more diffuse songs that eschew sci-fi glory for a hit-and-miss smattering of concept-free weirdness. Winners like the leftist call-to-arms "The W.A.N.D." and "Free Radicals" brim with darting effects and Wayne Coyne's brightly warbled melodies, but they're surrounded by murkier cuts like "The Sound of Failure." Even on fully loaded songs like "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song," a bouncy mishmash of acoustic guitars, studio high jinks and ya-ya-ya backing vocals that sounds like Neil Young inside a NASA rocket, the Lips' spacious attack feels a little tired. At War With the Mystics might be one of the year's best headphone records, but for the Lips, it's a step sideways. (CHRISTIAN HOARD)

Morrissey Ringleader of the Tormentors (Attack/Sanctuary)

Formerly famous for proclaiming his own celibacy while writing richly frustrated songs of unrequited longing, Morrissey announces on his eighth solo studio album a long-overdue sexual awakening. "There are explosive kegs between my legs," the former Smiths singer declares on the monstrously beautiful and shamelessly lurid "Dear God, Please Help Me," orchestrated by legendary movie maestro Ennio Morricone. Ringleader of the Tormentors concludes with the similarly symphonic "At Last I Am Born," where dear Moz confesses, "I once was a mess of guilt because of the flesh/It's remarkable what you can learn." To suit this miraculous transformation, veteran glam-rock producer Tony Visconti helps Morrissey achieve the delicious sensuality of early T. Rex and David Bowie, even paraphrasing the strummed guitar intro from David Bowie's "Space Oddity" midway through the epic "Life Is a Pigsty." You Are the Quarry, from 2004, was Morrissey's strongest album in years, but Ringleader reframes it as mere foreplay. (BARRY WALTERS)

Van Hunt On the Jungle Floor (Capitol)

In 2004, Atlanta singer-guitarist Van Hunt released his neosoul debut, the droll, expansive Van Hunt, giving Alicia Keys a run for her money in the floppy-hat retro-fashion department, when he wasn't talking in interviews about how much he loved the Stooges. On the Jungle Floor is even more sprawling than its predecessor, with sixteen cuts that include a Hendrix-y rocker ("Ride, Ride, Ride"), some Prince-style pop funk ("Suspicion [She Knows Me Too Well]") and a slow, murky Stooges cover ("No Sense of Crime"). Hunt's bread-and-butter is soul songs that undercut lover-man tedium with a singer-songwriter's wandering eye: On "The Night Is Young," Hunt's come-ons take off from "the unmistakable feeling of youth slipping away," and on modestly grooving, falsetto-laced cuts like "Character," he tackles romantic disconnect with the same deep interest most other soulmen place in sex. On the Jungle Floor shows off Hunt's impressive range, but sometimes his ambition makes the songs run away from him. Hunt's clearly got an R&B White Album in him; can he do Rubber Soul? (BARRY WALTERS)

The Vines Vision Valley (Capitol)

Four years and several cultural shifts ago, the Vines were the MTV-friendly face of a neo-garage movement that was supposed to save rock. Now, after a failed second album, canceled tours and a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome for their lead singer, the Vines' labored-over, over-ingratiating third album sounds like the work of a band that would be content to save its own career. Following the aimless experimentation of 2004's Winning Days, Vision Valley is a blatant return to the poppy Nirvana-isms of the band's 2002 debut. There are signs that frontman Craig Nicholls' songwriting chops are improving: The self-defeatingly titled single "Don't Listen to the Radio" is a lean, uncharacteristically Cars-like potential hit, and the punchy "Dandy Daze" nails a Nuggets-ish vibe. But as in the worst of latter-day Weezer, a certain emotional hollowness creeps in, from pretty but rote ballads like "Take Me Back" to Cobain-o-matic rockers like "Fuk Yeh." And then there's the numbing "Futuretarded," which is even worse than its title -- if that's possible. (BRIAN HIATT)

Bubba Sparxxx The Charm (Purple Ribbon/Virgin)

Since Georgia-born Warren Anderson Mathis released his cracking 2003 album Deliverance, he's both split from longtime producer Timbaland and seen his status as the South's pre-eminent paunchy-'n-pasty-faced MC scooped by Houston grille master Paul Wall. On "Ain't Life Grand," the one truly great song on album number three, Sparxxx addresses these changes. "I'm gettin' sick of banjos and fiddle shit," he says over a unique track comprising spare electric piano and a ticking clock, calmly rejecting Timbaland's country touches of yore before obliquely acknowledging the chart-topping Wall with the line "I'll prob'ly never be a number-one seller." Sadly, the rest of The Charm isn't nearly as charming. "Your chest is just whatever/I found a buried treasure," Sparxxx barks on "Ms. New Booty," his attention straying south. Not only is that lead single the zillionth song this year in praise of strippers, its whispered verses by Ying-Yang Twins and Mr. Collipark's one bass-note beat further suggest Sparxxx is trying to fit new rims on retreads. "Run Away," featuring junior crooner Frankie J, is a flaccid ballad straight outta Uncle Kracker's cornfield, and "Heat It Up," another Mr. Collipark-produced club track, is even more unimpressive than the first. Though newly aligned with Big Boi's Purple Ribbon stable, Bubba Sparxxx appears only able to follow for now. (PETER RELIC)

Massive Attack Collected (Virgin)

Their old jogging buddy tricky may have been the one who used Pre-Millennium Tension as an album title, but no one captured the creeping dread of the 1990s better than the Bristol, England, group Massive Attack. Slowing hip-hop's funk down to a crawl, delivering dyspeptic raps in raspy whispers and texturing their tracks with the crepuscular film of heavy dub, Daddy G, 3D and Mushroom defined the trip-hop sound. Disc One is piled with crucial cuts from their four albums, none better than "Five Man Army," where over an Al Green/Willie Mitchell rimshot drum loop the ghostly moaning of reggae legend Horace Andy freezes time. Among Disc Two's ten rare and reworked recordings, "I Want You" casts mature mom Madonna as an icy seductress, and the pistol-grip funk of "I Against I" finds Mos Def rhyming, "Only one of us can ride forever/So you and I can't ride together." The bonus DVD's sixteen videos make this a superior, welcome collection. (PETER RELIC)