On his 2008 Mixtape About Nothing, this D.C. rapper had the guts to set self-examining rhymes to Seinfeld samples. There's nothing so admirably weird on his debut. Wale instead fashions himself Kanye East, a mix of aspiration and anger, given to jazzy moralizing à la the Roots yet not above tapping Lady Gaga for the single "Chillin." "Everybody's on me like the 'A Milli' beat," he boasts while blasting phony stuff like implants and reality shows on "TV in the Radio." The darker...

Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! — recorded in 1969 over two nights at Madison Square Garden — is the last official live document of the Rolling Stones in their swaggering Sixties prime; it's also one of the great live albums of all time.

Expectations were high for the band on its 1969 tour, the Stones' first in the U.S. in three years, and their first outing without guitarist Brian Jones, who had died that summer. They delivered in spades. Keith Richards and new guitarist Mick Taylor...

On Amerie's fourth album, she excels at getting in your face without overdosing on divatude — not much excessive Beyoncé-size vocalizing here. The lack of pretense can't save snoozy slow ones like "The Flowers," but some of the uptempo tracks borrow the basic approach of her great 2005 single "1 Thing": Both "Heard 'Em All" and the guitar-flecked "Dangerous" are vibrant numbers that put the drums up front, alongside Amerie's percussive attack. Too bad that she can't hold to that...

On their recent side projects, Fab, Albert and Nikolai tried to show they could work outside the Strokes' neo-New Wave sound. Julian Casablancas' solo debut takes that MO to its limit. Phrazes is like his version of Thom Yorke's The Eraser — guitars submarined by wild-angled synths, off-kilter beats tripping up big ballads. A few songs have the old leather-jacket kick, but things get weirder as he explores alienation from a Lower East Side he once ruled. When he mourns, "Yuppies...

Hot on the heels of Live at Reading is this dolled-up 20th-anniversary (!) edition of Nirvana's debut, which barely hit the radar on its initial release but whose resonance ballooned as the band scorched the earth. Now, its near-greatness is plain, most clearly on "About a Girl," in the abraded Lennon-McCartney chord changes, and in the existential grunge howl of "School." The bonus live tracks, also pre-Dave Grohl — from Portland, Oregon, February 9th, 1990 — include both...

Do you think Rivers Cuomo ever gets tired of pissing people off? Check that album title again. The fact that he's willing to slap a title like Raditude on his work shows that when it comes to taunting and baiting the crowd, Cuomo makes every other rock star out there look like a dilettante. Ever since he attracted the obsessive Weezer cult with Pinkerton, he's inspired wildly hyperbolic reactions to his every move. So to a casual fan, each Weezer album sounds pretty great, and each Weezer...