Ken Tucker

Fountains of Wayne, the band led by songwriters Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood, has a new album called Traffic and Weather, their first collection of new songs in four years.

Amy Winehouse is a 23 year-old British singer-songwriter who takes much of her inspiration from American soul and R&B. Her American debut album, Back To Black, topped the British charts and hit the American charts at number seven.

Cantilever is the new solo album from Jeff Murphy, formerly of the 1970s band Shoes.

LCD Soundsystem is a band that exists primarily in the recording studio, with singer-writer-producer James Murphy playing most of the instruments.

When LCD Soundsystem performs live, he usually assembles a four-piece band that can reproduce the kind of dance-punk-electronica mixture that won the band's previous album a Grammy nomination in 2005.

LCD Soundsystem's new album, called Sound of Silver, broadens the project's sound to make Murphy's rhythms even more accessible.

The Stooges rock band, led by singer Iggy Pop, have just released their first album in almost 35 years. It's called The Weirdness.

These days, Iggy Pop's best known piece of music may be the riff for his song "Lust for Life," which was used prominently in the movie Trainspotting and, more recently, in a TV commercial for a cruise ship line.

But when he was with the Stooges in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Iggy Pop helped define the path that punk and metal music would follow in the years to come.

A review of the debut album Alright Still, by the 21-year-old British singer Lily Allen.

The new season of TV's American Idol starts on Tuesday, but four previous Idol stars — Taylor Hicks, Fantasia Barrino, Kellie Pickler and Chris Daughtry — have all put out albums within weeks of each other. Rock critic Ken Tucker says their styles vary widely, but that quality-control is a common problem.

Never Hear the End of It is the new double album by Sloan. The quartet from Nova Scotia was formed in 1991, and has spent most of the time since then as one of Canada's most popular rock bands. Their new album consists of 30 songs, which is an unusually large amount of new material.

Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews his picks for the best music of 2006. While CD sales figures are down from last year, Tucker says that music is increasingly being distributed in new formats.

Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews The Black Parade, the third album by the New Jersey quintet My Chemical Romance. Their dark musical approach has gotten them labeled as an "emo" band.