For your pleasure, vol #4
I'm euphoric that Moz has finally owned up to liking cock; now he can go get some instead of indenturing poor Tony Visconti to enliven plodding midtempo songs whose lyrical explicitness their creator mistakes for honesty but is really the flipside of a middle aged pussyhound yielding to his urges. And we all know how gross that can be without the requisite irony. Anthony: "I used to laugh about boomer artists given attention long after their sell-through date, but the `four stars for Storyville' impulse doesn't seem so generation-specific now."
At first this album dragged. It was my fault: all these guys got from me in 2003 was a polite thumbs-up, while under my breath I mumbled something about the half-life of postpunk referents. I was convinced they wanted to make a thick-sounding rock album – what else could they do? But I wasn't convinced they could make a good one. So what if "Gold Lion" is Sleater Kinney-meets-Love-&-Rockets? Not when Karen O wants to belt like Chrissie Hynde, always a good thing (on "Cheated Hearts" she even mimics Chrissie's catch-in-the-throat). The kids won't download "Dudley" when they need a ringtone like they did for "Maps," and I know why: an admission that partying destroys even the most perfect love is not the message teenagers want to hear. Or hot young bands. So I give the Yeah's the credit for saying yeah. 
He loves pussy almost as much as Morrissey loves explosive kegs between his legs, loves high-quality coke. He still finds time to hang with the Wu, hates it when black youth get away with, ahem, murder (it's their mama's fault: the kids don't get spanked enough). His ever-more-surreal anecdotes toughened by terse backbeats, most clocking in under three minutes ("Underwater" is creepy like PJ Harvey circa 1995), Ghostface will never blow up like Kanye, but this knowledge doesn't embitter him – hell, if it did, we might have something even more compelling than the album of the year. 
My 17-year-old self, dutifully listening to my best friend's CD copy of Chronicles after being dragged to catch the Roll the Bones tour, would have blanched at 31-year-old me tearing up the second time the chorus to this 1992 ballad-by-numbers comes around. Unmoved by the sub-Zep material and malnourished album concepts of their '70s work (what, lyricist/drummer Neil Peart thought dystopian reveries made better cover art than ELP's Tarkus?), I'm surprised by how compelling their '80s stuff is, when Alex Lifeson's quasi-Police skank did Andy Summers better than Andy Summers and the lyrics – in essence Peart's Guide to Ayn Rand– acquire touching resonance; they're aimed for the kids, and if it helps them get through high school, hey, I'll distribute copies of Power Windows myself.
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