"Everything is Alright" maybe the catchiest song this teen powered pop ensemble has yet come up with. Commit This To Memory manages to fall short in synergy to it's lesser known parent, 2003's I Am The Movie. Nevertheless, in a time when Fall Out Boy is flying up the singles chart this band knows how to make crying sound catchy without catering to neo-Ferdinand dance punk appetites (cough cough Panic! at the Disco, you've been caught red-handed.)

Emo, like alternative in the nineties, and college rock in the eighties is a terrible name for what "the kids these days are listening to". I Am The Movie, the proclamative, ego driven debut of the new wave tinged, mid western Motion City Soundtrack is a gem from a genre that (along with numetal) indie elitists will continue to crap on for the next several years. Considering the failure of Make Believe, this is the kind of album you wish that Weezer would make these days. It plays like the Blink 182 era answer to The Cars' debut album, maybe catchier. "My Favorite Accident" maybe the melodramatists' answer to "Just What I Needed".

Despite all their weird timings, one tends to wonder if Co & Ca know how to count. There's a giant "IV" on the package of their latest LP (with a name to exausting to type) but it's their third release. If they do know how to count, this is just makes yet another bullet on the big list of things that don't immediately make sense about this band and requires way too much effort to research. However unconventional, that's a brilliant marketing strategy that provides for a trekkie-style loyalty amongst fans. These members of the myspace generation are defined along the lines of who the hell has the patience to figure all this stuff out and who stays awake at night wishing they did.

I might sound annoyed, but I can agree with any of them on one thing: the spoiled-rotten-surfeit in Coheed's post punk/alt-metal/pop-prog is the entirety of their charm. It will continue to pay off as they discover on Good Apollo... that the only way to evolve is to get bigger: more pyrotechnic metal riffs, more theatrics, more meaningless sound effects between songs, more immensely complicated hidden plot shifts to be explained in equally confusing graphic novels instead of tasteless, over produced musical films (see the 1973 film version of Tommy).

It opens with a string quartet version of the piano theme from "The Second Stage: Turbine Blade's "Everything Evil" that is the only easily recognizable theme to tie this sci-fi series together. It bares a strange resemblance to the operatic "Wasted Time (Reprise)" that opens Side B of the Eagles' Hotel California LP - it's a device used more effectively for this self-obsessed space opera than that measly country rock standard. It moves slowly into Coheed's most ambitious anthem, "Welcome Home" truly worthy of any football stadium, provided it"s a homecoming game. Kicking off with an acoustic medieval backdrop compliments of Jethro Tull's "My God" via "Stairway to Heaven" it possesses no ominous quality for hiding the war ahead. In the slam of a snare drum the thundering tradition of the mighty Zeppelin's desert march "Kashmir" is mixed with the deliciously bloated, fully-loaded vocality and guitar wail of Iron Maiden and unleashed before masses of disaffected obsessive alt-rock teenipopper equivalents providing a perfect environment for head-bangers everywhere. It's the kind of song that gives all the fourteen year old girls who line up for Warped Tour tickets no reason to shit on classic rock - which might've been the aim of Claudio Sanchez and company with Good Apollo in the first place.

What's disappointing is once you get to the fade out, which features a corny audience participation sequence, you realize you've heard it all before. It's the same device from the equally anthematic title track of 2003's In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3. By the time you hit the cheerleader rants of "The Suffering" stolen from "Blood Red Summer" and a chorus too easily struck from "Three Evils (Embodied in Love and Shadow)" - both from the same previous album - the flaw is obvious. Yes, the crime of Good Apollo is at its worst it is a rehashed revision of In Keeping Secrets with all the same climax and release. What Apollo does stand to champion over its predecessor it is poppier, more hook driven where it evokes more from the very best guitar imagination of Sting and the Police and as loud and venomous as Cheap Trick od'ing on Ritalin. That more concentrated sound prevents imminent disaster and provides moderate satisfaction.

Deviation from that point is even more dangerous territory. The lackluster hardcore take on J-Tull's "Thick as a Brick" on "The Willing Well II: The Eyes of Madness" passes barely only on its back-to-basics conclusion. They manage survive to "The Willing Well IV: The Final Cut" which sounds like Floyd covering "Maggot Brain" with B+ imitations of what a David Gilmour vs. Eddie Hazel guitar battle would've sounded like.

Doing the math this album is taking two steps forward and two steps back. At the same time Coheed stays in the game with their posterity still in question. That question being whether or not their epic series will be remembered as the quasi-emo Chronicles of Riddick stinker or the literate modernist punk's Star Wars. In the meantime Good Apollo keeps the jury out, still bamboozled as to which glove fits.

Ryan Adams' rock albums tend to be drawn out, over polished journeys drawing from everyone from The Replacements to The Rolling Stones like a white Lenny Kravitz. To his credit, he can justifiably replace James Brown as the hardest working man in the music business - he's released seven mostly overrated alt-country and pop-rock albums since his debut in 2001, and this is his second this year. Many of those albums are captivating but all similarly far from perfect. With productivity to spare and a lukewarm formulistic approach, his talent draws from a few substantially flawless gems. Take "So Alive" from his 2003 release, Rock N Roll. He shouts like a post-punk Springsteen feeling the adventure of his own junglelands taking the listener through the darkest of the backstreets.

And just when it seems he's finally got the hang of being a modern Paul Westerberg - he pulls a Gram Parsons, stands back, and calls on a royal flush of classic roots country music. Cold Roses, released earlier this year, was a flattering american beauty worthy of Adams' taste for the bluegrass and all the legend that is the Dead. But Jacksonville City Nights is where he calls the ace in his sleeve- donning the southern accent and all, taking on the blunt, jealous heartbreak of Hank Williams on "My Heart Is Broken", only he's the bastard with the cheatin' heart.

Wonders never cease for him, climbing into the narration of a desperate young Willie Nelson along the long road of life on "Hard Way to Fall" with ease and passion. Three ingredients to Jacksonville's success Adams should stick to: Dirty (a band of purists clad with drum brushes and banjos), quick (this half hour suite packs more punch than the seventy minutes of Rock N Roll), and sweet (even Norah Jones makes a cameo without being show-y on "Dear John"). You can tell Adams has learned a few lessons and to tell a few stories. This is no longer alt-country, its purism would make the critics of The Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo happy. Take off your boots and get out the box of keenlex, this one's a keeper.

MF Doom is already known for outstanding collaborations in underground hip hop. His last project, Madvilliany, with beat master DJ Madlib, stood out as one of the most outstanding rap releases of last year even in the shadow of Kanye West's much acclaimed debut. This time the iron clad wordsmith gets behind the mic with DJ Danger Mouse, fresh off his controversial masterpiece The Gray Album in which remixed Beatles back beats from the White Album collided with Jay-Z's Black Album rhymes. It's not surprising that a project like Danger Doom is every underground hip hop fanatic's fantasy.

At the very least, the debut of these two dynamos can brag a great sense of humor and an interesting environment. With cameos from an array of cartoon characters from Cartoon Network's Adult Swim line-up, The Mouse and the Mask sputters on being either catchy gimic or a weird publicity stunt in their tribute to the late night lineup. Doom has trouble selling the idea and settles for some truly inspired commentary: "He kept his paper digits in the trunk/ once joined a rap clique called 'Migdets into Crunk'/ Did a solo on the oboe/ Coulda sold a million then the villian went fo' dollo". Danger Mouse takes the cake here with vividly original backdrops that find a niche somewhere between 60s R&B and a 1950s Sci-Fi B-Movie. At the same time it comes close to doing to James Brown era funk what The Chronic did to Parliament.