Tom Lanham

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe serve sumptuous techno-pop ditties as if they were flutes full of decadent absinthe. And they do so with grace, poise, and cabaret camp.

There are plenty more pop touchdowns in the Dosage game for Collective Soul.

There isn’t a note out of concordant place, no potential hook overlooked.

With a flick of his delicate wrist, ex-Kinky Machine curiousity Louis Eliot has simultaneously revived the foppish Bryan Ferry dandy and the '60s-classic British pop song.

Crooner Richard Ashcroft makes it all sound like churchworthy gospel. Or at least a tidy sermon for jaded MTVers.

This sophomore spook-athon from chilly U.K. combo Portishead clanks across the attic, via Geoff Barrow’s skeletal samples and funereal keyboards. Beth Gibbons’ surgical-steel voice on Portishead slices into her partner’s scraps of musical meat, for an effect that’s hypnotic, bloodless, and addictive.

Healy stretches every lunkheaded syllable to its elastic limit, until those words bluster almost anthemic. And this Scot’s no one-hit wonder — 11 more stunners spell stardom.

U.K. ensemble Chumbawamba have mastered the fist-in-velvet-glove sucker punch. Any weapon is fair game: jungle, synth-pop, hip-hop — even faux madrigals.

Not what Ride fans were expecting but berry promising.

The Fourth World turning the tables on lethargic slacker cynicism, with Green Day producer Rob Cavallo bridling all that youthful zeal.