What A Crying Shame is more commercial and conventional than its debut predecessor, but every bit as enjoyable. Raul Malo has such a terrific voice that he can wear his broken heart on his sleeve without lapsing into self-pity. In fact, the very act of confessing his hurt seems to charge him with rocking excitement, especially when he gets a melodic hook as juicy as that on the title track or the Roy Orbison tribute, "I Should Have Been True". Trisha Yearwood sings harmony on the saloon ballad "Neon Blue" and the band turns Bruce Springsteen's "All That Heaven Will Allow" into the honky-tonk shuffle it was always meant to be. -Geoffrey Himes.

Cowboy Junkies, who started out making some of the most delicate music ever committed to tape, are louder and more raucous in their 20th year than they ever were before. One Soul Now, their ninth studio effort, see them occasionally wringing the necks of grungey guitars and torturing Hammonds for fun, coming on like the Walkabouts circa their brilliant Devil's Road. "Hunting Ground" is a thoroughly menacing blues rock, "Simon Keeper" is a dramatic folk narrative relating an embezzler's downfall to the death of Jesus, while "Notes Falling Slow", the album's turbulent centrepiece, is a sure-fire stadium-filler. Really, where on their early recordings a simple raindrop would have gone off like a grenade, here Cowboy Junkies prove themselves to be one of the more explosive rootsy rock bands around. They do have weaknesses-"Stars of Our Stars" and "No Long Journey Home" are chirpy, chugging pop rock, lacking in power and commitment-but these can easily be forgiven, given the strength of the rest of the material. At last, Cowboy Junkies may well be breaking through. -Dominic Wills.

Gillian Welch has captured the ethos of mountain music on Revival in a way that few lowlanders have managed, and that's just a little disconcerting. Outsiders aren't supposed to be able to infiltrate tight-knit clans. Producer T-Bone Burnett creates intimacy by recording Welch live with a small cast of supporting players, including Welch's partner, David Rawlings. While many of the songs are built around duo acoustic guitars and two-part harmonies, Burnett spices up a few of them up with some neat tricks, mixing an upright bass above the vocals on "Pass You By" and getting a fat, dirty sound out of three instruments. Welch's vocals, meanwhile, are stoical and matter-of-fact as her songs, which are infused with a repressed dread and contrition that's utterly convincing. White gospel tunes such as "Orphan Girl" and "By the Mark" feel as if they were culled from hymnals, yet they were written when Clinton, not Coolidge, was president. -Steven Stolder.

Among the recent glut of good-cause charity albums, No Alternative stands out as the best, both for its performances and its cause (proceeds benefit the Red Hot organization in the fight against AIDS). The high points are Soul Asylum's unlikely cover of Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing;" outtakes from recent albums by Chicago's Urge Overkill and Smashing Pumpkins; "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence," the major-label debut by Pavement; a surprise hard-rocking Nirvana track, and "Memorial Song," an a capella tribute from punk godmother Patti Smith to the late Robert Mapplethorpe. -Jim DeRogatis.

Clear-headed, open-hearted and joyous, Steve Earle's Transcendental Blues is as essential an album as Nashville will offer in 2000. Of course, at this point in a career, most older-and-wiser hell-raisers are content to feint those rebellious moves of old in the hopes that if you squint, it still looks like they're charging the barricades. But perhaps not surprisingly for a six-times divorcé who once named an album The Hard Way and sounded like he meant it, Earle pulls no punches, delivering this full-throttle set with the energy of someone half his age and the sharpened focus of hard-won honesty ("I Don't Want To Lose You Yet"), humility ("I Can Wait") and empathy ("Over Yonder [Jonathan's Song]"). Featuring able contributions from sister Stacey ("When I Fall"), Irish accordionist Sharron Shannon's band (Celtic knees-ups "Steve's Last Ramble" and "The Galway Girl"), the ghost of Revolver-era Beatles ("Everyone's In Love With You") and bluegrass ("Until The Day I Die"), Earle may have found the perfect balance between his restless musical ambitions and the thunderous sounds his core audience will pay good tattoo-and-beer money to hear again. And in the unabashed, gut-driven rock & roll wallop of "Another Town" and "Wherever I Go", it's hard to believe even the hardest of them will feel shortchanged. Evidently, Steve Earle still ain't satisfied. Much to everyone else's satisfaction. -Jennifer Nine.

The Cowboy Junkies' gothic Americana takes a psychedelic hue on At the End of Paths Taken, replete with Beatlesque string sections and snarling, distorted guitar leads. It's an often epic album, exemplified by the opening track, "Brand New World," which starts off like a lament and ends with a triumph of surging strings. Atop it all sits singer Margo Timmins. She's the lover everyone wants, a voice that is at once world-weary and inviting, domineering and seductive. She's the perfect vehicle for writer and brother Michael Timmins-especially on an album that deals with adult themes-because if nothing else, Margo sounds like an adult, a woman who has experienced the world and life and things that maybe we shouldn't talk about. A mother's frustration never sounded as ominous and threatening as on "Cutting Board Blues. " Sitting astride a buzzsaw guitar riff and a groove of doom, she talks about walking away from it all, leaving her cutting board behind. Many of the themes concern adulthood and children with a sense of despair about the world those children are entering on songs like "My Little Basquiat. " There are moments of light and hope on At the End of Paths Taken, but overall it is a deliriously dark and brooding album. -John Diliberto.