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FROM NOTHIN' TO SOMETHIN'

LOST HIGHWAY
Island
Bon Jovi

By now most interested parties have grown accustomed to the idea of a Bon Jovi country album. Last year the band had a No.1 country hit with Who Says You Can't Go Home, featuring guest vocals by Jennifer Nettles of the Atlanta group Sugarland. The song's success earned Jon Bon Jovi an invitation to the Country Music Association Awards, where he voiced his appreciation for Nashville's songwriting tradition, looking only slightly out of place.

Lost Highway takes this strategic partnership a step further, yielding unsurprising but reasonably strong results. Jon Bon Jovi and his wingman, the guitarist Richie Sambora, sing as yearningly together as ever. And their new songs - often written with the band's regular producer, John Shanks - deliver a familiar payoff of big choruses and earnest lyrics. Several ballads, including the first single, Make a Memory, appeal directly to a love interest; true to form, Bon Jovi employs the word "baby" every time.

LOST HIGHWAY

Lost Highway feels most like a country album on the tracks produced by the Nashville insider Dann Huff, which turns out to be for better and for worse. Along with Make a Memory, Huff is responsible for sweet-tempered, sure-footed guest appearances by LeAnn Rimes and the singer-songwriter Hillary Lindsey. Unfortunately he also oversees a party anthem with Big & Rich and a dud called I Love This Town, songs that only the Nashville Convention and Visitors Bureau could love.

But Jon Bon Jovi has interests beyond civic cheerleading. On Everybody's Broken he delivers a barbed sort of consolation, and on One Step Closer he describes what sounds like a recovery from addiction. Perhaps it means something that Sambora recently checked in and out of rehab; there's a place for reckless behavior in country music, just as there's a place for redemption.

ICKY THUMP

ICKY THUMP
Third Man/Warner Bros
The White Stripes

"Rag and bone!" shouts Jack White on the crucial track of the White Stripes' new record, Icky Thump, and he's calling for whatever you've outgrown, including the pop culture you've lost faith in.

It's the call of the junkman from his horse-drawn cart, a vestige of British culture in the pre-electronic days. So is the phrase "Icky Thump," a slight alteration on an archaic expression of surprise, something a Lancashire retiree might say when confronted with the White Stripes' new costumes, with polka dots, feathers, button-crusted hats, and ties and suits.

The White Stripes aren't preservationists; they're magical utilitarians. Authenticity, in and of itself, seems to bore them. They're on a far more selfish mission, smelting down favorite bits of English-language culture for their own ends. Here these include Led Zeppelin, perfumed 1950s pop, Celtic folk song and the blues, which White plays with an electronic pitch-shifter. (The White Stripes' junk cart would have spinner rims.)

"One thing's for sure," White sings during the jump-and-dive dynamics of 300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues. "In that graveyard, I'm gonna have the shiniest pair of shoes."

The band's sound and method are 10 years old now, and this record is structurally familiar - with an approximation of a radio hit (its big-riff title track), a few blues longueurs and folk miniatures - but slightly more grandiose. Its rock is louder, its campiness richer. (Little Cream Soda is the closest they've gotten to metal; the album's only song not written by White, Conquest, copped off a Patti Page record, is chest-beating kitsch.) The setup's the same, the colors richer.

But back to the track Rag and Bone. Jack White hollers it over a wicked blues shuffle, the sound flooded with Meg White's cymbal crashes; the verses call for "something shiny," Christmas trees, broken trumpets, toilet seats. Toward the end he imagines his route. "West side, southwest side, middle east, rich house, doghouse, outhouse, old-folks' house, house for unwed mothers." Manic now, his rap shoots into a higher key, as if imitating the upward zoom made by his guitar's pitch pedal. "Halfway homes, catacombs, twilight zones, looking for Technics turntables to gramophones!"

FROM NOTHIN' TO SOMETHIN'
Def Jam
Fabolous

The Brooklyn rapper Fabolous is known for rhymes that aspire to nothing more or less than cleverness. His voice is plain and conversational and smooth enough, and if he has any personality quirks he's keeping them to himself. You might even call him dull. But give him a hard backbeat or a soft R&B track, and he'll happily supply you with wordplay until the chorus comes around. He's a word nerd, and he likes nothing more than finding unexpected rhymes: "Last seen in Brooklyn, they found him by a Bronx lot/Rifles on the roof - yeah, we got him by a long shot."

That couplet comes from From Nothin' to Somethin', Fabolous' fourth album and his first for Def Jam; it's a big-budget CD that delivers small pleasures. Every song but one has a guest star, some of whom inadvertently expose the limits of the Fabolous formula. Diamonds, with Young Jeezy, is a pale imitation of Down South hip-hop. Gangsta Don't Play, with Junior Reid, is an inert foray into reggae. And Brooklyn, which includes a verse from Jay-Z, doesn't sound quite as tough as the borough it celebrates.

Luckily, Fabolous' wit rarely fails him (even the misfires are quotable), and the best tracks are charming throwbacks to that recent but distant era when New York hip-hop was riding high. In Return of the Hustle he delivers boasts ("I'd rather do my lip-lashing/When the chips cashed in") over a bombastic Just Blaze beat; Jokes on You gives him a welcome chance to trade one-liners with Pusha T from Clipse; Baby Don't Go is a brisk and flirty T-Pain collaboration. And then there's his current single, Make Me Better, a love song with a chorus by Ne-Yo and a sleek beat by Timbaland. In it Fabolous delivers one of the sweetest and silliest pickup lines of the summer: "Guess it's a G thing whenever we swing/I'm-a need Coretta Scott if I'm gon' be King."

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