My musical radar (revisited)...

Quick hits through what's been banging into my brain over the past week or two...

• Mystery Girl by Roy Orbison - good album...two high quality songs ("She's a Mystery to Me" - written by Bono & Edge, "You Got It")...sounds timeless...the rest of the album's ok but didn't make the iTunes cut
• Life in Slow Motion by David Gray - slow, boring...makes me wonder if I know of any other artists who have one album that shines so far above the rest of their catalog as does his White Ladder...does anybody know of any one-album wonders?
• Spider-Man: Breakout - nothing to see here, boys...some decent artwork, but totally second-rate villians and a complicated story...it wasn't painful, but it wasn't much worthwhile either
• Green Arrow: Moving Targets - first half good...nice, meaningful story with supporting character getting HIV...good talk to her class/readers...nice character development...second half story good...revenge from previously seen villians...decent help from Outsiders...second half artwork horrible...really, painfully atrocious...
• Superman: The Journey - again, eh...nice artwork throughout...the story skips big parts of the tale so those other issues can be collected in other Infinite Crisis trades, and this one suffers for it...we miss a lot of the story in the process...
• Wonder Woman: Land of the Dead - interesting plotlines between WW's blindness, continuing issues with the Olympian Gods, fighting with a suped-up Cheetah...nice read...I'm still missing the one that came before, though...PLCH doesn't seem to have it...
• Superman: Sacrifice - Supes is the ultimate weapon, and here he kicks Batman's backside...we don't see it, however, since Supes doesn't see it...not bad...rather confusing here with three versions of the fight and events happening or not happening depending on whether we're in Supes's POV or not...essential to understand Infinite Crisis, though...
• JLA: Crisis of Conscience - horrible artwork on the cover and in a couple of issues inside...good story about the League continuing to deal with the mindwipes that were retconned to have happened long ago...needed to be read to bridge from Identity Crisis to Infinite Crisis...I'm gonna have to read Infinite Crisis when it comes out
• Bagombo Snuff Box by Kurt Vonnegut - reprinted stories from his earliest published works...hit or miss...some are nice portraits of people...others show the early ticks of a man who would become a great writer but isn't there yet...probably only for fans...