CD: Missy Elliott, This Is Not A Test

After seven years, Missy Elliott's chief competition is herself. Although the Virginian rapper's fifth album is predictably better than 90% of the year's hip-hop, it stands up less well against her own remarkable back-catalogue. After Miss E... So Addictive's club-inspired exuberance and Under Construction's vibrant redux of old school hip-hop, This Is Not a Test is relatively aimless. The ballads drag and many of the sparse grooves simply echo previous hits.

The peaks, happily, are as high as ever. Pass That Dutch is an astonishing concoction of handclaps, whinnying horses and double entendre while Spelling Bee pairs lines like "my flow is tight as H-E-double-L" with an insistent synth buzz. Most arresting is Toyz, a bumping ode to the wide range of vibrators now available. These three alone affirm that even an anticlimactic Elliott album has the capacity to make jaws plunge.

Elliott once revealed that her musical other half, Tim "Timbaland" Mosley dreaded working on her albums because of her punishingly high standards. Without a muse-cum-taskmaster Timbaland is tempted to phone it in, as he does on Under Construction II, a sequel not worthy of the name. Apart from brief cameos by Elliott and Bubba Sparxxx, the vocal line-up (including sidekick Magoo, Timbaland's very own Ernie Wise) is second-rate and the sonic ideas cupboard is worryingly understocked. Worse, there's an unsavoury mixture of bravado and whining. "They still won't give me my props," Timbaland grizzles on Don't Make Me Take It There. After blanket critical acclaim and millions of dollars worth of hits, what more does he want? A Nobel prize? So let's give him his props. He's a pop genius, as is Elliott, and it's precisely because they've revolutionised hip-hop more than once that it's hard to settle for anything less.