Not since Springsteen's "Greetings From Ashbury Park, NJ" has an album carved poetry so successfully from the dirty streets of America's greatest cities, or has a lyricist dealt so skilfully with the themes of addiction, failure and snatching redemption a split second before passing out.

Stuffed full of collaborations, the duo has created a multi layered, analogue driven, polished yet powerful long player.

This is a very, very good record.

It may be a scrappier collection than the exquisite, Tindersticks-in-aspic perfection of "The Hungry Saw", but somehow it adds up to something greater, the album as a whole bristling with creativity and the joys of trying something new.

Prepare to be beguiled.

Veirs here is at the peak of her game, and as refreshing as a lungful of oxygen.

'Wonderland' is magnificent. An album full of cracking tunes, potential singles and a new found lust for life from one of the best bands of the last ten years.

Free from the trappings of hype this is simply a great album. Rock 'n' roll: just like they used to make.

If March's "Fishscale" was his "Highway '61 Revisited" or "Innervisions", "More Fish" is "John Wesley Harding" or "Fulfillingness' First Finale". It may lack something of the lustre, but it's still a gem from a master operating very much at the peak of his powers.

Everything is that much thicker, more weathered, generously exaggerated and significantly less innocent. It pays increasing attention to composition and classy song structures and yet more to pulling them apart and lassoing passing listeners with the strands.

'Elephant' is already this year's most crucial purchase.

The good news is that The Polyphonic Spree still make sense stripped of all visual gimmicks.

It's not all brilliant, but there's enough of brilliance here to convince.

"Icky Thump" is really a very odd record indeed, but then, oddness of a particularly bravura nature comes naturally to them.

A far more sonically ambitious statement than its predecessors, perfectly fusing organic sounds with production techniques that are usually the preserve of underground dance producers or R&B mavericks.

'100th Window' is every bit the production masterpiece its predecessors are - in places harkening back to, if not quite matching, the collective's glorious debut.

Written, arranged, performed and recorded by Blake in his bedroom, the album isn't just a good collection of touching songs, it's a complete world of his own; a mood, a moment, a sound that's uniquely his. Just as a future classic should be.

'The Argument' is the sound of a band stretching out and thereby consolidating their position as a unique entity.

A definite tour de force for indie hip hop.

With Flock, their third album but only the second to get a British release, Ireland's Bell X1 have unearthed the missing musical link - and it's marvellous.

It's a record to get lost in, one that constantly surprises with its apparently infinite number of hidden harmonies and wry asides.

A fragrant bouquet of melody, light, love and naughtiness wrapped in an unfamiliar joie de vivre.

Herein lies the beauty of this band: geeky record collectors they may be, but they're quick to impose their feral energy and fierce individuality on proceedings.

They've become accomplished, exciting, restrained and wise.

With this majestic and multifarious new album, he has surely struck sonic gold once again.

It might not turn out to be his biggest album, but 808s & Heartbreak could well be his masterpiece.

Big by design, poignant yet relentlessly uplifting, it has the feel of a career crowning glory, or at the very least a second album, not a first attempt.

[A] strong contender for album of the year.

'The Sky Is Fallin' is a beast.... 'God Is In The Radio' has got just such an awesome riff, like the Lord himself hotwired to a Marshall amp.

Utterly unique and frequently wonderful.

Just knowing Shakira is still in the world and capable of making albums as inspired and assured as "Fijacion Oral Vol 1" is like finding out ABBA are reforming or that the real Michael Jackson was kidnapped and replaced with an evil imposter shortly after making "Thriller".

Take those hats off and launch them into the air for one of the most uplifting, career-topping albums anyone could have released, regardless of age.

2001 has been a tremendous year for hip-hop. At the last moment, the Wu-Tang Clan just made it even better.

A taut, economic album with emotional songs at its heart. Yep, we’re as surprised as you.

In short, it's the album everyone's been waiting for her to make.

It's not just that these sentiments are timeless - these songs, in these hands, are only now receiving their definitive interpretations.

If Adele's debut '19' marked her out as a young chanteuse with a booming voice, her follow-up '21' has shown a maturity in her songwriting that makes her the de facto authority when it comes to soundtracks to broken hearts.

Couples is simply a successful attempt to sound both different and better.

The one-time Best Unsigned Band In The Country have come up trumps with a debut album brimming with whip-smart, post-riot-grrl attitude.

Beyond the shiny surface of these songs lurks an unusual wealth of detail decorating the landscape through which the Furries power, scattering verse after chorus after verse at breathtaking speed.

[A] nine-minute sprawling, shifting and landing tidal wave.

What 'Original Pirate Material' makes abundantly clear though, is that - whilst Skinner may not be at the very cutting edge of Garage's club soundtrack - he's a man blessed with an astonishing aptitude for pop and a mainline into the Zeitgeist.

"Love Kraft"... sees the group slowing down and settling into themselves, revelling in their customary psychedelic indulgences while knocking out a supremely relaxed perfect pop album in the process.

Such is the depth and quality of Turner's songwriting, it plays like a best of.

"Fishscale" is a purist's delight, an album seemingly crafted solely for those who've been chasing his maverick tail for the past decade.

Despite the quick gestation, it's actually better than the successful debut - a rare enough occurrence - and the direction in which they've pushed things is equally surprising.

The quintessential much-loved cult band, they’ve yet to make an album their fans didn’t adore, but the good news is that “Oceans Apart” is one of their finest.

Nas's insight, erudition and poetic intensity override all other concerns.

It is dense, it is long, it is complicated. It is also a magnificent triumph of artistry over blind anger.

It may be epic, sprawling and too unwieldy a tool with which to prise open a place in the charts, but it's also nothing short of remarkable.

Squeaky genius.

It's hard to believe a better advertisement for music's capacity to be simultaneously adventurous and entertaining, funny and moving, leftfield and mainstream will be released all year.

They muster compelling music that sounds like triumph in the face of adversity, building something beautiful out of the building blocks of sadness and despair.

On paper it can seem a dark, depressing combination. But what Hope Of The States bring and what, in theory, they offer up for the lost and desperate to cling onto is... well, hope.

Busting out of car speakers on hot London streets this summer, 'Ego War' is gonna make you think that, finally, we've got a Brit band worth adoring.

Across forty minutes, this is epic yet compact, a film noir in garish technicolour, an album made up of potential singles.

This is music designed to fill arenas - possessed of a consistent quality and vision, a head, a heart and soul - that simply leaves the competition trailing in its wake. An utter triumph.

They've resurrected with this, their fourth album, the seemingly outmoded concept that with enough nurturing and faith, a band - and by extension it's audience - can grow into a beautiful thing.

'Reveal' sees REM exhale, relax and ease into a new confidence with a collection of songs to fill your heart. Every track here sifts with a live energy that was previously polished out of 'Up', and they sound all the better for it.

A darkly, slathering record of frustration and disillusionment, “Language. Sex. Violence. Other?" may, in time, even come to be seen as one of the true masterpieces of the noughties guitar revival.

Spoon have created an album that will not only satisfy long-time observers but will also act as a gateway for those yet to discover their charms.

Another masterpiece.

Welcome to the hottest, coolest, best-dressed pop album of the year.

Represents a considerable stride in ambition, reaching into dark unchartered territories and repaying close listening with the kind of organic insights that great music excels in unearthing.

A mature and, occasionally beautiful album, possibly the finest of their career.

In Hammond, [Waits] has found a worthy collaborator, one who gets to the heart of what these strange lyrics are actually about and imbues their sharp angles, acute observations and nicotine-stained introspection with some real insight and understanding.

Marina & The Diamonds convincingly fight off the encroaching talons of expectation by embarking on a rampant, stomping adventure, letting no idea lie when it can be crashed into another loudly and a microphone placed nearby to collect the resulting sparks.

'Since I Left You' is nothing short of stunning.... There's more imagination in this hour-long odyssey than most sample-based artists manage in their entire career. Not since DJ Shadow's 'Endtroducing' has an album showed what you really can do with a bunch of old vinyl.

It's an album that feels like a watershed somehow, a significant step onwards.

Nguyen has created what will probably be one of 2003's best albums. 'Again' is a dark and sexy record that reveals itself seductively over time.

Generally an upbeat dancey album which finds Madonna still ahead of the game sixteen years into her career, 'Music' takes an occasional breather with some more grown-up, reflective balladry.

This record can't claim such a free-spirited conception as its predecessor, but that's actually to its credit as not a moment rests idle or is flung in on a whim, every track connects like a pool cue to the back of the head in a bit of Friday night pub rough and tumble.

And while at first it feels like an unholy, unhummable mess, the same solid gold charm which powered lead single "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'" to Number One, lurks at the heart of every track, and by listen five it's refocused "Ta-Dah" into a strangely enticing nether world, where it's forever 1974 and a cheap thrill or soaring pop high lurks round every corner.

A mighty fine album which neatly sidesteps the tired alt.country tag, 'Feast Of Wire' is an engaging musical road trip that you wish would never end.

A beginning to end enchanting and addictive album.

For a band that formed little over a year ago, the energy and intent of this record is thrilling and the music rarely fails their undoubtedly grand ambitions.

This is the sound of a band returning to their roots, to the dramatic Celtic infused epics of their early records.

The album finishes almost as well as it started with 'The Mall & Misery' (a bit of country, a bit of disco, lightening bolts of new wave guitar, harmonies to intoxicate), proving the album's effective inevitability is not tedious and the quality is clear whichever direction you approach from.

Certainly, it's by far the best album of his career to date--proof that going it alone was a decision that most certainly paid off.

'Is A Woman' is a deep, rewarding, frustrating, baffling, engaging experience then, an album that drifts away from you just when you're getting hold of it.

Hence we get an album which, musically at least, veers all over the place, from chamber pop to glam to, God help them, hotel lobby jazz. In other hands, this would be a terrible mess, but in each instance you feel like the group are inching ever closer to that perfect pop moment.

Expect to hear a smattering of gems from Time On Earth, more than holding their own with the band's much loved and more famous moments.

Musically, DC continue to improve, supplementing their acoustic, sparse approach with radio-friendly pop and tracks that subtly ebb and flow; just beware of a few lightweight and labouring moments.

It gathers momentum slowly, making for a brew so quietly potent and pulsating with repressed energy you're almost afraid to leave the room while it's playing in case it explodes messily all over the walls.

The Frat pack are back with the impressive, Here We Stand, a confident, storming, guitar-driven rollercoaster of an album with more hooks than the North Sea fishing fleet, all bobbing along on a blitzkreig of overdriven, pop guitars.

There is a feeling of carefully constructed, mellow folk simplicity running through all these songs.

Laetitia Sadier's vocal melodies soar, so that even when you get two hints of classical minimalist Steve Reich in the first two tracks, there are still tunes to hum.

Scarlett Johansson has proved herself as much a rock queen as a roll queen.

This still isn’t the kind of music that you’ll hear looped on adverts or behind sporting highlights, but instead simple, affecting songs that use the human heart as an instrument as surely as acoustic guitars.

Callahan's trademark cold brittle voice - part Lou Reed, part Droopy - remains intact, but musically and lyrically he's a lamb in springtime.

Reflecting their influences without becoming burdened under them, their self-titled debut is an impressively varied beast.

In the main they have done away with their more stodgy, pretentious material and distilled their sound into a stripped down rawness, and they sound all the better for it.

'White Lilies Island' sees Imbruglia free herself from the Alanis Morissette-clone image that you sense was very much forced last time around and actually manage to carve out an identity, both in her vocals and as a personality.

With his languid, prolific philosophising, twisting humour and consistent melodic achievements, its tempting to see Benji Hughes as a kind of cartoon successor to Stephen Merrit and The Magnetic Fields (though it's more "25 Songs About Women 'N' Stuff" than "69 Love Songs"), but either way he's just snuck in from the back of the field with one of the most endearing albums of 2008.

Taking the death penalty as the central theme for an album -the sleevenotes feature anti-death penalty quotes from the like of Bono, Chuck D and Nirvana's Krist Novoselic- may not sound like much of a party, but there's a human warmth and gentle humour in Franti's delivery, hitched to hugely danceable and uplifting music.

The Raveonettes have something the Mary Chain lost around the time of 'Automatic': an understanding of how to make a tight three minute pop song feel exhilarating.

There's a gleefully fluid rock'n'roll dynamic driving this whole record, more evocative of modern-day US psychedelic reprobates The Dandy Warhols or The Brain Jonestown Massacre, rather than students trying to be clever.

It's mixed-up, mashed-up and flagrantly, unapologetically odd. It's everything we want The Go! Team to be. But with added extras.