For people awaiting that second Jet album, this should prove a welcome distraction from their crayons. For the rest of us it's a look of bemusement and a scratched head.

By third song, "Faded Beauty Queens", the recipe is already stalling, and the harmonies begin to sound flimsy.

If not musically the most creative thing to ever have been called hip-hop, “Sweat” has more than its share of head nodding struts and hands-in-the-air moments.

Mainly, though, this is a terribly weary album, tedious when it strives to be seditionary, trading on utterly devalued notions of attitude and aggression.

As much as Nelly likes to portray himself as everybody’s favourite fun-filled club star, “Suit” suggests that writing thoughtful, intelligent and enduring R&B is where his heart really lies.

Essentially a homage to The Jackson 5/Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and fellow Minnesotan Prince, "The Handler" proves that Har Mar possesses a fine R&B baritone, is an able rapper and pens exceedingly funky, party-primed tunes with a perfect pop core.

Sincere of intent and, as ever by Weller, stylishly and deftly delivered, "Studio 150" is a pleasant enough listen, which nevertheless will leave die-hard fans hankering for new Weller material.

“Funeral” is the sort of perfectly-realised record you’d hope from a band at the top of their game. For a debut release it’s unmatched in recent years. Hearing it is to wake from a black and white slumber and to view the world in widescreen Technicolour.

The album's sinewy rhythms and monochrome production sheen start to fade into the background after a while, but as far as capturing a certain political and musical zeitgeist, "Stealing Of A Nation" does so accurately, and with more honesty and integrity than most.

This is a determined little bastard of a record by a band in a bug-eyed, rhythmic sweat, who know it’s time to come out with their guns blazing.

Everywhere you look on this record there is a sense of magic escaped, accompanied by the ever-tantalising presence of a great band just beneath the surface.

Everything, you suspect, that people hate about Björk is multiplied a thousandfold here. But by the same measure, to her fans, “Medulla” is an intimate, ecstatic wonder.

Should you own the band’s magnificent first three singles (collected on the “Three EPs” mini-album), it’s hard to imagine you’ll ever really need another record by this conceptually brilliant, artistic dead-end of a band.

While the sound is distinctly Crowded House, it’s darker than previous offerings.

Represents an ill-advised body swerve from the duo’s idiosyncratic home territory and plunges them deep into the thoroughly becalmed waters of MOR ambient pop, offering up languid, beats-driven, down-tempo tunes that aren’t so much radio-friendly as downright sycophantic.

A dignified and enjoyable end to a frequently astonishing career.

It will undoubtedly top some end of year lists this Christmas.

Carr has always wanted to create his very own sound, and for the first time we are starting to hear it here.

Full of heat haze lethargy and sun scorched sing-alongs, it’s a resolutely romantic vision of the all American singer-songwriter as viewed through unmistakably French eyes.

A dignified and engaging record.

The results breathe that same rarefied air as Nick Drake or Vashti Bunyan.

This is much more than a retrenchment, and it certainly isn't a retreat.

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.

Yes, there are a lot of reasons to hate Scissor Sisters. But this brilliant debut is not one of them.

A great straight-down-the-line rock 'n' roll album.

"Tyrannosaurus Hives" is a good record, but one best dipped into rather than listened to in one go.

Warm and welcoming.

It’s both an oddly comforting and exhilarating trip.

For every misfire, the band hit their target twice.

With a distinct lack of pretension, some wholly infectious hooks and an insouciant sense of humour, this is the kind of project that will ultimately serve to keep Beenie’s rep as a professional entertainer and maestro of the dance deeply intact.

It's a smart, self-aware and consciously direct album.

A collection of rootsy yet sophisticated, summery soul grooves, with the usual nods to past masters like Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack and Glady Knight, "Stone Love" is equally at home alongside the sultry, sassy R&B of contemporaries like Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keys and Erykah Badu.

At its best “The Silent Hours” is a robust, reasonably straight ahead rock record and at its worst, a lumpen, forgettable distraction.

It's not a perfect record, but "The Cure" does achieve something quite remarkable and unexpected. It leaves you looking forward to their next one.

There are moments when The Concretes ape Mazzy Star a little too closely for comfort on this album, but overplaying a talent for languorous, delicious fuzz pop is hardly the most horrific of crimes.

"Afrodisiac" is Brandy’s most personally revealing album to date and her least lyrically fluffy, but its intimacy is hamstrung by the MTV-flavoured, formulaic gloop with which most contemporary, American R&B now seems to be contaminated.

It's probably safer to view "Gettin In..." as the sound of an old man lying back in the ocean with well-deserved drink. A straight-up collection of rock n roll songs that he probably enjoyed playing on as much as anything else in his bizarre life.

Imagine "Hello Nasty" if it had entirely consisted of "Three MCs And One DJ" and you're close to understanding exactly how "To The 5 Boroughs" sounds.

Brandon Flowers has a horrible, honking seal bark of a voice.... Faced with this significant disadvantage, The Killers have cannily crafted a wall-of-sound songwriting style so bombastic it almost suits Flowers' sledgehammer vocals.

What emerges is Sonic Youth at complete ease with themselves and their music, operating simultaneously at the peak of their powers and with a powerful, audacious restraint.

It's truly intriguing in the way PJ albums haven't been since the commanding "To Bring You My Love" back in 1995.

They ‘sound’ well-written without actually being so – the ultimate in pop sophistry.

"Contraband" is "Appetite For Destruction" for grown-ups.

Old loves Liquid Liquid, ESG and A Certain Ratio haven’t been abandoned and their percussionist still works overtime, but the spirits of Prince, Kraftwerk (both on the wryly self-referential "Dear Can"), Chic and even ABC (on the politicised "Shit Scheisse Merde Pt 1") make cameo appearances.

It's not, in the final reckoning, a terribly important and wildly impressive record.

So, we have a maturing Ms Lavigne, distancing herself from the teen antics of her "Let Go" debut, but struggling to find any stories worth telling save for boyfriend trouble and dead grandparents.

OK, so it’s not Norah Jones dinner party territory and there’s enough torturous mayhem to gratify their faithful ‘maggots’ but there’s equally a contrived nature underlying the habitual havoc.

A product so meticulously calculated, so shamelessly designed for the widest possible demographic, so wholeheartedly shallow, you suspect Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell must be dumbstruck in admiration.

Frequently, it sounds like the band have spent most of that time labouring to make their fifth album as monumental as possible. Where once they swung, however ironically, now they plod. Slowly. Ponderously. In expensive lead boots.

There are a batch of mighty tunes here, and a sound that, while hardly de rigour, melds some of rock's freshest, brightest lights to their own street-wise, archetypal city swagger and 'Mockney' wit.

While there's nothing as irresistibly catchy as "Under Rug Swept"'s magnificent "Hands Clean", the overall impression, musically speaking, is one of freshness, optimism and energy. But better still, it's smart, and sussed, and frequently funny as hell.

Favours The Song over ambient abstraction and real-time playing over rejigged samples.

It's, well, a thoroughly professional record. And therein lies the problem. Method Man, perhaps more than any other Wu-Tang member bar ODB, has personality to burn, and trying to force it into a box fit for any other hit rapper is an impossible task.

One meandering ballad follows another, each one overlong and labouring under the illusion that emotional profundity is more important than a decent tune.

As challenging and glorious as rock can go when filtered to it's basic elements, but not without a whiff of indulgence.

As an album it’s so random and erratic that it’s neither a brave step forward nor a disastrous wrong turn; just an entertaining detour while they workout where they’re actually going.

His eye remains sharp.

For a handful of decent Morrissey songs – and, it must be said, some of his best ever vocal performances – we should be grateful. Ultimately though, for all these tantalising reminders of greatness, "You Are The Quarry" still feels like a man unnecessarily trapped by the limitations of his band and the extent of his loathing.

"Up At The Lake" may not be The Charlatans' finest effort, but it’s certainly good enough to suggest they could still be around for another 14 years.

Appallingly tasteful.

This is a strange, disturbing, unsettling, compelling album.

It’s pretty much all fantastic.

This is the sound of an emboldened, beefier Beta Band, certainly, the new songs sounding fuller, freer and more confident than ever before.

Despite the overbearing subject matter of war, morality and protest "Trampin'" doesn't feel like a particularly heavy album.

To live in their world is like being trapped at an idiot's convention and almost – but only almost - as bad as Limp Bizkit.

It’s not as remarkable a transformation as the one Rick Rubin performed on Johnny Cash, but this is a fine collection and as pleasurable a listen as it undoubtedly was to record.

It’s a phenomenal album. And best of all, it’s unmistakably Prince.

So all-in-all, with every track practically a text book example of what great pop should sound like, even the ballads, Hanson’s return is a welcome one.

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.

Three albums in, their belief that success and integrity don’t have to be mutually exclusive, is finally starting to pay off.

At these transcending moments, "Good News...". is elevated into excellence. But overall, there is too much Mouse that bores and not enough Mouse that roars.

That it'll be her most scrutinised release is a problem, because its stilted, wearying, obsessive concentration on an uncomfortably forced notion of it's creator's sexuality means it's the only album she's made in the last dozen years that doesn't merit such focussed attention.

The most inventive and exhilarating rock music Britain's producing right now.

With lead single "Yeah!" being a genuine cyber funk masterpiece, and a lot of other perfectly respectable tunes backing it up, "Confessions" isn’t hard to like. But with the overall impression being of nice Usher making another nice album, it’s impossible to get excited about.

Flawlessly interesting is what we’ve come to expect from Williams and Hugo, but "Fly Or Die" is rather interestingly flawed.

Jem’s deadpan tones sound like a slightly huskier, sluttier Beth Orton, and while nothing quite matches the beguiling "They"... she strikes the odd thimbleful of gold.

Musically, it's a mess.

A definite tour de force for indie hip hop.

A thoroughly engaging exercise in uneasy listening.

"Seven Swans" is as a graceful tour de force of an album - beguiling, bewitching and beautiful.

The four Von Bondies remain terrific players, and Stollsteimer's sustained indignation is always good for a laugh. But at times, the calculated nature of it all is distracting, and you long for the harebrained rawness which made "Lack Of Communication" the best record (besides those by The White Stripes) that the Detroit revival has produced.

It won't usher in a bold new era where boys are boys and bands play guitars, but there is more than enough here to chew over and enjoy.

It's almost all too familiar, so much so that it's hard to hear the tender songs and mesmerising instrumentals in their own right.

A single-disc equal of "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below".... Even if it only sold 14 copies, it would still be the best record of the year.

He preens, poses and struts like a self-proclaimed and extremely delusional love god.

Everything suggests they have a great album within them, but this isn't it.

Tapping in to our fearful collective unconscious, Liars have conjured a darkly mesmeric, thrillingly full-blooded, paranoid drama of ritual and occultism built from twitchy electronica, shrieking vintage synths, punk noise and unsettlingly twisted hip hop.

Show[s] that the early chapters of the Staton story may not match the later commercial success, but trump the four-to-the-floor stuff with grit-in-the-grooves southern soul.

Mainstream, bleeding-heart balladry, tempered by slightly outre arrangements.

Ultimately it makes you feel the loss of Pavement all the more.

Out of these two good albums, a great single album is fighting to break out. [combined review of both discs]

Perfectly lovely to listen to, undoubtedly, but curiously difficult to digest. [combined review of both discs]

The lack of creativity on display here is palpable.

Eventually you’re left longing for a dash of spontaneity or that the band would break into something adventurous.

The Coral have refined their influences, dropping some of the more incongruous blasts and revelations for a more concise, controlled dervish of Northern guitar colour and shade, West Coast psychedelic fever and Spaghetti Western landscapes and atmospherics.

A full-blooded, affectionate and occasionally very funny album.

There is, however, nothing that remotely touches the pop genius of 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' and, by the halfway mark, the album's sagging badly.

"America's Sweetheart" is a thrilling record. Held together by that extraordinary voice, which sounds even more shredded than it did in the days of "Dick Nail" and "Pretty On The Inside", she can still deliver.