A gorgeous and ambitious melding of classic soul structures and values to hyper-modern production technique.

Yes, and it's just as frustrating, too, and fiddly and awkward and self-conscious and self-important and neurotic and panicky, and as often ugly as it is beautiful, and as often pompous or irrelevant as it is profound. Just as you've come to expect.

Whether they can co-exist with today's nu breed is another question entirely, but 'Beyond Good And Evil' just about overcomes its sameyness and provides enough flashes of what made them special in the first place to justify their continued existence.

A tremendously odd hour of music.

All in all, 'Flowers' is simply too nice to be up there with the Bunnymen's finest work, but a worthy record, if only for the few great tracks you will find within.

They've turned into Morcheeba. A blunt appraisal, yes, but them's the facts.

'Post-rock', which Sigur Rós most assuredly are, may be little more than the shoegazing of a decade ago in an ironic T-shirt, but that's no reason to dismiss it outright. For a start, much of it is very lovely.

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.

An emotionally exhausting, sometimes excellent album.

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.

An album of two halves, 'Green' has its pop, counterbalanced with its noise-outs but above all, it's a very traditional, straightforward tunesome half hour which slots in effortlessly with its predecessors. A welcome return? Oh yes.

'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.

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

Cowboy Junkies have made a 'growing older' record - there's a greater preoccupation with loss and death, reflected in a heavier, darker musical cast.

Raises the nu-metal bar by weaving maturity, passion and the craft of songwriting into its steaming pile of passive-aggressive chord chomping.

Often thought of as ahead of his time perhaps Byrne is now in the perfect position to articulate the angst of socially unskilled western white men who find themselves taking over the world via new technology. The album's glut of different rhythms speaks of a man trying to find his groove.

Harping on in their own innocuous, oblivious manner, like the shy cousin of Squarepusher the four music makers have succeeded in creating a selfishly inviting album of great beauty and delicacy.

This is an awesome album, almost certainly Placebo's pinnacle, although I'd love to be proved wrong.

There's precious little of the extravagant muso twiddling and indulgent nonsense that has waylaid the band sometimes in the past.

After a first listen 'The Optimist LP' simply drifts over your head like yet another take on a well worn formula, but given a second chance reveals a glorious, often ornate sensibility that simply can't be ignored.

Possibly the band's best album yet, destined to be loved by fans and loathed by critics, 'Mechanical Wonder' will be the soundtrack of spliffed up barbecues and boozed up afternoons with your mates for this summer and beyond.

At just over half an hour long, 'Rock Action' is a concise and robust statement of intent. It also contains some of the most beautiful and mesmerising music you'll hear this or any other year.

This is a much more satisfying album than 'The Velvet Rope', even if most of the songs are overlong and a few juggle satin sheet-cliches with self-help ones to numbing effect.

A bit of judicious pruning to remove the filler tracks would have resulted in a cohesive, dynamic album that would have easily been their best release to date.

The Stereophonics are trying to say something, expressing something more than the exuberant rock songs with which they made their name. Only time will tell whether their fans will lap up an album almost entirely starved of the big guitar sounds and sweeping choruses they've grown accustomed to.

'Old Ramon' is a slight affair cut from similar cloth to '...Blue Guitar', fuzzy with distortion, hampered by less than inspirational songwriting.

What makes 'No More...' Cave's best album since 'Henry's Dream' (which it most clearly resembles), is a return to melodrama (or rather the juxtaposition of melodrama with the album's ballads) where Cave crafts a deliciously potent mix of the visionary, the bizarre and the everyday...

Either they've been taking too much heroin or not enough, but 'Black Rebel Motorcycle Club' is as limp as a soggy spliff the ragged morning after.

If it was 1985, they'd be the biggest band on the planet.

Luke Haines, of nineties nobodies The Auteurs and Baader Meinhof, together with Sarah Nixey and John Moore, appear to have taken Saint Etienne's 'Like a Motorway' (from 'Tiger Bay') and driven away with it in a battered Ford Escort to a distant destination, a concept album about motorways and travelling.

A magnificent return to the band's brutal, almost hardcore punkish, roots.

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.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this album - just the airbrushed production of tracks like James Taylor's 'Don't Let Me Be Lonely' robs them of any true grit and soul they might have had. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem afflicting Clapton at the moment, making for yet another average album to add to the list.

Taken as a whole, 'Discovery' is a compelling concoction of styles that continually surprises.

Palatable but bland easy-listening.

What it all adds up to is an effective commercial album, littered with potential singles, taking few risks and adding little to hip hop culture.

Admittedly, this is bedroom indie, but it's bedroom indie with strong production and songs that are always self-deprecating enough to not be self-pitying.

Where the 'Farm break new ground is by exploring far more than the quiet-loud-rage-quiet formula with real singing and everything and a fair does of pop melody that place them more on a radio-friendly rock keel than no holds bared metal.

Fans of Aerosmith, and fans of good old Rock Music will love it.

It's an album for well-mannered emotional crises in front of log fires, a soundtrack for quivering bottom lips.

Largely acoustic, the album showcases a beautifully brutal collection of warped love songs; pristine and jagged, abrasive and tender and always devastatingly honest.

There is strong instrumental feeling - sometimes joyful, sometimes melancholic and sometimes alluring and seductive - in every single track.

But though the music is as good as anything they've ever done, rarely resorting to that downbeat, drunk-in-pub-tells-his-life-story tendency they've too often made their trademark, the lyrics are way below [Aidan] Moffat's usual standard.

If you didnt get 'U.F.Orb' or 'Orblivion', this ain't going to change your mind. If youve never heard The Orb before, though, this is as good an introduction as any.

Really, this isn't really a Run DMC album, they're just guests on it.

The influence of recent collaborators like Autechre and Spring Heel Jack is prevalent throughout much of the album as tracks like 'Eros' fuse jazzy, organic instrumentation like marimbas and guitar to colder cut-up beats.

Most people will deem this album a significant piece of work, and maybe if you haven't heard much Pavement then it is.

The formula here is for Frusciante to carve tunes out of loose, cyclical riffs, a few basic samples and drum programmes and his own parched voice. Sometimes, as on 'Remain', the effect is slightly uncomfortable... Tough that out, and get used to the demo quality throughout, and there are some decent songs on 'To Record Only Water,' endearing for their rawness and honesty.

Fortunately, the depth of great songs written by Francis results in something that feels more like a proper album of still-dynamic psycho-rock than a shoddy cash-in.

It's not too ambitious to suggest few other releases this year will match its grace, humanity and power.... A magnificent album.

For fans, a job well done, and surely appreciated. For the rest, digestion of any of Luna's five studio albums may be advisable first.

Collaborations with Helicopter Girl on 'Don't Come Around Here', with Macy Gray on 'Smitten' and the loving if overproduced take on of Curtis Mayfield's 'It Was Love That We Needed' stand out as highlights but only because the rest of this collection comes with the words 'will this do' burned deeply into its flabby, bovine arse.

Dog In The Sand' is unquestionably Frank Black's finest solo album.

Lopez mostly sticks to a successful formula - R&B lite with a Latin touch.

This collection of shimmering-smooth, synthesiser-led beats and lazy gangsta rap posturing isn't worthy of the once great Snoop.

Beginning with the juddering monstrosity that is the live version of 'Third Eye', there is no doubt that the band want to be judged as an epic attraction. It's unfortunate that they've chosen to lengthen some of the tracks to the point of monotony.

Overall, 'Road Rock Vol 1' is a tad sloppy and definitely no match for 'Live Rust', still Young's finest live album. That said, it's crudely compelling and with the exception of disappointing newie 'Fool For Your Love', further affirmation that this grizzled vet remains at the pinnacle of his considerable powers.

Renegades' is a formidable parting shot. A Rick Rubin-produced collection of 12 cover versions selected to show the breadth of Rage's influences, it's an object lesson in being both inspired by musical history and remoulding it in your own shape.

The monotony that blighted 1997's 'Wu-Tang Forever' and the sluggish complacency of some of the Clan's myriad solo projects in the past three years is notably absent. There's a born-again urgency here, with the RZA reclaiming control of the mixing desk from his disciples and trying out a few new tricks to spike the usual routine of cinematic string stabs and virtuoso raps.

'Vol. One' might have opened the band up to a wider audience but 'Vol. Two' is a far better reflection of what Everclear are all about.

Unfortunately, over a third of the songs on this album are ballads, and most of them are fillers at that.

The Dallas native has created a womb of an album. It's a warm, soft, retreat from the outside world. Reading between the lines, this means no hits.... [but] reading the printed lyrics shows what a wonderful poet she is.

The production is lame, and the album as a whole is unconvincing in it's pretences as hi-energy, bouncy and above all youthful punk. And Dexter Holland's vocals simply grate after a while. Die-hard Offspring fans will find nothing which deviates from the original plot, so they won't lose any long-term believers from this offering.

Back with the same band that helped her notch up such smoky, smooth jazz hits as 'Your Love Is King', 'Smooth Operator' and 'The Sweetest Taboo', Sade has produced an album of class, sophistication and melancholy soul.

Where 'Holy Wood' does come together and threaten to transcend its at times cliched parts is in its clarity of vision. This is a lean, visceral album that is as tripwire lithe as its maker. Manson's also remembered to write some great pop-goth tunes this time out, nowhere more so than with first single 'Disposable Teens'.

There's no gentle way of saying this, so let's cut to the chase. This record is, quite simply, useless.

Much of this album fails to engage.... There are lengthy attempts at covering too many bases, when fewer distractions would have allowed Cook to create music with direction, not just location and motion.

Despite the almost universal hyperbole that has greeted 'All That You Can't Leave Behind', this is no masterpiece. Certainly not by U2's stratospheric standards.

This time around Polly's drama school project is playing a Rock Star, and therefore this must be a Rock Record. And from the opener 'Big Exit', a simplistic, effective stomper so swathed in echo that she seems to be singing from the bottom of a pit, to the raucous semi-bonus 'This Wicked Tongue', it's just that, a back to basics special.

Okay, so it suffers from repetition in places and the last pair of songs are arguably disposable, but this collection shines and sparkles as an impressive debut.

The change is clear from the outset with 'In The Mode' sounding like an album made by an act that no longer feels the need to pamper its audience. Gone are the gently loping double bass grooves and feathery vocals, replaced by a feverishly paced percussive assault that challenges both vocalists and live instruments alike to keep up.

It doesn't disappoint, if beatific, rhythm-infested melodies, resplendent in wondrous brass, stark string accompaniment and obscure found sounds are your bag.

A cryptic but brilliant record, radically stripped of Radiohead's supposed musical strengths and charged throughout with a feverish desire to subvert and, perhaps, alienate.

But its modesty is its weakness. For the last 15 years, Simon has been rejuvenating himself with challenges, with awkward collaborations and unusual idioms, testing and experimenting with his talent. With this collection of gentle, wry ballads and witty, shuffly songs he is, nearly, just coasting on it. Not that this makes 'You're The One' a bad album. It just makes it an ominous one.

This second album from rappers Will.I.Am, Apl.D.Ap and Taboo is served with a hefty helping of soul sensibility and there are pinches of jazz and calypso thrown in for good measure.

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.

A refreshingly old-fashioned orchestral score intercut with rather less appealing jaunts through an atonal avant-garde.

Last year's 'Bleeps Tune' proved conclusively that he could do drum & bass better than anyone else around, 'Solaris' proves that he has the nerve and range to go beyond it, continuing to source new sounds and create rewarding albums. The best, you feel however, is yet to come.

And fortunately, Rickie also goes beyond the cliched songbook, choosing songs which the soaring yet contemplative voice lends itself perfectly to, and makes her own...

This is bound to be praised to the hilt as the Next Big Thing, but rock outfit At The Drive In have only one thing going in their favour - the absence of competition. It's so close to being something beautiful, something to cling on to in these aurally barren times, but it's just so not quite.

As tear-soaked and gorgeous as we ever might have hoped.

The Ecleftic' just tries to please too many people, open up too many markets, and simply ends up diluting the sound in which it purports to be rooted.

G.O.A.T.' is depressingly bereft of considered content. There's nothing outrageous or offensive, just plenty of the unthinking and inarticulate sex talk that L's been spouting between the brags for years.

It's New Order-lite.

The Golden D' is Coxon's second stab at recording the most pointless album of all time and rest assured he's getting there.

This, like the last joint 'Stakes Is High', sees the crew making even more stylistic space between themselves and their very own creation of the late eighties, 'the daisy age'.

A fine writer, possessed of a honeyed, deep, richly expressive voice, Ice-T may have been the rapper of choice for white suburban teens in big shorts, but that doesn't mean he or his music have ever been anything less than grippingly authentic. He might not have always walked hip hop's artistic frontline, but 'The Evidence' proves he should always be ranked among the music's great practitioners.

Rarely lifting itself above mere mediocrity the album is no doubt destined to provide background music at thirty-something dinner parties and sedate wine bars.

With this ramshackle spread of spiked beats and filthy-fingered funk he's produced easily his best work.... An intoxicating, headstorming brew of desire and despair 'Bow Down To The Exit Sign' is the first great album of the millennium.

Music that is designed to smother, to sedate, to lull the listener into a soporific state of boredom.

Despite Brown's unquestionably limited vocal range, the minute pitch shifts of his voice are well suited to the stoned-wonder of tracks like 'Set My Baby Free', 'Neptune' and 'Dolphins Were Monkeys'. It's on these blissed out, chilled moments that the album really shines.

'Mwng' or 'Mane' (as in horses) is a purely Welsh language album and is a theoretically disorientating and complex, but triumphantly audacious, experience.

In drawing on rock, hip hop, electro, drum 'n' bass and early electronic artists, Van Helden mirrors the developments dance acts have been making in the UK and Europe, rather than US artists.

Kid Rock's sound rarely deviates from the explosive metal guitar rap synthesis he has made his trade mark...It is when Kid Rock strays from these familiar musical pastures that he gets into trouble, as in the case of 'Abortion', a rather pathetic attempt at soul...

The production, however, is first rate, Dre proving that he really is on fire at the moment. Eminem's microphone skills are similarly beyond question ' though a little too shouty on occasion. It's just that his self-indulgent and irritatingly stupid rants will prove too much for any audience that recognises irony in Beavis and Butthead.

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.

This time it's the cover of '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' that grabs the headlines. The surprisingly credible version limbers into life with Britney chatting away to her pals on the phone.