Such a ratio of misses to hits was not expected but, all things considered, this is still one of the best electronic-based albums you're going to hear this year.

Many of The Libertines' finer qualities are made all too apparent in their absence on "Down In Albion", none quite so painfully as Carl Barat's Django Reinhardt via Johnny Marr charm with a guitar.

This release at least gives some sense of the visual brilliance, media spectacle and utter fertility of artistic energy that came together in Tropicalia.

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.

There are some truly great moments on "Senor Smoke".

It just sounds like she cannot be roused to feel very passionate about anything.

Beautiful songs one and all, there’s much to recommend "Eye To The Telescope", and given enough time and patience, Tunstall’s subtle charm seeps through making it an album to love.

The best approach here is to set aside genre delineations (who needs 'em?) and simply surrender.

There's no denying Sway's dazzling verbal chops and it's not just the speed and flow of his delivery that impresses.... His musical backdrops, however, are very much less adventurous and anyone looking to "This Is My Demo" for grime's trademark, darkly paranoid, tacheometric beats will be disappointed.

"Sexor" is one of the more diverting and consistent dance records of recent times, and certainly one of the most fun.

What's that sound? That's the sound of a barrel scraping and a career being flushed down a toilet.

If [some]songs catch a magical intangible by pairing Marshall's naked vocal with a ghost of Memphis passion, others fail to turn the same trick.

"Amber"'s glow increases with each listen, but existing fans have just cause to feel forsaken.

Hit and miss, then, but certainly brave and bold.

Without question, for all its eclecticism, "For Screening Purposes Only" is a dumb, disposable record that no one will listen to in 12 months' time.

A smart, exuberant and very real record, whose reach has nothing to do with "authenticity".

Rather than mimicking and rehashing "Simple Things", she's found a warmth and depth of feeling that makes "Colour The Small One" the logical progression.

Leaping from the speakers in a fury of jarring axe steel, clocking rhythmic beats and clinical vocal swagger, ultimately this LP gives itself - at some 60 minutes length - an awful lot of time to say very little.

At last Ryan Adams has made a record every bit as good as his heroes.

It's another solid and undeniably enjoyable album. But from a woman as supremely talented as Blige, somehow enjoyable rates as a disappointment.

It's not that Foxx can't sing.... It's not even really the lack of stunning songs. It's the fact that his super slick, super smooth R&B hasn't been either cool or fashionable for more than a decade.

By letting inferior guests share his stage, Beck only reminds us what a unique and gifted individual he is.

Despite this album's production credits reading like a PhD thesis, Korn's commercial masterplan is fatally undermined by certain glaring weaknesses, the main one being that their singer is a dunderheaded, sexist, self-pitying fool.

Stripped of novelty and goodwill, The Darkness are just a resolutely ordinary band after all.

Much more of this and Shakira will surely take over the whole world with her mix of unthreatening pop / rock, lovingly naïve lyrics and cute tummy.

System Of A Down's music is highly layered and complex, but never succumbs to self-indulgence. Every track is tightly-coiled and urgent because, even while they're trying to broaden your horizons, SOAD are aware of the need to rock hard.

The sound that [Price] has created for "Confessions On A Dancefloor" is simultaneously stylish, fun, hip and camp; all things a Madonna record should be.

"Kicking Television" documents a band on fire and a frontman in clarion clear voice.

A more satisfying album intellectually than it is musically.

For some, the excursions into god-bothering territory ("Create Me", "Man Of God") will be too mawkish, but few could deny that we're now in the full swing of a fascinating new era - a place where rock'n'roll, formerly the preserve of the doomed teenager with nothing to lose, has grown old.

The record's treasure is folded into layers which make it an endlessly rewarding place to invest a couple of months of your life.

An average effort with hints of greatness.

The pair have opted for unfiltered analogue over cleaned-up digital, too, achieving a lush density with loops and textures and a warm wooziness overall that's a million miles removed from their last effort, 2002's dark and almost mathematically complex "Geogaddi".

Sounds surprisingly vital.

Although "Hypermagic Mountain" is no less a terrifying, red-eyed and rampaging behemoth than its predecessors, the duo have unleashed a beast that assumes a more recognisable form.

If this fluffy, punk-lite petulance, devoid of any real personality is to your taste, lap it up.

There's something about the determinedly primal recording techniques and clunky, 'we-just-learnt-this-today!' instrumentation that doesn't ring true.

Proof once more, that you can be experimental, extreme and eccentric but be excellently hip hop all at the same time.

[His] most satisfying collection of material since 1993's "Wild Wood".

An album that's desperately hard to listen to, let alone care about.

It's a dizzyingly impressive debut.

"Thunder, Lightning, Strike" is an immensely derivative album, but one which cuts and pastes its influences in a strikingly original way. Chiefly, by piling them all on at once.

Given their youth, it does indeed promise much, but please, hold off on that honours listing for a while yet.

This is a frequently great and occasionally bold statement from an - extraordinary - artist on top of her game.

It is not a terrible album by any means; just an unfocussed and sprawling one.

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.

Breathlessly exciting and enormously sexy, "The Witching Hour" is just the soundtrack for your next S&M session.

A modern day classic.

Obviously nobody would pay attention to her smart lyrics if the music didn't compete, but, largely, it does.

Ms Dynamite's irate sloganeering may look effective on paper, but until she relearns how to connect with the everyday world, this is little more than ranting in the mirror.

Marking not so much a revival as a triumphant rising from the ashes, “The Antidote” is a surprisingly potent and clear vision of musical intent.

A beginning to end enchanting and addictive album.

A hugely impressive debut.

It sounds as if the band's batteries are steadily running out. Confidence ebbs, emotions run flat, the songs become more and more inconsequential.

More dutty than rock, "Trinty" fully establishes Sean Paul as not only a dancehall great, but one of black music's brightest talents.

Though hardly in the running for rap album of the year, there's plenty to recommend "The Naked Truth". Yet equally, there's an abundance of wearing phone skits, phoned-in guest performances and shameless fillers to get in the way.

There are precious moments on here and hints that something truly magnificent could emerge in time, but first Broadcast need to work out exactly where they're going and why.

"Dynamite" may be his most consistent long player yet, which is not to say there aren't some lows.

There is far too much irritating hippywaffle amongst these gems.

You can't help feeling that, with a little less self-indulgence and a bit more camp brilliance, Brakes could be the side project that turned into something special.

An aptly-named collection that will have even foul-weather fans scratching their heads as to where the pop has gone.

With "Life In Slow Motion" he's delivered an album so rich and deft that it pushes beyond the realm of the humble singer-songwriter, to earn him a place alongside the likes of Springsteen and Van Morrison as one of music's revered elite. Without question, this is a classic album.

No one was expecting Godrich to turn this noble British pop institution into Radiohead, of course. But the glimpses of greatness are enough to leave you wishing that bottle had prevailed and more in the vein of "Too Much Rain" had resulted.

It is surely intoxicating.

Overall, the effect is post-punk Cure with swathes of Ride in heady moments and, as overblown and unlistenable as these amassed elements might sound in your head, it's actually fantastic.

"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.

Certainly, "Plat De Jour" is one of the most ambitious records that will be released this year.

If Avril Lavigne dealt with her 'issues' by adding whiskey to her skinny latté, bummed about on a Californian beach at sunset and listened to The Go-Gos, this is what she'd sound-like.

A quietly timeless triumph.

The Stones in 2005 sound fresh and re-invigorated.

The overall impression is of an album that you’d never be ashamed to own but wouldn’t necessarily feel the need to play all that often, either.

"Late Registration" feels more comfortable in its own skin than its predecessor.

It’s all rather marvellous.

"Howl" burns with just as much commitment and fervour [as the previous two albums]; it simply burns slower.

Woomble’s lyrics, while literate, are never quite as clever as his supporters would like to believe.

For some, the absence of human warmth may prove the album's ultimate flaw. Still, until there are humans out there making music like this robot, we'll settle for it.

Think Giorgio Moroder, The Art of Noise and Michael Nyman with - if you like your reference points with less padded shoulders - a touch of New Order and Boards of Canada.

They've got one song, basically. It's a fairly good song, comprising driving, rama-lama rhythms and pitch-dark lyrical content; but repeated 10 times in fairly mild variations, it inevitably loses its appeal.

Song after song, this is hardly an album that boasts of its riches but, in a determinedly low-key fashion, the music asserts itself in honest textures captured in naked performance.

Stripped of the rough guitars and eclectic production of the original, two things are exposed - those words and that voice. Neither fare well.

Deceptively hard to resist.

This debut sets the newcomers head and shoulders above the neo-Britpop pack.

For the most part, "The Understanding" saunters along without a trace of urgency, which is unfortunate as Royksopp were always at their best when electronic ingenuity rather than pastel-shaded synth washes were holding things up.

While other albums may have been more groundbreaking, none have been as excitable or infectious.

Unsurprisingly, "TP3.com" is overblown and overlong with appearances from the usual suspects - The Game, Twista and the ubiquitous Snoop - and production qualities as impressive as his libido.

Once you've taken in how wonderful it sounds, it'll be time to thrill at how much of it there is, then how dense it all is.

The melodies are mostly jaunty and the stoner harmonies solar-powered enough to lull around your brain but there’s no disguising the fact it’s a disappointingly one-dimensional record stuffed with half-baked ideas (“The Start”) and devoid of a single original thought.

This is a very, very good record.

Establishes him not only as a master of the fast and fluid flow, but an insightful, frequently humorous - if somewhat socio- politically naïve - lyricist.

Corgan is slowly swamped by the style he's adopted.

Engineers here prove capable both of emotive songwriting and of virtuoso studio craft.... Yet it falls shorts of true brilliance, for the simple reason that the band steadfastly refuse to rock-out.

Resurrect[s] the 1970s white ska world of The Specials, The Jam et al with varying degrees of success.

It is not the Foo's finest moment, but for all its flaws and flab, this meandering record may just become one we all learn to love.

[Their] apathy really detracts from the heartfelt nature of the music, which, produced by the anthemic hand of Youth, is mostly of the passionate, chest-thumping variety.

There's little in The Departure to justify the trip.

“Anniemal” is a textbook pop album – with all the passion that entails (i.e. none).

"X & Y" is easily Coldplay's most consistent album, albeit one that operates within restrictive boundaries of creativity.

So safe and sanitised it makes The Fugees sound like NWA.