More commercial - and much better - than 'Rock'n'Roll', occasionally resembling the grandstand melancholia of Coldplay, and more frequently their antecedents The Smiths and Jeff Buckley. [Review applicable to both Part 1 and Part 2]

A thoroughly engaging exercise in uneasy listening.

Finally, it seems the venerable Iggy has realised that his own brand of nasty, brutish, reductive rock'n'roll is superior to practically any nasty, brutish, reductive rock'n'roll that has tried to supersede it.

This is a valuable record from a troubling and potentially vital new voice.

Eagles Of Death Metal have crafted a soundtrack to hedonism, a series of paeans to earthly and earthy pleasures and deliciously illicit behaviour. It's enormous fun all right but it's a long way from being a joke.

More vintage sound than classic album, All You Need Is Now won't revive any careers, theirs or Ronson's.

A skull-numbingly dull record, utterly bereft of the anti-establishment rhetoric these boring fakers aspire to.

Another riotously entertaining record.

It's an intelligent, beguiling and charming record, from a man who has often seemed to lack all but the first of these qualities, and the first thing he's done since The Libertines' debut to make you feel genuine hope for his future.

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

An album of patchy brilliance but with far too many freewheeling moments.

Gallows are the sound of this country's rising fury. And people in power need to listen, because if it spills over, there'll be trouble.

For the most part, however, this is a gentle hybrid that, while not reaching the heights of either artists' best work, like Eno and Byrne's recent "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today", succeeds on its own terms, creating a new world without sounding too cloyingly contemporary, or too much like the work of ageing pioneers proving they can hang with modern times.

Little Death may well resemble stolen kisses behind the bike shed rather than an evening of prolonged love making with the object of your desire, but that is still preferable to a night in with just a box of Kleenex for company.

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

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

Unfortunately, none of it's even remotely memorable.

As ballsy as anything you'll hear all year.

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

Antidotes is frequently exhilarating, challenging but immediate, cryptic and catchy, calm then frantic, as intricate, itchy fret-webs are weaved around Afrobeat drums and far-out sonics.

An album so engaging it is impossible to pick one best track.

Instead of pushing any boundaries The Soft Pack have made a vigorous, enjoyable and high-energy record with a bundle of opportunities for jerky dancefloor foot stomping.

The triumphant "Star's Of CCTV" will be to guitar bands what The Street's "Original Pirate Material" was to the UK urban music: essential listening.

Overall, Machine Dreams is bristling with invention and teeming with variety, a fantasy world you won't wish to quickly wake from.

This CD will sell solely on Eminem's four contributions, which include the uncommonly restrained current single 'Lose Yourself'.

It's the sound of a man who's worked out how to be good again, who finally understands his own strengths and limitations.

"Making Dens" is an immensely graceful, charming record that does a flawless job of capturing the air of good-natured abandon that defines the Jets' live shows.

If Hvarf is a mixed bag of treats and curios, then Heim represents something rather more thrilling: the future (perhaps).