There's barely a dull moment on this album.

What makes these songs really special is their ability to maintain a pop coherency, whilst being genuinely quirky and experimental.

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.

Older rap fans will probably feel the album's subtler pulsings more, but anyone will be able to appreciate the raw talent required to keep such an epic and sprawling project buoyant, without resorting to boring braggadocio and bawdy bling.

It's an easier listen than its wildly imaginative predecessor.

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.

Indisputably one of the best projects Gruff Rhys has ever been involved with.

This yet again reveals PJ Harvey to be one of the UK's greatest contemporary songwriters.

This is a lovingly crafted record which has the same misty fug and aura as The Soulsavers and Lanegan indulged in recently.

The key to 'A Rush Of Blood To The Head' is to be found not in Martin's presence, but in the intensity, dynamism, verve and style that Coldplay have now nailed, when comparisons to Radiohead, Echo and The Bunnymen and, perhaps most pertinently, U2's 'Unforgettable Fire', manifest themselves in a series of killer strides.

Super Taranta! is an album of such sweaty vigour, spittle-flecked passion, wide-eyed curiosity and a keen sense of the ridiculous it deserves a big fat plug on primetime telly.

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.

An emotive, atmospheric dreamworld that sounds like an echo from history.

It’s Manuva’s startling honesty which first impresses.

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.

Intense, grown-up and pretty it may be, but this record does nothing to move the whole cathartic/cinematic genre a millimetre further than where it was a decade ago.

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

It is modest, lucid and tender.

Epic, exciting, strange and unexpected, it's exactly what pop needed, but surely not quite what Gary Barlow had in mind.

They lack, for example, the ribald ugliness of Suicide, another big influence--but they deserve acclaim for sculpting the work of so many doomy forebears into something that, in their field, has rare pop purpose.

While those seeking a quick fix of cheap thrills hip hop will be disappointed, anyone who likes their music lush, multi-layered and lyrical should pick this up without delay.

"Songs For Christmas" is a(nother) labour of love, gently glowing with hope and humanity and is thus guaranteed to prize cynicism's barnacles from the heart of even the most dedicated Scrooge.

What potentially made Album exciting was that it seemed to understand that pop itself doesn't make sense, and that it can still work just as well with all the wrong notes in all the wrong order.

The truth is, however much or little you enjoy them, Radiohead are one of the few mainstream bands who try not to retrace their steps.

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

As they expose the fragility of love and ultimately humanity, and mourn evolution's victims, they pitch themselves somewhere between Neil Young's heart-rending "Needle And The Damage Done" and a hard-bitten Dylan going electric, all the while retracing traditional folk's footsteps with a wonderfully homespun flourish.

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.

Like all of Boards Of Canada's wonderful records, the whole seems to add up to far more than the sum of its parts.