The result is the best end-to-end Wu-Tang Clan album since their debut, 15 years ago.

Despite not being quite as smart as "Fishscale", The Big Doe Rehab certainly marks another reason (along with recent GZA shows and the release of "8 Diagrams") to suggest the Wu-Tang dynasty is going through something of a renaissance.

The rest of the tracks bop along with various degrees of offensiveness or inoffensiveness, troubling and achieving nothing.

The Black And White Album feels less like a fresh start than the end of something.

Red Carpet Massacre is largely just a ham-fisted example of what happens when fame, ego and squandered major label cash equate to a sad, missed opportunity.

This is a record that will happen to you, and when it clicks, the realisation that As I Am is a genuine classic is overwhelming.

Despite its branding as work-out music, 45:33 feels more like an amazing club DJ set than something to quicken one's pace on the treadmill. [Review of UK release]

Hearing him coast is still better than listening to most rappers trying; but the Jay-Z of today sounds like someone for whom making music is an enjoyable hobby, not a burning need.

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

Smoke pulls off the neat trick of seeming weightless and disassociated but never slight, playful, yet neither inconsequential nor silly.

Untrue is a devastatingly accurate depiction of urban UK--plugging the listener into the matrix of some godforsaken south London satellite, with its identikit fast food joints, repellent inhabitants and anonymous decaying sprawl.

The trio can't sustain this energy and inventiveness over the entire album.

Yet cartoon and divorced from reality as it is, his vision is so vivid that it never fails to seduce and fill you with the uneasy sense that maybe, just maybe, somewhere his disturbing dimension of bums and misfits really does exist.

Blackout is business as usual. Courting publicity more shamelessly than that infamous kiss with Madonna, Britney writhes, moans and generally gives good pillow talk for the duration of an album where crunk, glitches, squeaks and clubbed-up beats dominate.

The results are hit-and-miss.

Lyrically, Shotter's Nation brims with the insight and eloquence with which Doherty continually surprises you.

There are a couple of moments where Hourglass works perfectly.

A deeply special album, and one you hope enough people will allow to get under their skin.

Oblivion With Bells is a competent record and, it must be said, far stronger than the most recent releases by '90s contemporaries The Prodigy or The Chemical Brothers.

Wham, bam, rock and glam, it's Marshall stacks turned up to 11 and Kelly riffing away in the steps of a heap of bands who do it better.

She's melded the two sides of her history much more seamlessly; four-to-the-floor pop belters mix with touches of electronic and lyrical darkness to make one of the pop albums of the year.

Happily, In Rainbows is pretty, pretty good.

Like a feral Arcade Fire making whoopee in the Third Republic, The Flying Cup Club is an often magical listen and deserving of a wider audience than it will probably reach.

Brave is actually one of her strongest albums to date.

For all the moments of heart-stopping splendour, the backing tracks sometimes sound as creaky as a "Prisoner Cell Block H" film set.

Trouble is, despite the band's concerted efforts to beef up and broaden their schtick with a radio-friendly production, too many aspects scream "novelty act".

Sometimes it's almost too much "classic Springsteen"; too many songs seem like retreads.