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.