The results breathe that same rarefied air as Nick Drake or Vashti Bunyan.

This is much more than a retrenchment, and it certainly isn't a retreat.

This still isn’t the kind of music that you’ll hear looped on adverts or behind sporting highlights, but instead simple, affecting songs that use the human heart as an instrument as surely as acoustic guitars.

Yes, there are a lot of reasons to hate Scissor Sisters. But this brilliant debut is not one of them.

A great straight-down-the-line rock 'n' roll album.

"Tyrannosaurus Hives" is a good record, but one best dipped into rather than listened to in one go.

Warm and welcoming.

It’s both an oddly comforting and exhilarating trip.

For every misfire, the band hit their target twice.

With a distinct lack of pretension, some wholly infectious hooks and an insouciant sense of humour, this is the kind of project that will ultimately serve to keep Beenie’s rep as a professional entertainer and maestro of the dance deeply intact.

It's a smart, self-aware and consciously direct album.

A collection of rootsy yet sophisticated, summery soul grooves, with the usual nods to past masters like Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack and Glady Knight, "Stone Love" is equally at home alongside the sultry, sassy R&B of contemporaries like Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keys and Erykah Badu.

At its best “The Silent Hours” is a robust, reasonably straight ahead rock record and at its worst, a lumpen, forgettable distraction.

It's not a perfect record, but "The Cure" does achieve something quite remarkable and unexpected. It leaves you looking forward to their next one.

There are moments when The Concretes ape Mazzy Star a little too closely for comfort on this album, but overplaying a talent for languorous, delicious fuzz pop is hardly the most horrific of crimes.

"Afrodisiac" is Brandy’s most personally revealing album to date and her least lyrically fluffy, but its intimacy is hamstrung by the MTV-flavoured, formulaic gloop with which most contemporary, American R&B now seems to be contaminated.

It's probably safer to view "Gettin In..." as the sound of an old man lying back in the ocean with well-deserved drink. A straight-up collection of rock n roll songs that he probably enjoyed playing on as much as anything else in his bizarre life.

Imagine "Hello Nasty" if it had entirely consisted of "Three MCs And One DJ" and you're close to understanding exactly how "To The 5 Boroughs" sounds.

Brandon Flowers has a horrible, honking seal bark of a voice.... Faced with this significant disadvantage, The Killers have cannily crafted a wall-of-sound songwriting style so bombastic it almost suits Flowers' sledgehammer vocals.

What emerges is Sonic Youth at complete ease with themselves and their music, operating simultaneously at the peak of their powers and with a powerful, audacious restraint.

It's truly intriguing in the way PJ albums haven't been since the commanding "To Bring You My Love" back in 1995.

They ‘sound’ well-written without actually being so – the ultimate in pop sophistry.

"Contraband" is "Appetite For Destruction" for grown-ups.

Old loves Liquid Liquid, ESG and A Certain Ratio haven’t been abandoned and their percussionist still works overtime, but the spirits of Prince, Kraftwerk (both on the wryly self-referential "Dear Can"), Chic and even ABC (on the politicised "Shit Scheisse Merde Pt 1") make cameo appearances.

It's not, in the final reckoning, a terribly important and wildly impressive record.

So, we have a maturing Ms Lavigne, distancing herself from the teen antics of her "Let Go" debut, but struggling to find any stories worth telling save for boyfriend trouble and dead grandparents.

OK, so it’s not Norah Jones dinner party territory and there’s enough torturous mayhem to gratify their faithful ‘maggots’ but there’s equally a contrived nature underlying the habitual havoc.

A product so meticulously calculated, so shamelessly designed for the widest possible demographic, so wholeheartedly shallow, you suspect Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell must be dumbstruck in admiration.