There's a feeling that This Is My Demo is just geared too much towards the commercial audience.

This is gorgeous record that starts great and gets better with each additional hearing.

The emphasis with Generation seems to be on cramming in as many styles as possible. This gets tediously close to "look I'm a DJ, watch what I can play," rendering listening the first few times a nauseating experience.

Simultaneously the most-fully-realised of Chan Marshall's seven albums and yet one of missed opportunities.

You know it's special from the first bars.

Unfortunately, it must be said that the results of this musical experiment aren't always as successful as they might have hoped.

A collection that contains no weak links, no fillers, no afterthoughts and almost no mistakes.

For the first six songs, the whole thing is as exhilarating as Is This It?, it's in a different way, undoubtedly, but there's the same giddy rush of excitement.

Like a lot of her previous albums, The Breakthrough is overlong and spoilt by too many producers sticking their oar in.

Foxx's music and range of vocal techniques are not unique, but perhaps this added touch of genuine, heartfelt realism is what will see the actor make a successful jump into the music industry.

Over the course of the LP... the toe-tapping comfortably outweighs the head-scratching.

Korn have succeeded in bringing mainstream producers to inject freshness into their songs, without entering into a Faustian bargain and compromising their music.

I defy you not to enjoy this album.

Against all odds, the completed Mezmerize/Hypnotize project is actually greater than the sum of its parts - in fact it quickly becomes impossible to think of it as anything else than one epic piece of work.

The real glory of this record resides in the way in which Lekman blends his bottled sunshine melodies with droll and romantic word play.

Like all ambitious double albums, [Aerial] is not without its flaws, but even Bush's moments of failure are much more interesting than those of her contemporaries.

Even if you do persevere it's likely you'll find pleasure and irritation in equal measure, but at least he always provokes a reaction - a quality never to be underestimated.

To say Lookaftering takes up where Just Another Diamond Day left off is an understatement. It feels like no time has elapsed at all since 1970, neither in her own life nor the outside world.

It's Robbie The Rogue's least immediate album and needs several listens to get to grips with, but Intensive Care feels like Robbie has allowed himself freedom of expression, even if he doesn't always know how best to use it.

Working best with eyes closed and a fertile imagination, Feels plays like a dreamscape of interconnected happenings, some coincidental, some intended, that's as dense as it is languid.

[A] supreme collection of future-perfect broken nostalgia.

Some may say it doesn't move Depeche Mode forward a great deal; I say I don't give a damn, it's a real treat and I'll have some more, please.

This is an album of varied pleasures: it doesn't grab you by the scruff of the neck but it pulls insistently at your arm until you have to take notice.

Black Acetate is in equal measures, serious and mocking, threatening and comforting, ambient and rowdy.

As Is Now sees Weller revisiting various points of his varied career and updating them. So there's the brittle guitar pop of Come On/Let's Go which recalls The Jam, the pastoral, laid back vibe of Wild Wood in All On A Misty Morning and even the ghost of the Style Council is resurrected in Bring Back The Funk.

That they can create such a heavy sound with just two people is nothing short of genius.

An album of gentle, if sporadically confusing, beauty.

It is, quite simply, one of the essential albums of the year.