Their most intriguing, beautiful and dazzling record to date.

While they still sound pretty much like Neil Young if he'd heard an Aphex Twin record, the anxieties that '...Slump' articulated have been replaced by frontman Jason Lytle's desire to address more simple matters.

That's not to say there's not some exceptional music on this record, it's just once again the impact of the best moments is dulled by the inclusion of some indifferent electronic compositions.

The true masters have finally awakened from their slumber.

With their brattish Long Island manners, spiky wit and (middle-class) B-Girl 'tood, it mightn't be all that lazy to re-baptise them The Beastie Girls.

A modern, commercially-viable, carefully crafted rock record that also sounds violent, deranged and desperately, incurably sad all at the same time.

Harcourt might err too far towards gentle whimsy for rock fundamentalists, but otherwise 'From Every Sphere' is a rich treasure trove of sun-kissed grace and summery magic.

Soul music full of remarkable sonic ideas.

Against the odds, 'Think Tank' is a success, a record which might not mean much to Strokes fans but which shows Blur's creative spark is undimmed even while their stomach for the pop fight fades.

As debut albums go, it's terrific.

This clash of sweetness and discordance can be irritating.

A blissful happiness pervades 'Baby I'm Bored', but then that's Evan all over.

All perfectly good stuff, technically excellent. But 'American Life' also feels like an unnecessary sequel, a 'Men In Black II', made because hell, if it ain't broke...

'Anxiety Always' is a triumph of punkish spirit, an album that embraces creeping horror like an un-comfort blanket.

As irresistible at its peak - the luscious 'Little Eyes' and a lovely interpretation of Big Star's 'Take Care' - as it is baffling at its prog-jazz edges, 'Summer Sun' is the crowbar that pries open the door into a world of left-field beauty.

The eloquence, barbarism, tenderness and sweat-drenched vitality of 'Elephant' make it the most fully-realised White Stripes album yet.

Like Eminem, Williams is desperate to give his own spin on tabloid coverage and determined to prove himself as human as the rest of us, but incapable of letting us forget he's a star. Except Eminem is the voice of a generation while Robbie Williams is just the voice of Robbie Williams, and while Eminem has Dre, Robbie has a ramshackle posse of musicians roped in to create this album's (wait for it) 'spontaneous' live sound.

While being as well-crafted, catchy and dynamic as the first one, it leaves you feeling distinctly underwhelmed, as if the band had simply reprogrammed the Pro-Tools machine that they'd made the first album on and changed the lyrics and speed of the songs a bit.

It's every ounce of Idlewild's potential fulfilled at once.

A joyous slice of orchestral prozac.

When you cover this sort of expansive, experimental territory, you're inevitably flirting with pomposity. But like Tool or Radiohead, Cave-In's progressiveness is hypnotic rather than alienating, played out with a sense of near-religious awe that's difficult to deny.

It takes a while to work out what an absolute waste of 21-year-old Londoner Naomi McLean-Daley's incredible talents this album is.

It works in the same way that Doves' 'Lost Souls' did; that is, by inviting us to bed down in its sumptuously familiar lyrical folds while offering us a warm mug of Something A Bit Different.

A raw blast of electric power that serves as a career coda, of sorts.

The funniest, most refreshing British debut in years.

Flamboyance and melancholy in equal measure, then, but 'White Noise' mainly leaves you cold.

Their all-or-nothing ambition is exhilarating, however raw the execution.

It's exhilarating, daft and triggers spontaneous hair growth better than a vat of Pantene.

'Life On Other Planets’ is about three-quarters of the great album everyone knows they can make.

It's what The Velvet Underground would've sounded like if they'd been psychopaths. With a heart.

'Mary Star Of The Sea' has that kind of miracle-working effect: a euphoric and consistent hour of genetically-tweaked stadium rock that re-establishes Billy Corgan as a great, rather than ridiculous, frontman.

Of course it's pretentious, but the blend of reading-group rock, goth showtunes and gold standard hamming from Willem Dafoe and Steve Buscemi is surprisingly compelling after a while.

Filled with both a clarity of instrumentation and thought, this is an album of undeniably mature work. And one which knows how to effect a large emotional impact without unsightly flexing of the muscles.

When The Bees hit the target, as on domestic-violence lament 'Angryman; and the glacial funk of 'Sweet Like A Champion' the ghosts of everyone from JJ Cale to Hall & Oates to the Stone Roses enter the room.

Britrock's grumpy uncle has regained his gnarled spirit here and fans will feel all the better for it.

Mostly this is Nas going back to his former role as a keen street observer, ready to dispense wisdom to up-and-coming youngbloods.

Common has just gone way, way off the hip-hop map.

Who needs anti-depressants when you have Jesus and schmaltz?

A clear progression from 1997's broody 'Vanishing Point' and 2000's abrasive 'Xtrmntr', the seventh Primals album is genuinely their most diverse and consistently thrilling since 'Screamdelica'.

This is an incredibly sharp return.

Trouble is, as grown up and grouchy as Sum 41 may have become (on record, if not in Strokes-mocking video), they sure aint no Fugazi.

The singer's curious persona is mirrored by the musical pyrotechnics, Queen meets Rage Against The Machine in a metal production of Godspell!, an inventiveness and fury that makes their MTV contemporaries look as dynamic as lard models of Linkin Park.

Imagine a two-piece BRMC if they'd grown up in a sub-zero landscape in Denmark where the only cultural sign-posts are trashy sado-pulp novels, distorted Velvets bootlegs and endless re-runs of Marlon Brando in classic biker-flick 'The Wild One'.

Having already redefined garage last time around, he's conjured up an album equal parts R Kelly, Ali G and Terence Trent D' Arby, which will only send him further into the stratosphere.

Easily as good as the last Chemicals album and often snapping at the heels of Daft Punk's 'Discovery', 'Machine Says Yes' is as broad in its retro reference as it is happy to revel in the futuristic.

At least his grimmer outlook has inspired some equally raw music.

Sadly, it seems that with 'Audioslave' these people who were involved in some very exciting rock records in the 1990s, now seem happy to be making some bad ones from the 1970s.

Those waiting for another record as challenging as 'Vitalogy' will be left disappointed. But 'Riot Act' is the sound of a band entering a powerful middle-age. They still deserve your attention.

'Under Construction' is stuck all over with shocks and surprises, more than enough to keep the rogue-scientist glitchmasters who mutated 'Get Ur Freak On' in mischief for months.

Put it this way - if you don't loathe the likes of Starsailor and Travis with every fibre of your being then there's absolutely no fucking chance whatsobleedingever that you'll like Ikara Colt.

Jay-Z has upped the commercial rap ante once again.

As uncharismatic as its creator, it's certainly boring, but no more so than anything Richard Ashcroft has come up with.

'We Are Science' has a spooky cinematic scope with a dubbed-up, electronic gospel feel for our times.

If he still sounds semi-conscious half the time, so be it. Three albums into his misleading career and Damon Gough, it seems, can still write strange, life-affirming pop music in his sleep.

Complete and utter filth from start to finish, and that's as high a compliment as we can bestow on an album.

Timberlake, having failed to imprint his personality on 'Justified', simply stands or falls on the strength of the songs. Luckily for him, half a dozen of them - mainly Timbaland's - are brilliant.

When it works its magic, as on the opening suite of tracks, you will happily sit mesmerised for seven or eight minutes of glimmering sonic twilight and translucently tingling ambi-organic pearly-dewdrops droppery. But when the spell is broken, as on two or three later tunes, when more traditional instrumentation turns up late and dishevelled for a half-hearted cosmic-rock supernova, the effect is rather like gatecrashing some purgatorial soundcheck by a Pink Floyd covers band in, say, 1968. Or possibly Spiritualized.

Eminem's urgent radio hit 'Lose Yourself', you already know. It's excellent.... The two other new Eminem tracks '8 Mile' and 'Rabbit Run' are on the money, too, the latter being the shortest, shoutiest thing he's ever done. Elsewhere, things get more patchy.

It looks like a Mariah Carey album, it sounds like a Mariah Carey album.

'Kiss...' operates on a level of perversity, honesty and originality that blows most bands out of the water.

Everything they had, they still have - but now every note is ten times more focused and urgent.

By turns dark, funny and heartbreaking, the songs on 'Original Pirate Material' are snapshots of ordinary life as a young midlands resident, set to innovative two-step production.

The music is a spectral combination of bleepy 80s synths, lightly crunching backbeats and dreamy vocals; the mood is pure post-clubbing afterglow, in bed with your loved one, in some snowbound Ikea log cabin.

An impressive consolidation rather than a startling revelation.

As before, attempts to explore London's seedy underbelly verge on hamfisted and voyeuristic. But, again as before, Soft Cell really flourish with Marc's relationship horror stories, which happens on two songs.

Despite all this seemingly new wave-laden, impeccably cool, retrograde influence, 'Make Up The Break Down' is indisputably now.

It's ace, like you imagine Madonna would've sounded if the records had matched the raunch of her videos/concerts/multimedia-experiments.

Even if this is business as usual for Xzibit, then at least business is good.

At its best, 'A New Morning' sees Suede show off their vulnerable side again. It won't attract any new admirers but old fans will love them more for it.

Their best album since their 'Dubnobasswithmyheadman' debut, Karl and Rick have pulled off a comeback in fine style and laid some demons to rest.

'Trust' is a reaffirmation of far more than a vow of silence: it's a commitment to beauty that precious few modern bands capture.

A brazen, heartwarming, classic '70s bardic rock album, spirited enough to compete with and instruct the Ashcrofts and Gallaghers.

Fans of the Mancunian mood sculptor will see this lavishly packaged collection as the latest step in securing Bazza's reputation as the North West's sardonic answer to Barry White.

The music here might be gimmick-free, but it's imbued with a dark sense of confidence.

Their world - sexual, drug-filled, and occasionally paranoid - has become progressively darker, and as such we find them nothing less than guardians of the rock flame.

Despite the mutant promise of the title, 'Eve-Olution' is hardly startling. Yet as proof that mainstream hip-hop can still learn new tricks, it's a success.

It's an album of outstanding natural beauty, an organic, wholesome work.

It is one thing to make a clever record, it is quite another to make a clever record that could pass for a pop album, and which oozes humanity while simultaneously delivering a perfect snapshot of modern British life.

What saves this record from being another wallow in the misery of post-fame existence is the music.... 'We Love Life' is a grandiose, symphonic affair buoyed by succinct orchestration and white-light choral interludes.

Nailed to the dancefloor by Flea-like bassist Pat Nature, and dragged up to date by hip-hop beats and random electronica, musically Liars are taut as a tightrope.

Interpol temper this album with real atmospheric sadness: the guitar sunspots that flare through 'Untitled'; the echo and ache of 'Leif Erikson'; the way the magnificent 'NYC' brings on the dancing horses for a slow sad waltz through the city's sickness; the snap-shut metal box clang of 'Obstacle 1'.

Few bands could explore motherhood and terrorism without making you want to shoot them: Corin Tucker's electric-shock voice and the adrenal guitars make them as essential pop topics as schoolyard crushes and backstreet drugs.

FSOL fans may not be impressed. But for connoiseurs of sprawling, loony progtronica, this other-worldly masterpiece is so far out you need a telescope to see it.

In her music, as in her life, everything revolves around sex - but unseemly as it is for a woman of a certain age to frug bawdily alongside Damon Albarn, Marianne gets away with it.

Untrustworthy, confused, touching and idiotically ambitious; hard work that, undoubtedly, repays the effort.

Like so much of Gene's fine back catalogue, this is an album about the ways in which love can buckle you under and life can break you down, options closing in like the walls of an Indiana Jones dungeon.

Fact is, if you know enough about Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays to want to watch the movie, you probably own everything on this record already.

The immaculately chiselled 'Daybreaker' is so beautiful and distant that it almost isn't there at all.

They've just made the best rock album since Andrew WK's 'I Get Wet'.

When it works, the results are astounding.

Too many of the 15 tracks are padding and the entire record is neutered by a production that brushes everything up to a mediocre gloss.

Burke delivers as pure and proper a record as you'll hear all year. If you've ever laughed or cried, you need to hear this.

They’re a shaggy-haired, surf’s up pop band and painfully vulnerable all at the same time.

'Yoshimi...' sets yet another benchmark.

It’s actually Dire Straits gone trip-hop and everyone involved... should be brutally beaten to death with a tray of Ferrero Rocher.

By god is it ever long (it's 16 tracks), but on the whole it showcases enough of what makes the Chili Peppers a very good rock group – chief among these are John Frusciante's excellent, inventive guitar playing, and the fact that it is with tremendous conviction that Anthony Kiedis belts out even the most ridiculous words.

As dated as it undoubtedly is, it still makes for a pleasant enough ride.

No acoustic stinkers. No Live And Unrehearsed At K-ROQ radio sessions. No ropy early demos. No remixes. Just Green Day, playing solid, dependable, familiar idiot-savant punk-rock.