Fundamentally, 'The Sword Of God' is a record that fumbles desperately at the door of greatness but can't quite get the key to fit. It tries hard, it's got some excellent songs on it, but it's just slightly too smarmy for its own good.

A roducer's album in the best sense, showcasing the personal and lyrical over flashy technique. [Review of UK version]

First, the good news: 'Celebrity' is pretty damn fine too.... The bad news is that 'Celebrity' definitely shows signs of that discontent that all boyband members begin to feel after a while, and it's this which might well put some fans off.

A thoroughly modern, almost Byronic, solo album that updates past excesses in the context of the present, and ignores Californian darkness in favour of a polished, summery outlook.

What's most pronounced is the subtlety of it all, the tastefulness, the lack of bombast and histrionics.

'Hot Shots II' is a dizzy, magical voyage of self-discovery - concise where its predecessor was unfocused, immediate where the pop urge was once lacking.

Their fourth album rarely disappoints...

The same old sombre samba, perhaps, but with a renewed sense of direction, it's threatening to take them somewhere fantastic.

This smartly dressed record may allow James to feel at least slightly relevant again.

The first thing that strikes you about Tricky's sixth album is how, despite the size of the project - the collaborators, the much-trumpeted 'new directions', the very fact that this is the new Tricky album, fergawdsakes - it manages to sound so underwhelming.

The nerve of it all is breathtaking. Turbo-beats poke up a gospel-jazz revivalist meeting, a mariachi band wanders into the hazy disco sashay of 'Broken Dreams', a Gary Numan sample gets bludgeoned to credibility in the Van Helden-esque pogo of 'Where's Your Head At?'.

This is Swell's most constricted, least dynamic album to date. All songs move along at almost exactly the same pace and there is less breadth to their vision both musically and emotionally.

Today, in a world rooted in an entirely different stratum of rock, they're as lively as the corpses that archaeologists hook out of peat bogs: perfectly preserved, but not great for dancing or conversation.

From production so glossy that you could use it to reapply your lipstick to Sisqo's tortuous way with words, there's little here in the way of sex or sensuality.

Once again the rhyming is painfully funny, the delivery fresh, and the music catchy.

The sad fact is that Blink-182 are now indistinguishable from the increasingly tedious 'teenage dirtbag' genre they helped spawn.

It feels self-consciously downbeat and rustic, with a Gomez-style, recorded-in-a-shed sheen which belies Nigel Godrich's pristine, state-of-the-art production.

Like the works of other great swooners from Cole Porter to The Divine Comedy, 'Poses' is held together by its maker's maniacal attention to detail and conceptual strength.

A record of glorious parts that are just too weighty, too emotionally complex and rich to hang together well as a whole.

Despite Thom Yorke's assertions that 'Amnesiac' stands alone, it complements 'Kid A' so beautifully, develops it with such conviction, that the idea Radiohead ever cut themselves off to spite their fans suddenly seems irredeemably churlish.

Plaid's digitally inspired genius is to make electronic noises and the odd sample sound sad and celebratory, while occupying a spot on the dancefloor several galaxies away from Ibiza's gonzo techno

'10,000Hz Legend' is nothing like 'Moon Safari', then again it doesn't really bear a resemblance to much. Instead, it's a glowing, highly ambitious, quasi-concept album that sees Air spiralling off on a wildly idiosyncratic and brilliantly insane tangent all of their own.

A mildly diverting collection of the good (DJ Cam, Model 500), bad (Beth Orton, Mary Margaret O'Hara) and pleasantly forgettable (Dubtribe Sound System, Ananda Project).

It's hardly 'The Cutter', but it can just about handle the mustard.

Eitzel does doomed introspection with more wit than the average bear, however, and more tunefully, too.

Their mid-career crisis record full of poor-man's-Bjork wailing and dour shimmer rock, notable only for the funky mantra of 'Kali Yuga' (George Harrison exploding), and 'Point Dume' (the noises you'd hear in the night if your flat was haunted by Brian Wilson).

A substantial offering awash with humble entreaties and doe-eyed, lounge affectations.

Waves of unidentifiable noise, dulcet vibraphone pulses and singer/guitarist Jonsi's ethereal singing (more like some ghostly instrument than any conventional vocal, borne out by Jonsi's fictional 'language', Hopelandish, which he often sings in) mesh to create an elegant, grand music that's equally ambient and epic.

It's a blessing that the surrogate mum to the hip-hop youth of America is out there pushing for sounds as deranged, commercial, newly kinetic, and socially risque as those licking your ears in 'X-tasy' and 'Slap! Slap! Slap!'.

Lyrical gloom aside, though, 'Exciter' sounds like a band not just revitalised but reassembled from scratch. Not many long-running groups could make an album this fresh and confident in their 20th year, never mind one which bridges timeless soulman crooning and underground techno.

Not hip-hop in its most conventional form then, but a mutant version drenched in, and suffused with, the same rebellious spirit. An organic meta-hip-hop, if you will, that hearkens back to Gill Scott Heron's innovation and looks forward as well.

The 11 tracks trundle along in a generally inoffensive slipstream of occasionally admirable but mainly dull AOR silliness.

Essentially more surgical sonic detritus, it is Autechre nuanced, minutely reprocessed and at the top of their game.

'Reveal' is the slippers, fire and photo album - but this doesn't mean REM have resigned themselves to the placid lethargy of age. It just means that they've found a place to sit back and take stock after a long, colourful journey.

They're the metal Radiohead. Though it's definitely a million times more metal than anything the Oxford miserablists have recorded, 'Lateralus' still easily contains the same amount of misery and self-obsessed navel-gazing.

'Break The Cycle' is nu-metal as envisaged by Tipper Gore - 14 tracks of parent-friendly grunge-flavoured soft rock that make Creed sound like GG Allin.

Unfortunately, this is not only their weakest album, it's their most confused.

'Lions' is widdle-smothered great-grandadrock shite that Hendrix could whack off in ten minutes today, despite being dead. Pumped full of funk-rawk formaldehyde to stop the choruses dropping off, it boasts all the originality of a cloned baked bean and about as many tunes as a tractor makes trying to get out of a ditch.

'Survivor' is brimful of staccato Timbaland skew-beats and a heroic disregard for the 'all-important' milkman whistleability factor. It is, quite frankly, nuts.

Here's music for the twilight hours - feverish, contemplative, nostalgic. It resonates with the force of a thousand passionate post-club conversations in darkened, smoke-filled rooms, of intense, doomed liaisons, of youthful arrogance undercut by fear and failure.

Every note of 'Rock Action' wins every fight they've ever started, touched with an imagination and awareness of the potential of sound that puts them so far up on the moral high ground they're almost lost in the clouds.

For in the Düsseldorf duo's continuing remit to bewilder and dazzle, conformity is the enemy. Sick of being billeted as d'n'b smugsters, 'Idiology' is a post-everything record - it's the sound of music being carefully shredded in the hope of finding something new and better.

As a sort of lyrical sermon from the mount with uptempo beats to crush the weak-hearted, 'The Sneak Attack' raises the stakes on the microphone skills front as KRS-One lectures, hectors, drops streetwise politics, and laments the state of the world.

Songwriting low on insight, high on moaning.

A far more accomplished work than anyone suspected this bunch of deadbeats capable of.

They're the sentiments and sounds of West Coast rock becalmed and quietened, stripped of fretwanking excess, and invested with a warmth that transcends cliché. A fortunate, if belated release, and a tragedy averted.

All of these incredible songs shimmer and vibrate with the riotous majesty of 'Psychocandy' without a trace of the Mary Chain's post-'Honey's Dead' self-parody.

So, even the fact that these 29 tracks, including 3 remixes, have sometimes been re-produced, re-jigged and finely honed production-wise doesn't diminish the original effort involved.

'Nation' is not bad - it's taut and tense and if you buy it quick you'll get to hear their logic-defying cover of Bauhaus' 'Bela Lugosi's Dead'. But it's hard to reconcile 'Nation''s obsession with the scourge of globalisation with Sepultura's conversion from third world pioneers to just another angry hardcore band.

Daft Punk have pulled off a brilliant wheeze by re-inventing the mid-'80s as the coolest pop era ever. And not even the officially approved retro-kitsch cool of Madonna's lukewarm excursions into post-Daft terrain but all the bubble-permed, sports-jacket-and-jeans excesses they can muster.... Mostly, though, 'Discovery' is simply fantastic pop...

Semisonic are the lambswool jumper pulled over the eyes of people who have an irresistible soft spot for 'classic' songwriting. Fail to give their songs full attention - and God knows, that's easy enough - you could almost believe this is literate radio-friendly pop; just the thing for those blustery rides through an imaginary Santa Monica freeway.

Hidden under the pit floor, however, are frankly scarier prospects. Like AAF's toe-curling cover of Michael Jackson's 'Smooth Criminal' or the awful sub-Police reggae lurch of 'Flesh And Bone'. Singer Dryden Mitchell over-emotes at every turn too, further slickening 'ANThology's pomp rock gloss.

Much of the 'Smith's music is reassuringly familiar, barely changed over their previous 12 albums, a mix of loose-jointed Stones raunch and vast power ballads impressive enough to bring out the 40-something in all of us.

This is really little more than a half-baked infantile indulgence.

'The Red Thread' is a frequently beautiful record, as dark and twisted and funny as anything the band have ever produced.

Cydonia is a stillborn relic, flawed throughout by chronically stunted ambitions.

The Queens trio still flow properly and cut a dash.

It's surprisingly gentle, allowing the emotional context of a soundtrack or accompaniment rather than the vacuum-packed, controlled conditions art of their last album.

The record is both labour of love and exorcism - Frusciante plays every instrument himself and every song is, without exception, pointedly self-analytical and emotionally probing. This, combined with Frusciante's ropey but breath-catchingly fraught voice, can make for uncomfortable listening. Nevertheless, there remains an underlying optimism and fondness for unapologetically pretty melodies that imparts a redeeming and lasting warmth.

Ladytron slide perfectly vacuum-moulded from the Kraftwerk production line, a brand new model of synthesised splendour, power songwriting, and industrial dance shudderings. 'He Took Her To A Movie', 'The Way That I Found You' and 'Jet Age' capture the exotic Teutonic soul of 'Don't You Want Me' or 'The Model' while sounding thrillingly modern.

Low have always sought to make music that can both swell the heart like a gospel tune and capture the amplified absence of a funeral parlour. It's difficult to imagine a more perfect expression of their vision than this.

Simplicity obviously works to their advantage. True, with all unnecessary distractions gone you're painfully aware of Wareham's stretching for the high notes, but from the leathery creak of 'Bewitched', to the arch pop of 'Moon Palace' via the rollicking fuzz of '23 Minutes In Brussels' it hardly seems to matter

It's unfortunate that Frank Black And The Catholics' fourth release falls so close to that of his former band the Pixies' B-sides compilation. Next to the twisted urgency of Black's heyday, his current shortcomings are even more stark.

Sure, 'J.Lo' is competent, but like Lopez's voice, it lacks sincerity and warmth.

The Donnas are utterly convincing...

Here is another dry collection of sullen machine drones and subtle tonal manipulation; signals to the outside world explaining that all is well in Pan Sonic's overpoweringly masculine universe.

Make no mistake, this is a poor, poor album.... Frustratingly, it's a waste of talent. For Snoop has lined up an array of musical back-up here (Swizz Beats, Timbaland, Eve, Master P: all marshalled by Dr Dre), and his is one of the most distinctive voices in rap, but he chooses simply to repeat himself with it.

What's so impressive about Xzibit is his rhyme flow, which is one of the smoothest in rap and provides a wonderful contrast to his profanity-led ghetto dwelling lyrics. With Dr Dre providing beats for three of the tracks and overseeing the whole project, Xzibit now has the perfect musical canvas to accompany his underrated skills.

Volume 2' is a suite of profoundly unhurried, directionless and pointless noodling, passed off only half-heartedly as some exercise in musical exploration.

While there are blips in all areas of life - the possible existence of Bigfoot, the rich and strange wildlife of Madagascar - few things cast more suspicion upon the whole survival-of-fittest concept than the continuing career of Everclear.

But trying to be something you are obviously not does have its downfalls, the main one being - true colours are never easy to hide. Early on, songs such as 'Take Care Of Me', and 'I'm Keepin' You', have a guarded and helpless feel to them. She sounds even less confident and seems to provide a glimpse of inner pain.

All told, it's incredible this is a debut album. Accomplished, yet subtle, it works perfectly as a whole in a way all the production skills in the world couldn't replicate.

Kelly shows how easy it is to keep it simple, melodious and un-synthesised; and on these occasions, Kelly's lyrics come to the fore.... when he shelves his obsession with opening your legs and opens his mind, that he is capable of making thought-provoking material.

PJ Harvey's best album since 1991's 'Dry', a return to the feral intensity of that remarkable debut.... The clarity of the electric guitars played by Harvey, Rob Ellis and Mick Harvey is enough to make you fall in love with elemental rock all over again.... You could quibble Harvey has absolved her responsibilities by making an album earthed in the New York sound of 20 or 30 years ago. But when rock is so invigorating, so joyous about love, sex and living, all arguments are null and void.

Allowing bonus points for successfully merging personal lyrics and shuffling beats without once evoking lazy trip-hop, she still too often confuses blandness for adult sophistication.

Dense and relentlessly angry... 'In The Mode' is an example of fierce, righteous, and - despite the American input - fearlessly British innovation.

An album of gloomy, almost gothic techno splendour. Beneath its typically sleek, urbane deep house grooves, it beats nervously with foreboding, fear and loathing for humanity as a whole.

An inventively arranged mixture of blues, hip-hop, strings, folk and metal, 'Eat At Whitey's' is like Fun Lovin' Criminals' cameo in The Sopranos: by turns, flash, atmospheric, melancholic, and very masculine.

Amusingly, Los Angeles nu-metal types Orgy look like Duran Duran after being chewed on by giant robots. The problem is, as this hugely stupid sci-fi concept album grinds on towards the 30th century, they sound that way, too.

Let's Get Ready', Mystikal's fourth LP and his first Billboard chart-topper, is one wholesale fighting muthaf**ker, a full theatre of opportunities to offer the world outside. Women? Mystikal will take you down for one. Or, preferably, two. Reputation? Come see about him. Neighbourhood? You don't wanna go there... Mystikal is the fightingest bastard and his grin's never wider than when he's putting the hurt on.

Nearly everything Robbie Williams writes is some kind of confessional and here it doesn't quite come off. There just isn't the sufficient depth of him in it to make it work.

Yet in his desire to create a self-consciously classic album, BDB has erred on the side of generosity. At 63 minutes, 'The Hour Of Bewilderbeast' is true to its title: there's simply too much to sustain one's unswerving attention.

While the album is full of quality tunes that sound nice in isolation, as a complete package, it lacks the versatility to take it to another level.

For all its feats of brinkmanship, the patently magnificent construct called 'Kid A' betrays a band playing one-handed just to prove they can, scared to commit itself emotionally.

The Day's trademark bubblegum punk rock guitars have all been turned down in favour of a less electric, more organic sound. Where once they rocked out, now they polka on the awful Levellers-like 'Fashion Victim' - a song about Gianni Versace. Please.... 'Warning' is the sound of a band losing its way.

They've already featured on a multitude of soundtracks including Stealing Beauty, Shades and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Not to mention cinema ads for champagne and episodes of La Femme Nikita and er, Baywatch. That's pretty much all bases covered, then.

...a spontaneity here that replaces the formality of tradition with something more vital. Like a snapshot's moment captured, the gap between composition and recording seems to have been reduced to nothing, and it's here that the group hit their mark.

Vocodered, stretched, distorted, warped, deliberately upstaged by beats so showy they belong in a strip joint - quite simply, she's almost managed to make herself disappear. That bluntly explicit title isn't just pointless irony. This record is about the music, not Madonna; about the sounds, not the image.

She may not have written the words, but Björk's emotional investment in songs like 'I've Seen It All' (really sad) and 'Scatterheart' (really really sad) is undeniable; making this album - 'in character' as poor, doomed Selma - totally seductive as A Björk Record.

OK, here's some track titles - 'Too Little Too Late', 'Never Do Anything', 'Pinch Me' - and, guess what, THEY ALL FUCKING SUCK! Not just Weller, Ashcroft or Belle & Sebastian sucky but Mike & The Mechanics, Tin Machine and, yes, Hootie And The Blowfish sucky.

It tries to capture the essence of 1973 without having any big hairy old prog hits on it. Which is a bit like trying to capture the essence of the Star Wars films by cutting out all the bits in space.

Electronic, if not exactly rejuvenated, are rewired, recharged and, really quite good again.

And it makes the right choices, that much is indisputable; almost everything here is a monumental Underworld moment.

ATDI's latest album has its amps cranked to the hilt from start to finish. Far from being another in a long line of sanitised American punk rock albums, 'Relationship Of Command' sounds REAL.

The objective was to make a fucking brilliant album where the mood is king, the delivery is queen and studied modern coolness is a jester that's one misplaced quip away from being the lion's breakfast. And, of course, they've succeeded.

The difference this time is small but significant, in the overall high quality threshold - from the silken slo-mo waltz of 'In Love With A View' to the listless Dylan-lite stumble of 'She Broke You So Softly', there's not a bum note here. Which is not necessarily a recommendation. Because if you stand too close to these tunes they can seem suspiciously perfect, like a newly painted Wild West movie set.

Basically, it's the curse of Jewel: Yank bird with acoustic guitar, homespun philosophy and twee poeticism, where the songs ramble on and on to deliver some platitudinal twaddle...

A mammoth indulgence, an 80-minute justification of his own ill-defined status.