As an introduction to the dark sounds coming out of Scandinavia right now there's nothing better.

Right up to the cover of Mud’s ‘Lonely This Christmas’ done as though it’s East 17’s ‘Stay Another Day’, this is a Christmas riot.

There are moments on indie folksters Why?’s fourth album that propel you into a state of emotional bliss.... [But] Eskimo Snow isn’t immune from the odd blooper, however.

The 14 tracks--almost entirely instrumental--play out as loose sketches of piano, violin and electronics, making for an ultra-sparse, carefully considered album.

Overall, it’s a brash, shiny, confident record, careering along on a second wind, or as one jaunty number puts it, “the return of inspiration.”

It could have been so easy for an album that's strung out on the tension between artist as paid-up perma-kid and responsible grown-up to be self-indulgent and, worse still, boring. Instead it's cathartic.

He calls love and life as it really is: occasionally sweet, rarely trouble-free and often so suicidally routine we could all become the man he speaks of on 'Ballad Of The Bastard'.

‘Your Favorite Toy’ is a few more tracks of that depth away from being the most vital Foo Fighters record since 1997’s ‘The Colour and the Shape’. For now, at least, they have remembered that no-frills punk, played fast and loud, suits them much better than middle-of-the-road dad-rock.

This album of instrumental sketches is surprisingly bullish, its snotty distorted synths and chiptune funk melodies aligning El-P unexpectedly with the output of young UK producers Joker and Rustie.

Dammit if they're not real handy at no-fi surf-rock jangle ... an unapologetically upbeat 23 minutes.

Skip ["Last Song" and "Desperanto"], and you've something very much like a classic. [9 Oct 2004, p.57]

But for every moment where the echoes of what's gone before threaten to engulf them, The Stills have ten more that shrug off the dead weight of their influences and reveal a thick, dark veneer of anguished sincerity.

An assured debut that scores as much for what it doesn't do as it does for its low-key, insidious rhymes and chrome-gleaming rhythmical clatter. [24 Jul 2004, p.49]

Personality, his third album, conforms to type, while confounding expectation.

A belligerent surge of dub-influenced electro-rock and angst-ridden sloganeering.

Leaves sound zeitgeisty and minty-fresh enough to inject some cold fire into the soft-rocking mainstream.

It's a tougher listen than usual, but it's still laden with lashings of classic Lekman pop hooks and a vocal that's sweeter than a Swedish cinnamon bun.

For an album that you might think is merely an excuse for a megabucks world tour, it sure does, er, wail.

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

Ultimately, Darkstar's maturation from dubstep's next big things into modern pop classicists continues to intrigue.

Those wanting clangour and dissonance will be disappointed, but everyone else will be pleasantly surprised.

Perfect pop is not something you can design; it’s an alchemical accident resulting from a freakish alignment of melody, words and rhythm that unifies all who hear it, an H1N1 strain of music. That Little Boots so nearly achieves the ultimate chart-slaying, cerebral-cortex tickling, Bradford-hen-party-and-Shoreditch-rave-soundtracking album is, frankly, amazing.

Butler’s done well to harness the fuller ideas first explored on "Smokey" but, in doing so, has sacrified raw Devendra for something just a bit too, well, Bees-y.

Gone are the ill-advised brass and bare-faced chart aspirations of 1996's awful 'Wild Mood Swings', as are the flippant pop songs that commercialised The Cure in the mid-1980s. What we are left with is the dark, dense core of Smith's psyche, and a reminder that The Cure are at their fearsome best when creating soundscapes awash with uncertainty and dread.

But Paramore have always been more pop than their fans may like to admit, and this mainstream rebirth feels like a transitional step to something gigantic.

With their third album, bijou trippy-hippy souljazzfunksters Morcheeba have let it all hang out - and so all those half-formulated ideas they hadn't the guts to record earlier are here. It's

His solo debut is frequently as imperfectly perfect as Pavement approaching their best...

At times things seem a touch over-produced--something that's always a risk when you spend half a decade working on 11 tracks. But mostly, Marshall's thickly layered studio shenanigans make Sun shine.