The style is cool, the moves perfect, but you can take as much of lasting value from a stick of gum as you can from these dank-basement stomps.

'A Funk Odyessey' takes you on a journey of eye-closing triteness.

They have a new sound, a warm, lush and funky noise powered by producer Danny Sabre's sympathetic programming alongside Tony Rogers's bold keyboards, and they've created a great party record with it.

By its close, 'The Blueprint' has eloquently mapped out life's foundations: laughter, tears, joy and pain, and has marked the Jigga as the complete rapper.

'The Altogether' adds weight to the increasing suspicion that Orbital's best work is, like their hairlines, behind them.

At best, these are semi-finished rejects from 'The W'...

With this heavy payload of imagery, it's a miracle that Sparklehorse's third album of backwoods blues hasn't ended up a junk shop of Southern Gothic clichés. Old dog Tom Waits even wades in, hollering like an incestuous uncle on 'Dog Door', while Linkous' rusty cabin music creaks insalubriously beneath. But that's just the first of many wonders of this exceptional record.

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

Blige's best yet...

Unfortunately, Lupine Howl's debut long-player errs on the side of the canine, wolvish thrills hidden behind some positively vegetarian noodling.

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.