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.