The angriest, least compromised, most utterly justified pop record in years ?

Gently acoustic, peacefully steeped in nostalgia and remembrance, it generates a warm glow of grace...

For, as derivative and daft as The Apples are, it's impossible, like a scowling adolescent laughing at the antics of his irritating kid brother, to hate them.

An album so autonomous and remote it sounds like it's being beamed from a deep-space probe.

While the clipped melodies and eerie tinklings are gently brushing your feet with a feather duster, Margaret Fiedler is fiercely proclaiming, "Something's gotta give/And it sure as hell ain't me" ('T Street') like a mightily pissed-off Edith Piaf.

An album awash with pretty ambiguities and difficult twists.

Imagine if your diary was published in a national newspaper two years after writing it. Now consider what dull and repetitive reading it would make, and welcome to 'Return To Saturn'.

As his musical repertoire has expanded from minimalist folk to occasionally playful pop, so has his tolerance for the foibles of the flesh. 'Dongs Of Sevotion', from its silly title to its intermittent flashes of tenderness and humour, is the proof.

The main criticism of this record is that a few tracks are merely good, as opposed to epochal.

It's a terrible pity: when she stops politicising like a councillor on a complementary therapy summer camp, there's music here that's full of the febrile commitment and unashamed passion that marked her out as a valid icon in 1975.

With her distressed, Southern-inflected vocals and guitar/piano accompaniments tolling like perpetual church bells, Cat Power brings these songs successfully into her own, bleak domain.

Recorded with a Luddite's zeal- no keyboards, samplers, sequencers - he's... managed to document the clanking claustrophobia of modern life.

Sounds as if it was recorded in a hermetically sealed ballroom by a group of misanthropic, jazz-obsessed weird-beards.

Producing an album that distorts time so each second is the temporal equivalent of War And Peace is almost a perverse triumph.

Once more, we're in a world of uptight, high-gloss grooves, wry tales of dirty old men, and, of course, terrifyingly proficient guitar solos.

But if attempting to dress ancient monuments in radical, avant-garde clothing was always going to be a hit-and-miss project, he's still succeeded for the most part in making a richly ambient, evocative record from apparently staid and stale old material.

A clearly adult, unfashionably sensitive document, all grace and understatement, experimental through what it leaves out, and the effects it plants in the background.

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.

By any criteria an astonishing work.

Merely a decent Morphine album.

An album of impossibly adorable disco - Star Wars "ping p-p-p-ping ping" bits, cheesy synths, George Clinton (!...hmm) workouts... all delivered in a slightly unsettlingly ersatz kitschness, half-hinted ironies, indietastic samples, hip-hop phrasings and The Asian Influence seductive throughout.

Narrower in scope than 'Odelay' but more immediate in impact, it's clearly been conceived as an accompaniment to our hedonistic habit of choice, the last great party album of the millennium.

And for her second album of Amos-aping MTV-branded Lilith Fair fodder, the barmiest, prettiest pretender to Tori's throne of corporate crackpot chic deals unashamedly in that tired and trusted heavyweight heart-tugging currency: relationships.

'So ... How's Your Girl?' is precision-tooled to amuse the Beastie Boys, for sure. But it also harbours a wit and dexterity that not only represents the usual cliquey extended family, but also manages to transcend them.

'The Contino Sessions' can mean whatever you want it to. All we know is that it feels amazing. Warhol also said that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Death In Vegas' glory starts now.

'One Part Lullaby' lapses very slightly into generic Barlow-pop two-thirds through, then soon recovers its shimmering grandeur. Sebadoh hardliners will dismiss this record as pop fluff, but few will be listening, too busy hailing The Best Lou Barlow Album In The World... Ever

In the hands of someone less witty and schizoid, a near three-hour epic would be unforgivable, but Merritt at play is frequently magical.

'Remedy' is probably as good a dance album as anyone from these Isles has produced this decade.