You know, deep down, that the These New Puritans set is the one that you'll be listening to in a decade, enjoying the fact that you can never quite decipher its codes, and probably being amazed at how many more commercially successful records it inspired.

I wasn't sure whether to listen to the record or call Ghostbusters. But once I plumped for the former, I was somewhat shocked to discover a pop record, full of grooves, melodies and recognisable chorus type-affairs.

Something magical may well have rubbed off [while working with with Robert Wyatt], as One Life Stand not only sees them back on track, it's also their best work, paring down those past excesses and unifying them into an extraordinarily lovely whole.

I'm New Here might turn out to be a footnote rather than an American Recordings-style new chapter, but this is as striking a return as we're likely to hear all y.

The result is a fifth Four Tet album which has the power to delight someone who has never listened to a Kraftwerk record all the way through, just as much as those who know their Walter from their Wendy Carlos.

Any fears that the zippy Afro-pop of these New York-based hipsters was a novelty--so very 2008--are quickly dispelled on this confident and completely entertaining second album.

The loose, spontaneous nature of the exercise means there's the odd dud, but there are far more hits than misses. The result? A dead concept is temporarily revived.

The music's Pharrell Williams-assisted dancefloor pop; the words entirely Shakira's. Preposterously brilliant.

It's an effortless success, from the opener, Ruby, big on melody and plaintive harmonies, to the dream-like Bells of Harlem, moving river-slow to a brushed snare and ending this quite terrific record with a meandering coda of wistful strings.

It's likely that their slabs of noise are too explosive. But for Team Biffy, their followers, this is a strength, not a failing.

It is also a sound that on this, their fifth album, seems as resistant to change as the forces of nature and while seemingly limited in palette, is as expansive as it is inventive.

Hudson Mohawke, whose debut album contrives to be both idiosyncratic and soulful. The spirits of OutKast and Prince loom large, and, along with most of the albums here, it crackles with imagination.

White Denim somehow manage to cover all points of the musical compass without ever losing their overall sense of direction.

Sometimes the rough edges have been over-smoothed: there are all kinds of strange, cheap synthesised noises buried under the layers of polish that I'd like to hear more clearly. But this is a minor gripe, for despite its dark heart, there's a real joy about this debut.

It's the best pop album about beating depression since 1983's Soul Mining by The The. Buy now, and avoid the winter rush for Prozac.

There is a lightness of touch at play that gives the XX a sophistication beyond their years. It probably means that their dream pop will become the ubiquitous dinner party album du jour.

This is a beautiful album. Moving rather than maudlin, uplifting rather than depressing.

The live clips of the Very Best on YouTube suggest an almost chaotic stage presence, and this very easy-on-the-ear debut may inspire many imitators.

There's an intriguing synthetic wheeze lurking in the upper reaches of Jackson's vocal range. Those who feared this effect might pall over a whole album will find solace in the unexpected emotional intensity of her lower register.

It's more jaunty nouveau Traveling Wilburys than folk rock summit as Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst, My Morning Jacket's Jim James and M Ward join forces.

Still challenging preconceptions (with son Sean and Cornelius joining the band), and tender with it, too. Easily the best LP to be released by a 76-year-old this month.

It unquestionably adds up to a pop record sharp enough to be the bratty but irresistible younger brother of Lily Allen's "It's Not Me, It's You."

Not just a dignified salute to an absent friend, but a cracking album in its own right.

The wholeheartedness with which this album hurls itself into the abyss of cod-symphonic astral pretension is to be commended.

More Stravinsky than the Saturdays, this is still way more fun than the latter.

The heart of Two Dancers lies in these seemingly jarring juxtapositions. The individual ingredients may be a decidedly mixed bag, but the final product is both coherent and very satisfying.

Forget hi-life vibes: this psychedelic trip takes you from Jo'Burg to Brooklyn and way, way beyond.

It's most beguiling when the eastern influences are to the fore.

With this second album cementing the union between Mariam Wallentin's impassioned gut-bucket vocals and Andreas Werliin's busy percussion, they are on their way to becoming the White Stripes in reverse.

Something a bit crunchier that's been boiled up with producer Josh Homme in the Mojave Desert, but with the sweetener of Alex Turner's words.

Skins have been shed, batteries recharged and the traditionally difficult second album dashed out with apparent ease.

Fabulously moody third album from British production duo whose roster of gloomy vocalists now includes Richard Hawley and Jason Pierce alongside regular collaborator Mark Lanegan.

Richly textured electro-pop teems with flamboyance and sees Wolf come over like a cosmic Martin Fry.

Amid the sighs and groans, she hits the pop G-spot with her savvy hooks and superlative rhyming.

This is beautifully fragile music, not disposable but built to last.

This is intoxicating psych-indie for heady days in unbroken sunshine.

Played, boys, oh well played.

So let's hear it for Living With a Tiger, which makes a point of scrambling everyone's tastes. Not since Jr Walker & the All Stars in the 60s have a sax-led band reached out and communicated as Wareham does on Gratitude, which is apparently informed by grime.

Chicago's veteran alt-rockers haven't sounded this much fun in ages, their seventh album balancing their easy-going and experimental sides.

Tired of her peculiar singer-songwriter pop being a fringe taste, the Russian-born New Yorker's gone for the commercial jugular, polishing her strangeness with help from ELO's Jeff Lynne among others.

By virtue of its sheer irreverence, Guns Don't Kill... seems to encapsulate everything you always loved about reggae, and perhaps thought had disappeared.

It offers a thrillingly accessible demonstration of hip-hop's limitless creative possibilities to those whose experience of the medium stretches no farther than the occasional random episode of "Run's House."

Somehow, though, it soars, the title track especially.

It's Elvis (or Mr Diana Krall as he's also known) in fine, lovelorn country form.

This exhaustive project is the most impressive retro-fest of recordings, photographs, video footage and digiti sed memorabilia ever assembled.

Veckatimest's only down side is a touch of preciousness, a need for refinement that, unchecked, might nudge Grizzly Bear towards the polite rather than imaginative. It's a small quibble. For now, this is almost perfect.

A trippy marvel.

A perfectly summery blend of Krautrock, prog rock and more danceable grooves.

Euphoric, feelgood electro-pop of the indie rather than chart-topping persuasion, with the Massachusetts quartet's debut substituting lost-boy yearning for outright hedonism.

It's to Lewis's credit that he can credibly convey the romantic notion of hopping on a Greyhound while also moaning about the leg room.

The result is writ large on this brilliant second album, which welds his drifting soundscapes to fractious, rapturous techno.

It's a state of the union address, an apocalyptic protest album. It also sounds phenomenal.

Part-Incredible String Band, part- Lal Waterson, but mostly magnificently unique.

While the listener is largely swamped in this sense of horror and disgust--which no doubt makes the point--Gallows are also concerned with some kind of catharsis.

Wall of Arms is the meticulously evolved sound of a band aiming to bid to breathe life into British indie.

That's the problem with social realism, but the Enemy do their best to vary their sound and mode of address.

It sags mid-album, but the Brits won't demand a recount.

This might just be their best record in a decade.

This, their fourth album, feels like a breakthrough, more polished and poised to build on cult 2006 single 'Lloyd, Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?'

His piano versions of standards such as Winin' Boy Blues show that the funk was always in the Big Easy's blood.

A masterly work.

Female duo Melissa Livaudais and Busy Gangnes make stark, witchy electronica that's subtle and exciting, their mantra-like voices drawing you in like a sinister nursery rhyme, with melodies breaking through their oblique, half-muttered lyrics like beams of winter sunlight.

While the dewy-eyed mood of his last album, "Woke on a Whaleheart," suggested Callahan's romantic entanglement with Joanna Newsom had turned his brain to mush, this miraculous return to form finds the artist formerly known as Smog losing his girl, but rediscovering his mojo.

A cosmic, contemporary Human League.

Khan is a fantastic package and a good, if not as maverick as some believe, songwriter. In a year when no one wants to sing about making a cup of tea, she's just the ticket.

Previous albums never quite lived up to the band's facility for knockout singles, but this one holds the attention.

Here the folk legend rings in the new with songs from the old, sensitively produced by Joe Henry.

Their third album offers an advance on the ecstatic dance punk of 2003 debut "Fever to Tell" and beefy rock of 2006's "Gold Lion," boldly pushing synths centre stage while sacrificing none of their vitality.

Although it's as uncentred as 2004's "Uh Huh Her," this album broadcasts confidence rather than confusion.

Standards given a sensual bossa makeover

The great thing about this follow-up is the way it builds on that foundation without lapsing into self-consciousness.

This muscular follow-up ratchets up the internal tension until his exuberant toy-town techno becomes a shot of pure musical adrenalin.

This song cycle concerning Margaret, her swain William and forest queens is as dazzling as it is beautiful.

If this all sounds a bit heavy going, Crack the Skye offers plenty of simple pleasures as Mastodon heap on the musical melodrama, with a more-is-more approach to fretwork that's bound to see them liven up moshpits when they support Metallica this summer.

Born Like This finds DOOM back to his scalpel-tongued, scatter-mouthed best.

Beware is one of the more playful entries in the Bonnie "Prince" Billy canon. It's also one of his fullest sounding records.

There's the odd jarring note but Bare Bones remains a work of high class, deep feeling and, let's not forget, magical singing.

Terius "The Dream" Nash is the song-writer behind Rihanna's Umbrella and other more intriguing than average R&B hits. His second album continues the theme, with assistance from Kanye West.

With bands like Vampire Weekend so keen on appropriating the polyrhythmic thunder of their African peers, it's only fitting that these childhood friends should often sound like art rock sensations from Brooklyn.

It starts out blustery and familiar, before gradually revealing an unexpected and almost lovable sense of vulnerability.

Anyone familiar with Boden's usual extrovert singing will be amazed by his restraint and, despite outbursts of percussive grunge, the arrangements are primarily gentle and acoustic.

With three full decades of sardonic wordplay behind him, these unusually expansive musical settings inspire the mordant West Midlander to some of his freshest and most subtly intoxicating work to date.

By the time he closes with fittingly open-ended encores of 'Listen to the Lion' and 'Summertime in England'--neither of which is on Astral Weeks--he is truly gone. And in a triumph as unlikely as it is complete, Astral Weeks is reborn.

Mozzer's ninth solo album is still a good solid guitar-rock record, even though it's his worst since 1997's career nadir, "Maladjusted."

They appear to have set out to make the world's trendiest record, and succeeded. The tracklist on their album of terrific party songs commands a kind of double double-take.

The banjos and root-tootin' bass might seem overly reverential but there's something comforting in her landscapes of small-town America.

This previously unreleased mini-album (recorded in late 1974) turns out to be a marvellously invigorating blast of proto-punk intensity.

It's Not Me, It's You is a wonderful record, and, better than that, a pop album brave enough to have a go at defining the times.

Spun-out psychedelia, world-weary Appalachian bluegrass and soulful blues make up his first solo album, proving that in the right hands, nostalgia can become a delicate, authentic rediscovery rather than the clunky retread that so many settle for.

Though it may occasionally be a little too skittish for its own good, Which Bitch? confirms that the View are a band with a vibrant imagination and an abundance of ideas. For that reason alone, their return is very welcome.

On his 24th album, Springsteen reaches for the simple power and unabashed romanticism of early pop.

John Frusciante has carved out a parallel world as a solo artist over a series of intensely personal and brilliantly realised albums. His 10th, The Empyrean, is his most ambitious to date.

Even by their own exuberant standards, though, AC's ninth album is a dizzying knees-up that makes most music, indie rock or otherwise, sound both bloodless and pathetically timid.

That The Crying Light vibrates with confidence will be no surprise to anyone who witnessed last year's remarkable shows at London's Barbican.

Vernon is great at seizing on something simple and spinning it out to reveal its innner beauty and this EP shows that there's more than just heartbreak to the 27-year-old. The title track, however, does sound like something by Coldplay.

Fantasy Black Channel is a tour de force comprising glam, techno, and rave, all of which he twists into unimaginable shapes.

Praise indeed but then these hard-nosed softies are unique and this, make no mistake, is their "Definitely Maybe," the quintessential noise-pop set of the modern age.

And while this all may sound suspiciously over-indulgent, the fact is these self-styled 'soft-core' rockers are fulfilling their own prophesy.