As wonderful as it is unexpected, Dirt Farmer is a strong candidate for comeback of the year.

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.

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?'

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.

The good news is that the ninth album from these inveterate melancholics is a burnished pleasure.

Certainly Levi's mannered vocal style, with its brittle helium edge, requires a bit of commitment from the listener. Immerse yourself in Black Magick Party's world, though, and you will become hopelessly attached.

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.

There's too much jokey bluster, and little ground is broken, but this is an entertaining diversion.

Rhys has made both his wildest and most accessible record to date.

Nothing Harvey has done in the past, however, can prepare you for her eighth album, White Chalk, whose cover is as singular as the tunes therein.

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.

A singularly rousing gem.

The tumescent, endlessly inventive songs are seldom less than exquisitely performed.

Bleak and evocative.

Trouble is, save for the soft bits being softer and the hard bits being harder, it's practically a replica of its predecessors.

The result splendidly combines piety with celebration and musical tradition with creative boldness.

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.

Refashioning 60s pop for today's pilled-up generation? Not such a bad idea, as it happens, even if it is a bit Spiritualized.

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.

Once it hits its stride, it just keeps on getting better.

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

Confessions... is vocally sharp and (at times) lyrically breathtaking, but it is difficult to imagine this album working without Price's involvement.

This album will make your life considerably better.

Every track contains something to surprise and delight.

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.

The Dears sound like a band who have finessed their vision and are ready, finally, to take on the world.

The 24-year-old's debut is a tropical soundclash of spiralling steel drums, looped, gnarled local songs and untrammelled joy.

It sounds exactly like a Dinosaur Jr album should.

Liars might have moved a little more towards the mainstream, but they're still a long, long way from easy listening.

Eight years after his last album, Pharoahe's return doesn't disappoint.

Allen has fused together a uniquely acidic brand of pop, and the icing on the cake is that brutally barbed tongue.

An unexpected winner.

A lovely addition to the noisy canon and a barbed new year tonic.

Perhaps those earliest Detroit grooves are truly inimitable after all. But if you want to hear someone give the task one hell of a shot, The Way I See It affords the finest view.

With this unexpectedly moving concept album about disgraced Back to the Future car designer John DeLorean, US producer Boom Bip and moonlighting Super Furry Gruff Rhys have come up with a new twist on hip hop's unholy trinity of cars, money and coke.

Thankfully, Bones is neither a heated-up knock-off of Fever To Tell nor a fan-alienating abandonment of their signature sound. It is instead, a supremely confident 12-song cut that has a remarkable weightiness.

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.

They are very good at making sleepy, hapless trip-pop sprayed with whimsy.

If you like the Hot Chip album, you'll love this.

It reeks of a band with ideas above their station.

Still sounding like an evening in your company will encompass discussions of Yves Klein and Lindsay Lohan? Check, check, check. But still cool.

Her voice, dark, nuanced and full of mystery, shows what a class act the singer has become.

Sixth album Truelove's Gutter is his best, thanks to easing back on the twanging guitar and ads for his native Sheffield in favour of more universally minded tunes, the finest of which, the 10-minute Remorse Code, edges into ambient territory.

There's no stand-out to match 'Tiny Tears' or 'Marbles' but Stuart Staples's crumpled voice and the distinctively intricate arrangements summon Lee Hazlewood's tear-flecked, bruised spirit.

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.

Their most mature set to date.

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."

The best track on this typically polished but ultimately quite disturbing album (the back-to-basics self-examination of 'Everything I Am') is a brave attempt to confront such uncertainties head on.

As its title implies, though, Strawberry Jam is strange: luxurious and fractious, wistful and atonal.

When they rock out they are truly bruising, but, happily, their music is now underpinned with a new-found serenity.

Kings of Leon have spent much of the past couple of years in potentially soul-sapping support slots on extended US stadium tours by the likes of Bob Dylan, Pearl Jam and, most significantly, U2. But rather than be ground down by that experience, they've used it as the jumping-off point for a bold expansion of their own parameters.

It's mostly fast and unfussy, convincing and committed.

Now, 35 years on, her voice is as resonant, lachrymose and strong as ever.

It's a bravura performance on both men's part.... A thrilling return to form.

The songs are deeper and richer than on 2006's "12 Songs," but still naked and raw.

This second album (featuring Grizzly Bear's Chris Bear and Chris Taylor) is a sumptuous sequence of symphonic meditations on memory and loss that somehow manage to give a more expansive twist to the already elegiac mood of Arcade Fire's Funeral.

Goldfrapp and Gregory have made an album as hummably lovely as it is knowingly referencing of a certain tradition of neo-psychedelic English whimsy.

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.

Calexico's dusty vistas make a welcome comeback.

Though this is their most vocal-oriented album yet... it's actually the instrumental tracks - 'Child Song' and 'As the Stars Fall' - that have the most depth.

While it's debatable whether the Cool Kids alone can restore hip hop to its former glories, there's no doubt that the Chicago-based duo (Chuck English and Mikey Rocks) are a breath of fresh air.

Essential.

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.

Perhaps Made in the Dark's greatest achievement is to keep back a bit of mystery for itself above and beyond the enveloping sense of destiny fulfilled.

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.

As bright young things fall in and out of fashion, it's a joy to have these gnarled veterans back to reinforce the sheer visceral thrill of timeless heavy metal.

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.

This is easily Costello's most instinctive, least self-conscious record of original songs in over a decade.

It's a collection of 14 songs that will be instantly recognisable to those who loved them back in the Nineties.

Like its physical namesake, The Sea is capable of being dull and flat, but at its most winning it provides glimpses of a new horizon shining beyond the riptides of pain and sorrow.

Beck, at last, is back.

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

I Know You're Married... is a sure-footed, emotionally engaging step up the ladder.

Not much has gone Perkins's way in the past 15 years. Now, though, at a time when few singer-songwriters bear comparison with their predecessors, when grief this raw all too rarely begets pleasure, you cannot help but feel that his luck is about to change.

[A] vital, dolorous treasure.

They fail to develop their retro psychedelia influences, and use fairground organs and cutesy strings as lazy shorthand for dreamy nostalgia. The result is a pleasant record that's lacking in personality.

The 27-year-old has stepped up into territory that references his background in gospel and soul but avoids the more obvious nods to the past.

It's a stunning record, a must-have even, but it fails to turn musical excellence into cultural significance and may end up being played in branches of Borders rather than in bedrooms everywhere.

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

There are lugubrious shades of Tom Waits and antipodean gothfather Nick Cave here, but Nux Vomica has its own type of elegant, seductive power.

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

Listen intently, repeatedly, and you'll hear much to widen your consciousness... But listen for, you know, enjoyment and you'll be left wanting.

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.

Best is the title track, a roll call of compassion that embraces the darkness of 'Frankenstein technologies' and the hope of "a safe place for kids to play/ bombs exploding half a mile away." Both sombre and defiant, it's Mitchell at her finest.

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

No Doubt-esque ska-pop forms the record's core, but her belting vocal hooks really come into their own on the robotic indie numbers.

What lends Proof of Youth a whiff of genius is its ability to evoke exuberant innocence without making your teeth ache.

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.

Such an eclectic, ambitious record might be expected to sound disparate, desperate even, but instead it's a set of distinctive, strangely addictive songs.

At 35 minutes long, Object 47 is the perfect length: short, to the point, and boasting some of Wire's most vital music.

Mason's latest solo guise is endearingly odd. Who else, after all, would dream of welding Tubeway Army to lubricious RB and house and pull it off?

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

Difficult, certainly, but not without its charms.

If hippie leanings and a penchant for image-dense, nature-inspired poesy make Oberst a kindred spirit to Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, he can also be hard-nosed.

The Future Crayon isn't the 'new Broadcast album', but it might actually be their best album.

Its gravelly tones are certainly no thing of beauty, but when married to the right song Faithfull can still emote, still deliver. There's plenty of plain wrong material, though.

Montreal 's Tiga Sontag has always nodded to the genre's 80s origins but keeps it fresh by drawing from rave past and present.