Whenever Hard Candy threatens to get boring, something always happens to recapture your interest, but the three songs in which Madonna actually seems to forge a genuine connection with her musical helpmeet leave the rest of the album in the shade.

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

'Cult Status'--just one standout from their joyous debut--sounds like Primal Scream when they were trying to be the Rolling Stones. Even better is 'You Made Me Like It,' their hand-clapping, hip-swivelling calling card.

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

This is a heavyweight album in every sense of the word.

Such is the balm-like propensity of her singing that the listener experiences it as a physical sensation as much as a sound. Yet as these 13 brief but perfectly formed songs rush by in 35 hectic, blissful minutes, the overall effect is galvanising rather than palliative.

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

The lyrics lack focus at times but this is a winning debut.

F&M have added intriguing textures to the Krautrock of 2006's Transparent Things.

There are the terrible lyrics and more than a few moments where her one-style-fits-all MCing grates, but there's also the politics that no one else would touch, an intelligence, colour and humour, and the added benefit of centrifugally heavy production. Skip a couple, and you're in for a treat.

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.

One of the most exciting things about White Denim is the way they balance unfettered extravagance with constructive constriction.

The Florida band's music is pleasingly random, too. One minute they're new romantics or dour indie kids, then, before youve had a chance to draw breath, they're apeing the Ronettes.

It works - even though this area of pop culture has been mined remorselessly for the past 50 years - by dint of its clever melody lines and smart lyrics.

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

This is glorious, 21st-century Technicolor po.

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.

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.

Played, boys, oh well played.

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.

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.

It's brainy and brawny: Springsteen and E Street Band comparisions valid.

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

[A] vital, dolorous treasure.

Not everything is perfect here, the five live cuts, in particular, not particularly inspired choices. But you could lose yourself in these recordings.

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.

A singularly rousing gem.

But snobbery apart, this is a terrific album.

The Hardest Way... is twice as good as any album about the price of celebrity has a right to be.

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

A masterly work.

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

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.

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.

Every track contains something to surprise and delight.

Cajun, unquestionably, are the real deal.

Brotherhood seems to be one for completists only. But the bonus disc, Electronic Battle Weapons 1-10, takes this into must-have territory.

This album is a mature and thoughtful collection of songs and a fine memorial to her father, who would have been right to be proud.

Their fourth album picks up where 2005's "Leaders of the Free World" left off.

It might seem harsh but let's hope he doesn't find too much happiness in the meantime. Loneliness is proving quite the muse.

Straight out of Edmonton, Alberta, fast-talking MC Rollie Pemberton's impeccable second album confirms that the history of Canadian electro did not end with Neil Young's Trans.

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

Masters at building tension upon tension then gently letting it go, their cyclical instrumentals are both sorrowful and consoling.

The Letting Go's marvellously grandiose taster single, 'Cursed Sleep', suggested that this would be the album to finally reward our patience. And so it is, though not always in the way that might have been expected.

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.

Smith's trademark combination of breathy - almost whispered - vocals, deceptively resilient acoustic melodies, and sombrely introspective lyrics, is shown off to sufficiently good advantage here to make New Moon a worthy companion piece to 1995's Elliott Smith and 1997's Either/Or.

This kind of electro-glam was acceptable in the Eighties, and Hourglass proves that it still is.

Life in Cartoon Motion is so exuberant, so accomplished, so crazysexycool that it's all a little overwhelming.

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

Six years after his last album, England, Half English, Bragg has come up trumps: Mr Love & Justice, with his band the Blokes, is his best realised work musically for ages.

Beyonce's superstar status is not in danger, but she should hand her A&R man a copy of this album.

Stunning in places ('I'm Wild About You'), pedestrian in others, the song remains the same, which is achievement enough at Al's age.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While not everything hits the mark... there's enough here at least to draw comparisons with the aforementioned Britpop mainstays and keep them among the forefront of 2007's elite.

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 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."

A brilliant collection of spanking, multi-layered tunes.

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.

Where fellow Aussie pasticheurs the Vines get more depressing the more they manage to sound like Nirvana, listening to Wolfmother's hilarious attempt to board the long-departed cock-rock bandwagon - singing 'She's a woman, you know what I mean!' as if they have never seen a woman, let alone touched one - is actually quite fun.

Razorlight have dropped the urgency and brashness of indie-disco floor-fillers like 'Rip it Up' and traded it for the boldness of tracks such as 'Somewhere Else'. It isn't easy to graduate from teenage bedrooms to coffee-table status without compromising on credibility, but the quartet have managed it somehow.

She writes everything, and has a feel for timeless songwriting that means she can cover Eminem's 'Lose Yourself' live, and it works.

Jackson is back with his old producer JP Plunier and 'Hope' even has a mellow ska refrain. Johnson's vocals--imagine a Noughties take on Paul Simon and Cat Stevens--are utterly addictive, but this time there's a grown-up vibe to the trippy prose.

Consolers of the Lonely is heftier than its predecessor, both in its Led Zep-go-garage wig-outs and in its cosmic balladeering.

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.

Although packed full of nerdy Sixties tributes and Spider Webb's dizzying antique organ sound, it's not stuck too far in the past.

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

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

Consistently framed around a beat, a piano and her voice, her plucky and at times eccentric songs generally stick to themes of female neurosis, emotional fragility and, occasionally, what she likes to eat on her toast.

Profound and intense, they had reached a level of interaction most bands can only dream of. Svensson's loss goes deep.

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.

Crazy Itch Radio cements Basement Jaxx reputation as Britain's gold-standard dance duo.

The band... haven't leapt off in a new direction but have capitalised on the tension between Oundsworth's spiralling, just-about-to-fall-over vocals and the driving, zealous music that stops him from metaphorically sailing away into the ether.

You can't help but wonder what the results might be if she turned her lyrical flair to some subject other than doing the nasty.

West produces the bulk again on Finding Forever, and it's his skill in embellishing a sample and his unerring eye for a soulful hook that is consistently bringing the best out of his mentor-turned-protege.

At the end of an extraordinary year in America, hip hop is witnessing the start of its lost icon's second term.

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

There is a new-found ferocity at play.

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

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.

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.

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

It's the record's wholesome tracks, such as 'Young Love', a duet with folk darling Laura Marling, that prove Mystery Jets thrive in the gap between naivety and cynicism.

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.

This marvellously fluid third album seamlessly integrates big names Terry Hall and Martina Topley-Bird into Leilas close-knit cadre of vocal helpmeets

Ladyhawke is an accessible but immensely rewarding listen, and while some of this singer's influences may be middle of the road, her album isn't even on the road.

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

Someone to Drive You Home is undeniably derivative, and over 12 songs the appeal of Jackson's fruity voice can dim. Still, with its cynical heart and high-octane bite, it's impossible not to warm to its visceral, lusty company.

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

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.

This is the Lips' fifth album and their slickest yet. It hurtles along with impressive momentum, its 13 songs each under three minutes long

It doesn't stray too far from their original template but it is focused and involving.

At less than 40 minutes long, Vampire Weekend sounds paradoxically both brimming with confidence and something put down as a marker for the future.

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.

'My Dearest Friend' ("I am going to die of loneliness I know / I am going to die of loneliness for sure") is among the most tender tunes that Banhart has produced.