An album packed with tuneful songs that would sound great coming out of radio speakers.

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

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.

The remainder of their fourth album, however, has a familiar Midwestern chug, and is a gorgeous confection of girl-group soft rock and country-tinged balladeering.

This is the sort of album which is destined to be talked about in hushed tones by people who can remember exactly which improbably funky Manfred Mann tune it was that Kieran Hebden once put on a compilation. But it deserves a much wider audience than that.

He's back on his own terms, those of the earnest hyper-intelligent bookworm who won the plaudits of Jay-Z and 50 Cent, and sounding a lot more comfortable, with 'Hostile Gospel' and 'Say Something' re-staking a claim for the hip hop high ground over beats that are soulful and sonically coherent.

Roots and Echoes is a brighter, considerably more settled record than previous outings, less inclined to meander skittishly into dub, mariachi and sea shanties.

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.

'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.

A frustrating set with glimpses of gorgeousness.

Probably the most exquisitely integrated single listening experience the Chemical Brothers have yet come up with.

Our Love to Admire fleshes out the dark edges of Interpol's sound to create a polished, muscular-sounding record that teems with life and bristling potency.

At its core, Cross is loud, restless, and daring. A creative tour de force, Justice have unleashed an era-defining album for the children of acid house.

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

A singularly rousing gem.

So here's what's brilliant about this band: the 11 songs here offer no solution, no way out and very little hope, making We'll Live and Die in These Towns as bleak in its own way as the Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible. The songs are brilliant, too.

With Uncle Dysfunktional there's no faulting the band's ambition - the music veers from country to samba to electronica - and Ryder's lascivious drawl and surreal wordplay remain intact.

Easy Tiger is his most rounded creation.

For fans only.

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

Lowe pulls it all together with warmth, wit and searing emotional honesty.

Word-heavy, tune-light songs don't help... Worse, O'Connor's delicate voice can be heard puffing, straining and - horrors - singing flat!

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

There's a tasteful shimmer over all the tracks.

It really shouldn't hang together but somehow does, and effortlessly so, without ever seeming gimmicky.

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

Homme's ever-catchy formula remains, but the mood is uneasy and brooding, with tracks such as 'Sick, Sick, Sick' revealing a venomous new band that's finally learned to separate business and pleasure.

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.

It's a way more focused album than usual.

Every track contains something to surprise and delight.

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.

Essential.

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

Battles combine the power of hard rock with an experimental aesthetic.

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

Complex, melodramatic, ambitious, vain, beautiful and frequently magnificent - Release the Stars may not yield many chart hits, but it feels like an album that will endure.

The closer you listen to the jazzy guitars, Beatles touches and easy, shuffling rhythms ... the more it transpires that Tweedy is simply allowing the songs sufficient room to speak up for themselves.

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

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.

While James Dean Bradfield's melodic gifts shine through on occasion, particularly on first single 'Your Love Alone is Not Enough', this is a pedestrian retread of former glories.

Detractors will complain that there's nothing to rival the brutal impact of his earlier recordings, but only towards the end does the new-found positivism grate.

It sounds exactly like a Dinosaur Jr album should.

Smith's rock poet muse is certainly alive on most cuts, her deep voice declaiming, yipping, soaring, and investing old lyrics with fresh dignity and rhythm.

On the evidence of Favourite Worst Nightmare, the Arctic Monkeys are playing at the very top of their and everyone else's game.

The angry funk of 'Down in Mississippi' proves too good to last, but only 'We Shall Not Be Moved' is (predictably) dull.

This is mostly a brutal-sounding, and often brutally funny, record full of odd surprises.

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

Beautifully sequenced, Jarvis makes the case for albums as opposed to downloads.

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 sounds like creepy supper club music.

It's an undeniably impressive range of talent and, for the most part, Shock Value pulls off every trick it tries.

You get the sense they don't know exactly what they're aiming for, and the resulting mish-mash of crude energy and unfocused ambition leaves the listener gloriously befuddled.

It starts out inchoate and hard to put your finger on, then coalesces into something wiry and unshakable.

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

Shorn of his camp finery, not to mention his preferred subject matter - androgynous boys from suburbia kissing under nuclear skies - his voice, still an acquired taste, proves ill-suited to introspection.

It's occasionally like a dream collaboration between Bill Hicks and New Order, with Giorgio Moroder producing.

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

There isn't a duff or thoughtless moment.

The fit is often clumsy, over-laden with strings, backing voices and metronomic beats, but there are enough stand-outs to keep our Joss in airplay.

Here, as on 2004's Where the Humans Eat, he posits himself as a man of the road whose sole possessions are a handful of albums, all of which were made in the mid-to-late Sixties. Pleasingly, however, he abides by his own rules.

Like Animal Collective, Lennox pulls off the trick of being simultaneously poppy and abstract, winsome and deranging.

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.

It would be disappointing if this turned out to be the best debut album of 2007 - there's nothing particularly original here - but Hats Off to the Buskers is nonetheless a record that re-energises melodic guitar music in the most irresistible fashion, recalling the euphoric punch of Oasis' Definitely Maybe or the Strokes' Is This It as it does so.

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.

The Canadian septet are the greatest art rock group since Talking Heads stopped making sense.

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

It adds up to a light-hearted, sometimes poignant elegy for the American working man and his music.

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

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.

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.

Often harrowing, although Williams's emotional odyssey finds resolution on the title track.

Tones of Town finds Field Music... hurling themselves into an abyss of pastoral abstraction with a wholeheartedness that is utterly thrilling.

Inevitably, Vieux Farka Toure is not in the same league as his father. But he has still managed to make a very impressive and enjoyable debut album.

Those hoping to be converted are likely still to doubt the 'voice of a generation' tag.

With a unique Backstreet Boys meets Bon Jovi production sheen, every track holds its own.

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

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.

The darker, more mischievous mood at work is perfectly complemented by arrangements that are as inventive as they are austere.

One of the most surprising and magical records for which Damon Albarn has ever been responsible.

Their most mature set to date.

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

Sublime.

This faultless debut album will delight lovers of recent records by Nouvelle Vague and Roisin Murphy.

There is little here to delineate her above her far less interesting contemporaries, Fergie and Nelly Furtado, both of whom have presented fresher minted records this year.

Hell Hath No Fury is as lyrically kaleidoscopic as it is conceptually monochrome. Track after track flays the central theme, but with such consistently inventive language it seems almost churlish to dwell on its moral bankruptcy.

While many will no doubt have set the bar of their expectations too high, Jay-Z has pulled out all of the stops on Kingdom Come.

Love vindicates the Beatles' status as master musicians and conceptualists.

An outstanding musical creation... that nods to almost every known genre of American music, and some that have yet to be named.

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

Ys is an exceptional piece of art in the broadest sense - give it the chance to grow on you.

Jayceon Taylor's eagerness to live down to a cartoon sketch of what a rapper should be is in danger of obscuring his very real talent.

Though the songs are all praises to the Creator (or His prophet), there is little sense of joy.

Quite addictive.

Only My Chemical Romance are funnier, albeit by accident.

Vocally, a combination of steel and fragility is required, but Campbell can be frustratingly hesitant, often tending towards the limp side of haunting or ethereal.

From production to persona, rhymes to flow, Public Warning is almost flawless.

A messy car crash of a record.

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.