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."