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.