Shadow's head scratching choice of singers detract from the potency of his fluid beats.

If the naivity and high-pitched voice don't grate, chances are the shifting soundscapes will still leave you charmed.

Unlike the calculated, humourless thump of Razorlight, this is stirring, ecstatic and - just sometimes - brilliantly OTT stuff.

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.

In a musical climate awash with just-above-average singer-songwriters, Elton is still among the brightest exponents of what can be done when you combine piano, voice, melody and heart.

His orchestral Kanye-meets-Nas muse lacks originality.

A warmer, more linear record than their debut... Spellbinding, frustrating, wonderful.

This early-Roxy-Music-meets-late Led-Zep-style third studio album finds the band stepping back from total impenetrability with a pithy, eight-song, 76-minute set, guaranteed to restore the faith of those whose confidence in this grand enterprise was waning.

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

A truly original, innovative, heavy-as-hell, interesting heavy metal record that you can listen to more than twice without wanting to smash it to a million pieces with an axe.

It's still a career high, but B'Day could have been released at any point in the last three-and-a-half years and, in a year which has given us tracks like Justin Timberlake's 'SexyBack', it already sounds stale.

Now, more than at any time since his first few folk albums, he sounds like a traditionalist. He's walking down that same road that Sonny and Cisco and Leadbelly walked down.

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.

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

Damaged is a transcendent record - poetic, mysterious, witty, wise and at times so musically grand that it changes the colour of a room and the weight of the air.

Like a silly holiday cocktail with umbrellas and sparklers, there is much to enjoy about Paris Hilton, albeit for one mad Med fortnight only.

The album occasionally misfires... but there's still sass and creativity here.

The first disc contains all the major American radio hits, but at no small price. It's all craft and very little heart. Disc two, then, comes as welcome respite.

Barat does a great job of revitalising the ramshackle thrills that the Libertines did all too briefly so well.

Their most rigorously conceived and focused [album] for years.

Yell Fire! offers little bar platitudes over a bed of reggae-lite and tepid bluezak.

It's the kind of rollicking, party-rockin' fandango which, genuinely, nobody has the spirit or wit to put together these days.

All we need to know is, he was a master and this is his masterwork.

[It has] an unexpected depth, unity and resonance.

It's often quite wonderful, occasionally pretty woeful, but endearingly frantic and chaotic.

Entertaining and rabble-rousing, daft and deadly serious, it's a fantastic record, with almost limitless appeal.

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.

All the songs here are fully realised and often the equal of those on their parent album.