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.

Femi's new album suffers in comparison to Seun's – while the tracks are fairly enjoyable, Femi's lyrics are the usual worthy but clunking stuff.

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

The Grammy-winner has a worthy reputation--and, yes, songs namecheck Katrina, Obama et al--but there's also a playful, reflective quality as Chapman looks back at the way music has shaped her life.

Certainly the LA punk mob have a free-spirited approach to life – as rebellious and American as the Stooges or Jack Kerouac – and every bit as compelling.

The new arrangements don't add lustre to every track; Hawley's own 'Coles Corner' was so expertly crooned the first time that it feels unnecessary here. But more incongruous reworkings, including a version of the Human League's 'Louise', fare better and Christie's voice is engaging throughout.

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

On their charming debut, the four-piece fulfil their promise of being the edgy, sexually voracious Ace of Bass.

Out of Control is more of a lucky dip, with scintillating trinkets and humdrum knick-knacks.

Brave, but forgettable.

What an astronomically bad parallel universe. Queen's star is dead.

Mostly band and producer Mark Ronson have done what both parties needed to do in late 2008: avoid the ordinary and obvious, namely glossy stadium-indie and retro-soul horns respectively, and aim for the extraordinary.

What Smith sees in goth-metal is a mystery but, sure enough, the final third of 4:13 Dream is studded with the sort of big-haired, suffocating fluff ('The Scream', 'It's Over') that has blighted his band's reputation in recent years. A shame because, at best, when they reconcile themselves to the fact that they are essentially a pop act, albeit one whose dark side is more pronounced than most, the Cure are as thrilling now as they were in the Eighties.

Her new album lays into her ex-husband with devilish choruses and potent hooks.

This set has 21 unreleased folk and pop tracks, their conventional framework unable to contain the childlike dreaminess that marks their creator's best work, whatever the genre.

Barnes pushes their ninth album to sometimes unlistenable extremes and although it has its moments--'Touched Something's Hollow' is a beauty--the pleasures to be gained from this sexual experiment are few.

AC/DC have stuck to their guns with electrifying results.

The happy-in-love rockers are doggedly inessential, but ballads such as 'The Knowing' and 'Plan to Marry' redress the balance beautifully.

This live double album, recorded in July 1998, offers another take on those great songs.

It's a more varied listen but also markedly lesser in impact.

It won't win them any new fans, but those that believed the truth last time will dig this.

After nine albums the Nashville oddball's parade of styles has dissolved into ambient noodling.

Offend Maggie is head-spinning bliss from beginning to end, and proves that the quartet are the best prog-rock post-punk Afro-Oriental art-pop folk-jazz band in the world.

It's Chrissie Hynde reinvestigating her roots with some rockabilly and a Dylan vibe.

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

This second album (featuring Grizzly Bear's Chris Bear and Chris Taylor) is a sumptuous sequence of symphonic meditations on memory and loss that somehow manage to give a more expansive twist to the already elegiac mood of Arcade Fire's Funeral.

If we are going to go, the magnificently mournful title track of this EP may as well be the soundtrack.

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