There's a kind of timeless haze that drifts through 'Yellow House' and makes it a pleasingly elusive listen.

They entwine eastern canticles and fuzzy finger picking and electronic trickery like no other.

Building on the shaky, disjointed, but strangely beautiful foundations that they first laid twelve months ago with the release of their debut, 'Some Loud Thunder' is a gloriously shambolic second album from a band that continues to sound like no one else.

An eclectic ragbag of influences coerced into great exciting guitar pop.

Thankfully, it's even better than expected.

This will be one of the best things you'll hear all year.

Mostly, it's Chan's wonderfully bold and understated piano and guitar work that makes 'You Are Free' what it is, a collection of shapely and becoming lo-fi oddities.

There are several duff tracks, certainly. And, sure, as a whole 'American Idiot' can easily be criticised for its simplistic, occasionally naïve sixth form lyrics, all round pomposity and general adherence to the group's tried and tested formula of punchy three-chord pogo-pop. But it's still a wonderfully entertaining, polemical punk rock record.

You will have to surrender yourself completely to this record, for left as background music it will waft pleasantly around your head and out your window.

They seem to have recaptured a lot of the elegance and urgency that characterised the increasingly seminal 'Rings Around The World'... and the songwriting, even if it is roaming mostly uncharted territory, is back towards prime potency.

It's an album that's unlikely to yield any massive hits, but like that other iconic singer songwriter, Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos has survived initial success to end up in a place where she has the space to do exactly what she likes in pretty much the only way she seems to know how.

More difficult when played initially, you will find yourself becoming immersed in it, a generous reward for your initial endeavours.

A triumph of style and content, a precious thing and proof positive that acid is well good for you.

Admittedly, there's not exactly the strictest of divides between the two, although 'Aw C'mon' is arguably the more upbeat of the pair.

A slice of experimental pop, simultaneously bright and bleak.

Lyrically, it's astounding as ever.

This is pristine, state of the art, pop: the usual perfect combination of great melodies and swooping atmospherics that you can dance to.

Although more full-blooded and more rhythmically experimental in places, '...Planets' isn't a giant stylistic leap from ''Homseongs', but then, why would you want it to be?

There are enough pinnacles of musical achievement married with subtle storytelling to justify the scale of this album.

'Alice' finds the twisted surrealisms of Lewis Carroll's relationship with Alice Liddell offering both refuge and escape for the usual Waits suspects: vagabonds, low-lifes and beautiful lunatics.

It's not so much her actual rapping skills but her keen ear for a devastatingly simple track structure that makes her stuff so satisfying.

Most of these songs sound like they're taking down whole walls of your average sonic cathedral and replacing them with huge stained-glass windows with a billion pieces in a hundred thousand colours that sparkle like angel's tears when the sun hits them, like. Yes, it is a bit evangelical. It's reverent.

The mix of spite, beauty and pain in here is compelling and repulsive all at once.

'The Spell' marks their most successful record to date in creating a coherent aesthetic throughout; a beguiling and compelling atmosphere of black magic.

Bottom line: One dimensional ghetto fodder this is not.

They no longer rely on dense production and atmospherics, because they don’t need to: ‘Antics’ is bare-boned and beautiful.

If you were disappointed by 'Antics' then this'll make up for it, and if Interpol's last offering did agree with you then you'll spend the rest of '05 at least giving this a great big hug.

This is a densely structured journey through intense pummelling and dervishes of electronic noise.