Ten years after they first assaulted us, Mogwai remain as vital as ever.

Despite the handful of duff tracks and a couple of absolute howlers, 'Here Come The Tears' is a fine album - certainly not the best they've made together, nor even apart, but accomplished, ambitious and often highly impressive.

Chock full of songs that are lounging rather than strictly loungey, cosmpolitan-sounding in a wearing-aviator-shades alongside a large-haired lovely kind of way and blessed with harmonies that fall narrowly on the breezy side of melancholia.

It's a huge album, a beautiful album, a witty album, and above all, a Spiritualized album, through and through. If you like Spiritualized albums, you will love 'Let It Come Down'. If you don't, it may be time for a rethink.

One of the finest albums of the year.

'The Runaway Found' may have sounded great in 1996, but it also sounds great now, and by our reckoning it always will.

This is probably the record that everyone who bought the Keane album should buy.

They still sound as spunky and powerful as they were nearly two decades ago when they kicked off this long-term assault on American culture.

Whereas their debut album 'Good Health' saw the unlikely and frankly scary collision of Fuzazi and Rocket From The Crypt, 'The New Romance' leans resolutely on the emo-punk side.

Patchy, though when it's good (and nicked) it's very good.

'Nightlife' is a record that demands to be heard, for not only is it Erase Errata's best album yet, but also one of the finest to emerge from the leftfield this year.

While not quite aspiring to the lofty benchmark of 'Whatever, Mortal', this recovers the lost ground of 'Pajo'.

There are, admittedly, times when it looks like they're just showing off.

It must take a fair amount of skill and a peculiar single-mindedness to create something this consistently bland and tiresome.

As welcome as emphysema.

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

'Crazy Itch Radio' bumbles along with mid-paced beats and, it seems, too many disparate influences to really hold together.

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

So as sturdy and rocking as 'The Indian Tower' is, it never quite lets you into its world, though if you manage to break on through they're likely to bore you to death by reading Guitarist Monthly aloud and swapping Gary Moore tablature like Pokemon cards.

Disappointing, frustrating and exhausting, 'Astronomy For Dogs' finds a band trying too hard to cram too much into one sitting.

It's an unrelenting trip, and while Hawtin's much trumpeted spoken-word vocalisations veer perilously close to self-parody at times, 'Closer' is a stunning re-affirmation of an uncompromising musical vision.

From the opening few seconds of 'Rain On Lens' you just know this album is going to be a classic.

No, it's probably not going to remap the musical landscape this time, and, arguably, it doesn't sound as ahead of its time as, say, 'Computerworld' did. BUT! 'Tour de France Soundtracks' also sounds joyously, shamelessly like no-one else at all.

Delicately layered with ornate instrumentation and hushed vocals, perfectly poised between joyful and damaged, 'Personality' sees off the previously over-obvious obsession with America's dizzy expanses and endless horizons, instead offering something infinitely more natural and personal.

There's a decidedly reigned-in grandeur to the orchestrally-focused Silent League. The strings and things are never allowed to get overly carried away in their stratospherics, the slide guitar and saw are supplied in delicate veins rather than employed in over-styled extravagance.

'We Are The Pipettes' is perfection.

There are some fillers on 'Shootenanny!' like 'Rock Hard Times', which means it's never going to be an absolute classic, but it's good to hear E is suffering a little less despair than he's been forced to tolerate in the past.

This is hip-hop - experimental, brave, and weird, just like it's supposed to be.