Yet again, Mann's songs concentrate on life gone wrong - but this is timeless stuff.

A wildly inventive, often sprawling opus, comprising a multitude of styles from boisterous guitar rock to psychedelic nonsense.

A darkly uncompromising and often difficult record: uneasy, sinister, scored and scarred with sonic detritus and, in layman?s terms, a bloody racket.

Broadcast are detached and austere, but mesmerised by their discoveries in the radiophonic workshop. Current single Echo's Answer and the unusually upbeat Come On Let's Go are the best places to start, but this is a classic case of an album working as a whole. Hard work, but compelling.

Most riveting are the ballads, where he conveys a devastating truth with conversational ease.

Despite a clutch of well-crafted songs, the results are hit and miss.

Stylistically he's been likened to just about everybody from Leonard Cohen to Kurt Cobain. However, the use of loops and samples on Chemical, for instance, are just as likely to recall Beck, while the damaged tone could give Eels's E a run for his money.

Back in the real world, fans of the disconnected Callahan know what to expect. They're a loyal breed who puzzle over his dryly funny lyrics and file the CDs next to Mark Eitzel and Nick Cave... His best yet.

Despite the presence of original Patti Smith Group members Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty, this lacks the buzz of her past material.

Eventually, though, the guitar-and-piano-only, stripped-down dynamics mean that a dull torpor settles over the album.

Though rockier in parts than any of his previous work, this 12-track set houses some of Johnson's most impressive songwriting to date.

MACHINA/the machines of God is, mostly, a wonderful rock album.

They've produced a demanding slice of music, brilliantly out of sync in an age of quick fixes and plummeting attention spans.

From any conceivable angle, it is an indulgence...

At times recalling Eno's Another Green World.

Wisely, Bloodflowers is every crotchet a Cure album. True, there's no blatant hit single - one of those sudden shifts into gloriously barmy pop frenzy - but there's still ample compensation to be had...

Heartbreaking, gorgeous and totally individual, these big-production numbers meld the different but complementary beauties of Nashville country and sweet soul while adding a dash of wine-dark weirdness.

The trio's nearly sub-sonic blues, jazz and beat poetry hybrid once again evoking a dangerous Spanish Harlem drinking den while Near Eastern influences and a subtler instrumental mesh hint at what might yet have been.

While sometimes determinedly slight, these cunning community-minded grooves - People Power In The Disco Hour, in particular - do gradually insinuate their way into the affections.

Stylistically, Lynne steps out in several directions and gives the impression that she could succeed in any of them: the warm caress of her voice and the cool, cutting edge of her songs suggest great things.

As musically dazzling as Midnite Vultures often is, the one criticism that can be still levelled at Beck is that his songs remain strangely soulless, failing to ever really grip the emotions or stir the soul.

Part Jewel-with-tunes, part Tori-Amos-without-kookiness, it noodles, but only rarely.

Sixty minutes long -- the album's subtitle is "A Musical Curriculum" -- this is pure, hip-hop-based sampledelica and anything but po-faced.

It's a magnificently gothic trip in which guitars grind pitilessly against hip hop beats, electronic circuitry throbs to breaking point and Iggy Pop cameos as a serial killer.

One Part Lullaby's chugging, folk/soul interface and tagged-on beats has a more natural flow than before ... He's still proffering those cryptic, jittery asides ("one part lullaby, two parts fear" in the title track), but at least Lou Barlow's music sounds relaxed these days.

A boundlessly entertaining expose of what happens when you mix fine words with excellent melodies to make great songs.

Remedy follows a growing list of albums born of an infectious energy and bubbling belief that, dance-wise these days, almost anything goes.

The Soft Bulletin echoes the oft-mimiced Smiley Smile by The Beach Boys, with its psychedelic wobbliness, songs-within-songs and airy termperament.