The Sunset Tree is one of the most volatile, affecting and coherent records he’s made yet.

That Harrison was evidently too busy to produce the entirety of Touch suggests a missed opportunity for a more cohesive and potentially even better album.

His best [album] yet, his most fully-formed, emotionally engaging and sonically rewarding.

As mechanised as their rhythmic focus can be, there is flesh, bone, and brain beneath the near industrial barrage of beats.

Ex Hex does have some problems, but they are minor in comparison to the thrill of hearing Timony rock out again.

This is by no means a bad album, but to my ears, it’s worse; it’s mediocre.

Like Blueberry Boat, this is a triumphant album of good bits.

It’s easily the strongest album that she’s made in this millennium, but suffers from the fact that her vocals have deteriorated.

Barnes has created some utterly brilliant compositions, captured a perfect blend of melodic energy and sincerity while never sacrificing catchiness, and has used both achievements to create one of this year’s most cathartically fun albums.

Wainwright exhibits a rare talent as a confessional singer/songwriter; her album is an impressive, not to mention emotive, first LP from an ambitious artist unwilling to cling to her family’s famous coattails.

The National are able to pack as much power into the songs on Alligator as any of the more heralded indie-rock bands working right now, only The National have taken the common influences and grafted them into something altogether fresh and remarkable.

By adding textures, piano, acoustic guitars, and restraint, and losing some of the scowling and savagery, BSP have unleashed a truly unique pop creation, one with depth and feeling.

The Books have toned down the weird, smoothed down the edges, and created their most homogenous record yet. Lucky for us, the homogenous version of The Books is still probably ten times more interesting than your favorite band at their most creative.

If there’s a single quality that ties these songs together, it’s consistency of scope and sound.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the kind of music Hot Hot Heat makes. Nevertheless, bands have done it better.

On On My Way To Absence Jurado provides far more satisfying moments than dubious ones, and that’s no small feat when trafficking in the kind of bottom of the barrel human emotion that Jurado has made his trademark.

Although this LP is sequenced into tiny fragments of varying speeds of mood, the LP feels like one super-caffeine express fairground ride.

If this is your first experience of the band, you might still find it fresh, but personally I’m beginning to feel radicalism fatigue.

The lyrics here lack the self-indicting punch that made MEC so unflinchingly great.

What is remarkable is the way that they have made a recording that can remain entertaining and engaging, resist becoming background, even while leaving you with the nagging sense that it was about nothing but the act of musical reference itself.

I've listened to this album more than anything else released this year, and I still don't feel like I've fully explored its depths.

A terrific and thoroughly enjoyable effort.

Beck has shed himself of Sea Change’s need to shelter himself in his songs. We have our urban craftsman back, to stir the dust in sampled record grooves and unearth for us, again and again, the new in the old and vice versa.

In some ways is a step backwards towards their rockist, meat-and-potatoes roots, and in other ways is a quantum leap into the unknown.

Completely forgettable.

Edan has lowered his tone, beefed up his content, mastered an independent, creative production style and crafted a concise album that makes a strong stab for early album of the year bids.

One of the strongest albums of 2005, Beanie Sigel stands among the greatest of the Roc-A-Fella catalogue with technical ability and an emotional severity worth experiencing.

It’s a swaggering, spitting, utterly contemporary album of politically dissident, sexually forthright Anglo-Sri Lankan dubstep bhangra hip-pop IDM in which M.I.A. stars as protagonist, antagonist, chanteuse, MC, exotic schoolgirl tease, graphic artist, chastiser of the immoral, and fun-loving London-living party girl. And all in under 40 minutes, too. It’s special. We’ve not heard it’s like before.