In its own downbeat, understated way, Tinsel and Lights does more for festive good cheer than any number of more traditional Christmas albums that go straight for the razzle-dazzle.

Humbugness aside, though, it's a serviceable collection of jazzy covers and duets.

It's deeply engrossing and rings resoundingly with cultural and historical truth.

The main duty of pop is to be catchy, and it's a duty which DNA mostly shirks miserably.

The orchestra's work is subtle and supportive rather than flashy, allowing free rein to that astonishing voice.

Based on his native London, its themes are hardly original but he handles them with likeability.

How you respond will depend on how you react to such gubbins being brought to bear on Merritt's A-to-B-and-back melodic sense. No doubting its realness, though.

The arrangements for a small rock band are rudimentary, leaving everything to depend on the song and the singer.

When he isn't sounding like a Police album track ("Locked Out of Heaven") or a Musical Youth album track ("Show Me"), he's mostly sounding like a Wham! album track (the disco-pop "Treasure" being a case in point).

This is Green Day doing what Green Day have always done.

"I Wanna Talk 2 U", [is] just one highlight of an album which manages to be sonically inventive, dense and complex and melodically accessible.

Like most pop albums, it's front-loaded. The banging club tunes, like the chart-topping "Young" are at the start, then it slumps into a series of obligatory ballads on which her unremarkable voice is somewhat stretched.

A surprising (if a little sad) return to form.

Walker is almost unique among his generation in continuing to provide mind-food instead of cosy nostalgia. If you go into Bish Bosch half-wishing he'd belt out a ballad, you leave it with absolutely no regrets.

There's such a belt-and-braces approach that the array of sounds (strings, choirs, tubular bells, beats and synths, dubby blurbs and squeaks) can come across as overbearing.

Carry Me Back ticks all the boxes: jaunty, soulful, nostalgic without being cloying.

It's tender, touching and not nearly as miserable as its subject matter suggests.

All elegantly arranged and written in self-consciously prosy style. He'd say wry. I'd say borderline sententious.

Not for the faint-hearted, nor those offended by religion. Often brilliant.

Evolution is a perfect Frankenstorm of over-produced American R&B.

If you loved Williams the way he was, rejoice. If you didn't, it may be time to switch off the radio and television for a few months, and bury your head in a bucket of calamine lotion.

An album which should win prizes (but won't), and hearts (and will).

Tthey run the gamut from cheesy to cheesier with Hucknall managing to make every song sound impressively dated.

An atmospheric yet danceable debut.

Winehouse's progression from fresh-faced ingénue to agonised diva is operatic stuff.

Her fifth studio album is dominated by navel-gazing auto-therapy sessions.

D&B&G is delicate and unaffected but clever and soulful--a balm and an inquisition.

Like most of Unapologetic, it's ["Nobody's Business" is] instantly forgettable.

Should you be struck by a nostalgic mood yourself, Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da is a Madness album like they used to make 'em.

It's all a bit "junior school music project" at times, and there's nothing John Cale wasn't doing half a century ago, but it's nevertheless an impressive work.

This one's a beauty.

It's often barely there, notably the final minutes of "Lux 4". This is musical homeopathy.

If the Mayans were right and the world really is going to end this December, you won't hear many better soundtracks than this.

The upbeat tracks are as catchy as conjunctivitis.

If the band can let go of their younger selves completely, that masterpiece will be theirs.

Its best moments are its electro-pop numbers.

There are four CDs' worth but it's enormously rewarding, like mid-period Miles Davis playing Ligeti.

Halstead's songs and Euros Childs-like voice breathe the sort of honesty and goodness that's harder and harder to find in the iTunes age.

DeMent cuts through the sheen with a simplicity that reaches back through decades.

For all Bird's reverence for American rural music of the past, Hands is startlingly contemporary.

MFAD! finds them sounding like exactly what they are, namely an airbrushed, Massachusetts version of the Stones.

What's revealed is what's often been outshone by the originals: the sheer quality of the songwriting and vocals.

The Atlanta singer delivers soulful, socially conscious meditations.

Even if [Psychedelic Pill is not essential], it's by some way the best non-essential album Neil Young has ever made.

Composer Joe Acheson seems more interested in texture than development and you can long for a discordant voice, but as head-nodding experiences go, this is pretty good.

Sweetly soaring stuff.

Tough, soulful, rockin' songs.

They don't significantly compromise the essential charm and glitchy poetry of the songcraft.

This long-delayed third album sets out to make the Hackney diva "current" again.

Krall's smoky contralto lacks the pungency of Wilson's, but compensates with greater mobility.

It's a skilled blend of the organic and the electronic.

Ten out of 14 tracks are outstanding, especially considering Bugg's only 18.

Venturing further into radio-friendly pop-rock than ever before, her fourth album showcases a strong voice which (unlike brother Rufus) actually hits the notes.

The Origin of Love is an autotuned, multitracked meringue whose ingredients include 10cc and Buggles, and whose only weakness is the absence of a killer single.

We get grooves as smooth and tight as Lycra, funky stabs of brass and arch lyrics delivered with cool detachment.

It's nice that Shaddix is still alive, but Papa Roach remain irretrievably atrocious.

Essential for fans, of course. It is left to the rest of us to look on from a safe distance with our hard hats on and to marvel at the most self-regarding singing voice in post-war popular music.

It's a less distinctive incarnation, but as evidenced by the stutteringly propulsive "Ye Ye", hardly less hypnotic.

She makes a half-decent dance diva on "I Need Your Love", but I'd ask whether that doesn't defeat the object of being Ellie Goulding, though I still don't know what that object is.

The sound is gothically cavernous and frames her seized phrasing with tasteful restraint.

More important on first contact, anyway, is the feel of the music, which grooves. Really good.

The none-more-Nietzschean, grandiose-apocalyptic mood continues through the utterly splendid Olympic theme "Survival", with its über-ELO arrangement, and "Animals", with its sound effects of an angry, riotous mob.

The results have a tendency to make you look at the ceiling.

Their music which, as it happens, is a thrilling mix of raw vocal harmonies, rattling homemade guitars and handclaps.

This critic cannot in all honesty say, with a clear conscience, that their second album is absolutely terrible. Because it plain isn't.

There's an excess of bog-standard radio-friendly pop-rock, and a couple of wet weepies à la "Don't Speak".

Uno! starts promisingly, but it's soon obvious that the Clash of "Tommy Gun" is still their template.

It shows a musical maturity way beyond its creator's years.

A cool, edgy soundtrack for the summer, should it ever arrive.

There's not a duff track or dull moment in this 75 minutes of studio material.

The rest of Kiss is like opening a tweenager's diary (titles include "Tonight I'm Getting Over You") and setting it to synthy, house beats, but nothing has the crossover appeal of that debut single.

These are tipsy juke-joint stompers with feeling in their heart as well as dust in their grooves.

This is a production in search of an album, a massive empty shell, a big expensive nothing.

It's a blast.

Another sweet viper's bite of post-Freudian dyspepsia from the singersongwriter who loves to mistrust.

The world adored the xx's Mercury Prize-winning debut album xx. Coexist is, if anything, an even finer piece of work.

In every sense, Theatre Is Evil sounds like a million dollars.

King Lear probably sounded like this after a couple of days on the heath.

Love This Giant is a skewed and funky instant classic.

If Elysium has a weakness, it is the absolute absence of thumping disco-pop monsters. Once you accept that, and surrender to the tranquil beauty of Chris Lowe's synth textures, you quickly realise that Neil Tennant is on top lyrical form.

There's an undercurrent of sentimentalism running through Come of Age....But originality is hard to come by.

14 songs of keening, romantic acoustic music of great seriousness and lightness of being.

A chastened affair: instrumentally pared-back, vocally wan and full of unremarkable Brill-Building-meets-Belle-and-Sebastian ditties.

Sun is an album of polished electronic pop that mostly struggles to distinguish itself from the current slew of female singers.

Simultaneously the most and the least pop record of the autumn.

Casual bystanders might wish for more memorable songs or some advancement of the form.

Contact is shamelessly allusive, never remotely challenging and characterised by a get-to-the-chorus immediacy.

When these three Liverpool lasses let their freak-folk flag fly their abandon is contagious. Their voices are great, which helps, but it's the unexpected instrumentation that really seals the deal.

Exquisitely poised solo pieces that subtly pay homage to the likes of fellow keyboard masters Abdullah Ibrahim and Erik Satie.

While there is nothing here which startles, the spirit of the music is vivid.

It's high-class karaoke, covering the Chi-Lites, Dorothy Moore, The Dells, Womack & Womack.

Hot Cakes is a rock-solid home win from the band who still do feelgood hard rock better than anyone alive.

"Anastasis" is the Greek word for "resurrection", but stasis is closer to the truth.

[Four] sees them rediscovering guitars with a vengeance – and many tracks here come with the sort of epic quality that has helped Muse filled arenas.

Their 12th album covers all points from brutality to beauty in pursuit of epiphanies.

The overall theme is utopia defiled. Until, that is, Deacon – ever the optimist – brings it all together on "Manifest", the big rapturous finale.

Morissette is the sort of woman who does yoga to ensure she can still gaze at her navel... Self-obsessed.

Fragrant Word has killer synthpop tunes buried within it, but too often you wonder how much better a record this would have been if they quit dicking around and just gave you the song.