When it all comes together, with the sinuous, haunting grace of "Near Death Experience Experience" or the jaunty élan of "Danse Carribe", the results more than justify the sometimes obtuse methods.

There are a few too many tracks on which the hook outclasses the actual rap.

The impression is of someone picking obsessively at an emotional scab, which is effectively what The Wall is all about.

It has a winning blend of respect, technique and humour.

Meat Loaf's latest, which covers much the same territory [as The Wall] but without any depth or desire to understand.

These 10 tracks are a masterclass in modern pop creation, pinballing from style to style without endangering their essential "TingTingness".

[The] debut album sparkles with invention and throbs with emotion.

White's albums have tendrils that imperceptibly wrap themselves around one's attention; and such is the case here.

It's Wagner's mix of the enigmatic and the demotic that dominates, his songs fill of understated apothegms and startling lines.

[Shows a] lack of development involved in either the music or the creators' worldview.

It's pleasant enough ... but somehow lacks the cutting edge.

Her best album in about a decade.

An engaging blend of slinky Tropicalia, soulful Bacharachia, and enigmatic Euro-thriller themes.

[It is] possibly the band's best album.

The arrangements on Barry Adamson's latest album seem more restrained than usual, his jazz-noir ambitions trimmed to a blues-funk palette of bass and drum grooves carrying Hammond organ or piano parts, with just the occasional solo horn part.

Speech Debelle shows some welcome signs of maturity on this follow-up.

There's an awful lot of music crammed into Plumb's 35 minutes, but it's rarely organized into the most attractive shapes - and on the few occasions it is, they alter course within seconds and head off in some less appealing direction.

Has the dense, occasionally cluttered manner of the obsessive bedroom producer.

The loss of its uplifting chorus harmonies deprives "Map Ref" of its sunny appeal, but "Two People In a Room" bowls along briskly with dissonant monochord tension.

The lite-jazz treatment of standards on Kisses on the Bottom seems like a misstep.

Taken as a whole, it's a marvellous piece of work, boasting a rare congruence between lyrical themes and musical evocations, and fronted by one of the most broodingly characterful voices in rock music.

Pleasingly, it's all comically cosmic, as befits the host movie.

Mindset is short by Necks standards--just two tracks of 22 minutes each--but it is typically involving.

The backdrops feature dark sheets of strings and organ, the occasional lonely trumpet, and lumpy, superstitious drums driving the menacing Western mythos to its doom: not a forgiving place, but an engrossing one.

The interpretations range from the admirable to the abysmal.

If You Want Loyalty Buy A Dog is a textbook Little Axe album, stuffed with dub-blues grooves that manage to be simultaneously soothing yet unsettling.

In song after song, she offers variants on the same theme, in infatuated erotic reveries of submission to bad-boy or sugar-daddy lovers with fast cars and lots of money.

With feelgood lyrics of fellowship allied to pulsing electro twitches, Sister Bliss-style piano vamps, sample fragments and sunrise synthscapes, there's a flavour of The Beloved to "Warm & Easy" and "Bear Hug."