It seems a huge effort being expended to achieve so little.

It all adds up to probably the best Stones album since... well, since Some Girls, actually.

It's all as ludicrous, graceless and unlovely as the "sport" it hymns, yet there's an anachronistic boot-boy charm to Haines's depiction of the milieu that's genuinely affecting, as well as amusing.

The second album from Franco-techno duo Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé is decidedly less pop-tabulous than their career highlights to date.

It's a pleasant enough ride which reveals some of Panda's tastes.

The result is a lush, immersive work which is sonically more homogeneous than her earlier albums.

The high priestess of emotional turmoil returns to her apparently turbulent personal life on this latest album, vacillating between obsessive devotion, self-assertive morale-boosting and the kind of masochistic abasement depicted in "Mr Wrong".

Vastly talented, he brings rare articulacy to the thorny subject of black self-image, particularly the problem of breaking down the barrier of ghetto authenticity.

"Cockiness" is barmy enough to stand out from the routine dubstep/electro beats cooked up by such as Stargate, Calvin Harris and Dr Luke.

For a while on this overlong album, he brings something new to the usual hip-hop parade of brandy and bitches, lasciviousness and loyalty.

Norwegian singer Ane Brun's quietly involving music occupies a spectral space in which her delicate, tremulous voice reveals shared intimacies with a rare poise.

The songs themselves are low-key and unexceptional.

Green's delivery is too Estuary-Eminem, scattershot hip-hop asperity snarled out with a mockney menace that is too secondhand to be effective.

Soul Time! is a near-perfect expression of retro-soul style that grips from its opening bars.

As a swansong, it's as fine as might be expected given the circumstances.

Overall, it's their most spirited effort yet, and the changes have been deftly effected in a way which shouldn't alienate their core fanbase too much.

Not only did they change the course of rock music; they also sustained an inspired creativity for almost two decades, something that the career arc of this retrospective brings into focus, right down to the Bacharach-esque touches of the final unreleased tracks, which pleasingly bring things full-circle in certain ways.

Set to light, sparkling arrangements of banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, concertina, twanging mouth-bow and comically honking horns, these songs are populated with a bucolic menagerie of foxes, dogs, birds and little horsies.

Summer Camp's long-awaited debut album seethes with updated teen angst set to engaging electropop grooves.

It's not a bad album as much, but to anyone familiar with Lynch's other work, it's entirely predictable in sound and style.

Proving that it is possible to have too much of a good thing, the five discs of this outtakes-and-all edition take the (let's be honest) rather meager delights of Brian Wilson's unfinished "masterwork" and wring the life out of them.

The stark landscape of Will Oldham's album is the musical equivalent of King Lear's blasted health.

But in cementing one style, some of the possibilities offered by Lungs have been choked off.

It's not hard to see why both parties agreed to the alliance--Metallica gain artistic cachet, Reed gains an audience--but it is not an alliance that welcomes listeners with open arms.

With Björk and Longstreth sharing lead vocals, and instrumental contributions pared back to just a few drones and pulses, the result is a fascinating evocation of Orcan existence, implicitly acknowledging the entire planet as a home.

Despite the references to Nietzsche and Einstein, which suggest a cachet Stronger doesn't deserve, this is simply an overlong string of standard putdown R&B and bogus emotional turmoil, the songs blitzed with generic power-ballad overkill.

The results are smoothly pallid even by their standards, the usual modes of exultant melancholy and epic sympathy exacerbated by the earnest thrumming of acoustic guitars that punctuates the familiar piano vamps.

An album which contains no filler at all, each track blooming in its own way like a collection of strange desert succulents, with a whole lot of hollerin' and a touch of Lieber-Stollerin'.