At first listen it sounds messy, but the more you play it, the more inspired and essential each brutal interruption becomes.

The collective’s strength lies in their snakelike energy: all coiled muscle, hypnotic sway and dangerous unpredictability. The flaw is that it can all get a bit lairy.

American Kid is a triumph of songwriting and expressive singing.

With the hard-hitting yet loose-limbed playing of Rage Against the Machine drummer Brad Wilk, there is a real sense of top professionals at work.... Osbourne’s singing, by contrast, is strangely unexpressive, perhaps because there is no real possibility of emotional connection with lyrics that strain for grandiose effect but are flattened by clunking phrases and trite rhyming schemes.

There’s nothing very new about the sound, but there’s a freshness and intelligence in the Lawrence brothers’ discovery of it.

Once I Was An Eagle is a masterpiece, and, at 23, she’s still only getting started.

Their return should be heralded from on high, because it is the boldest, smartest, most colourful and purely pleasurable dance album of this decade.

Agnetha: still as seductively normal, beautifully boring and enigmatically familiar as ever.

While they make no claims to be a wildly original band--they listen to Black Sabbath and they have been described as the all-female Joy Division--what makes them so compelling is their fierce focus.

Arrangements are marked by clarity, one thing easing into another in a beautifully measured fashion.

Mike Bub (bass) and Kenny Malone (percussion) make up the tight musical unit on 13 enjoyable songs, which were recorded in Nashville.

Only a couple of cumbersome yet oddly elegiac acoustic ballads push the Stooges outside of their comfort zone.

Simple but lovely.

Mostly this is a gimmicky album with ill-fitting techno and electro influences on plastic, poppy songs.

Elusive and ethereal, it hints at the late night soulscapes of the Blue Nile but remains boldly, if at times frustratingly, out of focus.

Tape Deck Heart unfolds as an album of emotional revelation, full of elegantly melodic, perfectly formed, lyrically astute songs that always find that little bit extra.

The 58-year-old, who is writing his memoirs, is as busy as ever, and he's still got what it takes.

The country singer turns 80 at the end of the month and although much of the album saunters along, Nelson can still fill a song with emotion, as he shows on his own composition The Better Part of Me.

The Australian singer-songwriter's fourth album evolves into a sweeping, original aural landscape through which she embarks on an involving journey of self-discovery.

It’s infested with the collective naughtiness and layered irony of a B-movie all-nighter.

It’s an adventure.

It is music of emotion and imagination, shifting perspectives in ways that are deliciously intangible, intent on moving the heart rather than the feet.

In 2013, if rock is going to survive, it surely has to encompass the bleeps and beats of electro veterans who sound like the future is still catching up with them.

Grant brilliantly skewers his own depression, addiction, bitchiness and heartbreak throughout a record which finds him mixing his penchant for corduroy, laid-back melodies with a new, rawly exposed synth-pop that feels like it's seeped up from an underground carpark, all hard concrete and cold, flickering fluorescents.

It’s only once you can give this album a little time and space that you begin to realise that the low-slung 20/20 Experience is really a rather refreshing and assured kind of a sit-down.

Bloodsports is bleeding good.

An album of real class.

It is an enormous pleasure to report that the new David Bowie album is an absolute wonder: urgent, sharp-edged, bold, beautiful and baffling, an intellectually stimulating, emotionally charged, musically jagged, electric bolt through his own mythos and the mixed-up, celebrity-obsessed, war-torn world of the 21st century.