Warm Heart Of Africa works best when Radioclit subtly build on the rhythms of Mwamwaya's native kwassa kwassa. [Oct 2009, p.119]

Disarmingly playful, deceptively gripping, its songs at first seem wayward, erratic, but soon enough reveal their own internal title song. [Nov 2009, p. 83]

Here, courtesy of producer Jason Falkner, his curious rock 'n' roll songs are given a crisp, clean production, a belssing which sometimes threatens to expose the - how you say? - idiosyncrasies of Johnston's singing. [Jan 2010, p. 115]

It's actually more satisfying as a piece, a folksy ambience lapping up against muted psychedelia and reverb'd pop. [Nov 2009, p.102]

Her best album for many years illustrates her uniqueness. [Jun 2010, p.97]

The results of his previous work have sometimes felt opportunistic and Go Hard is no different. [Nov 2009, p.90]

The Liberty Of Norton Folgate--a title which makes sense in context but is otherwise unlikely to be jamming up the ringtone sites--is Madness in both their pomp and their prime.

This is adequate debut, but La Roux will need to move beyond brittle pastiche if they hope to reinvent such overfamiliar ingredients. [Jul 2009, p.91]

Now regrouped by leader Jerry Cantrell, the bands' sound is still full of menace, melody and doom, chock full of Cantrell's trademark heavy riffs. [Dec 2009, p. 85]

These are gently rugged country-folk songs made all the more authentic by a chewy voice that, with age, now seems to have deepened its resolve.

Album four sees tracks pushing more into more arcane territory, but otherwise we see Zero 7 putting a subtle electronic spin on Elton John, Syreeta, Pentangle and Nick Drake. [Oct 2009, p.123]

Nonetheless, this is impressive, mainstream stuff. One hope their bluecollar heart will win out over their white collar power pop head. [May 2010, p.83]

The religious theme intimated by the title ensures that there is more going on with each track than mere mindless dirge. [Nov 2009, p.99]

Her husky drawl of a voice remains as precious and fragile as a chandelier, and it well suits these insidiously melodic, intimate songs. [Oct 2009, p.110]

This sequel similarly mixes hard country and mountain music, memorably on Harlan Howard's "Busted" and a plaintive "Half Over You." [Feb 2010, p.93]

Not tunes for kids: simply some of Karen O's sweetest songs yet. [Nov 2009, p.100]

Big Dada, Beans, Sayyid, Earl Blaize and High Priest riffle through more fresh ideas in the opening six tracks than contempoary hip hop will in as many months. [Oct 2009, p.91]

Fronted by Jonas Stein formerly of adolescent punks Be Your Own Pet--the missing link between the Monkees and Dead Kennedys--are every bit as spirited as his old band. [Dec 2009, p.117]

There is an unassuming brilliance to much that they do and, as ever, We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River is a-bristle with finely-tooled detai.

The all-together family vibe permeates this unabashedly life-embracing album. [Sep 2009, p.83]

An uneven listening experience, to put it mildly. [Feb 2010, p.90]

It doesn't require a lyric translator to hear the exquisite sense of regret that permeates a song like "Ha Dvash," but the sheer exuberance of the music keeps spirits soaring. [Feb 2010, p.88]

Ian Brown follows an idiosyncratic path in keeping with My Way’s title--mixing up the kind of heavily synthesised rhythms learned from Jamaican dancehall with a curious cover of Zager And Evans’ dystopian folk oddity 'In The Year 2525,' some insidious grooves and, on closer 'So High,' a somewhat wayward stab at soul.

With the aid of some of the finest session musicians in Chicago, Hayes concocts a creamy rock'n'soul fantasy that answers the question: what if Jimmy Webb had teamed up with Thom Bell to write for Marc Bolan? [Oct 2009, p.98]

Tinkling lo-fi arrangements evoke the scarred spookiness of mid-period Sparklehorse, rendering the whole charmingly (and sometimes chillingly) child-like. [Sep 2009, p.88]

But none of it recaptures the sheer commercial inevitability of his debut. [Nov 2009, p. 96]

Basement Jaxx still manage to exceed expectations with each album. [Oct 2009, p.91]

Monsters Of Folk ends as captiatingly as it starts. [Oct 2009, p.99]

Maybe they should have bigger ambitions. [Spe 2009, p.79]

Album lurches bizarrely from the heart-rending to the goofy to the simply spaced-out, but what it lacks in polish it makes up for with buckets of charm.

This is an excellent album that manages to be both a mature summary of an artist’s career and something completely fresh and new.

It is uneasy listening. [Oct 2009, p.107]

Throughout, his mellowness of tone is the album's defining feature. Miraculously, thanks to the minutiae of the arrangements, it's a sound that never becomes one dimensional. [Oct 2009, p.96]

It's quite lovely, and manages to be simultaneously mournful and innocent-sounding. [Oct 2009, p.106]

Freed from Torquil Campbell's mannered indie melodrama, she gives full rein to her inner country girl. [Jan 2010, p. 121]

The only thing lacking is a sense of rhythmic discipline, without which these overlong - and occasionally overwrought - songs can tend towards the self-indulgent. [Jan 2010, p. 123]

There's nothing quite as forward looking here. [Oct 2009, p.102]

This fifth album is an abstract fuzz of Floydian oddness and gothic not-quite-country. [Nov 2009, p.102]

If the audio quality is a mite cleaner this time, it seems the band have made the songs a little more prickly. [Oct 2009, p.112]

A collection of cobwebbed country and chamber-pop spiked with dark wit, it peaks with "Flirted With You All My Life", a dialogue with the reaper that Chesnutt handles with impressive dignity. [Nov 2009, p. 83]

Their heart is evident; they need to find their voice. [Oct 2009, p.115]

The rather prissy album versions are given room to breathe and take on a rather more energetic cabaret feel. [Nov 2009, p.109]

Alongside collaborator Warren Ellis [Nick Cave has] mastered the subdued, unobtrusive yet sinister piano ripple and the occasional unsettling rumble, gilding them with rare, understated vocals.

Somedays is full of great, blues-tinted folk songs. [Nov 2009, p.102]

Inevitably, youthful anger has been replaced by pettier bourgeois concerns (traffic wardens, the congestion charge), but there’s a sensitivity and playfulness that’s still hugely endearing.

Clearly full of ideas and enthusiasm, FrYars suffer from a cheapness of sound, the instrumentation often too basic and one-dimensional to give songs od potential the lick of sonic paint they deserve. [Nov 2009, p.94]

The commitment that Vedder brings to all this material, from the rowdiest thrashing to the schmaltziest ballad makes this feel like a unified and ultimately convincing project. [Oct 2009, p.90]

This is also a brave, compelling record that stands shoulder to shoulder with the Manics’ best.

It's fine, quietly captivating stuff, all the same. [Jun 2009, p.86]

Their choice of guest vocalists this time around indicates good tatse, although in practice there's not much call for subtlety in these chewy, club-oriented productions. [Sep 2009, p.95]

These tuneless songs which either brim with maudlin self-pity or bounce along with enforced jollity. [Oct 2009, p.123]

It’s bonkers--hilarious, maddening, ridiculous and slightly shit--yet never dull.

These commercial frailties have come to be seen, quite rightly, as cultish strengths. But it all goes to make Keep An Eye On The Sky much more than a repository of extraordinary music; it acts as the most thorough and articulate explanation of why Big Star never became superstars.

As a stand-alone album it's ultimately more laudable than loveable. [Oct 2009, p.92]

Here, his luxurious voice, weathered and warm, sits atop intuitive improvations from the likes of Christian Fennesz and Evan Parker. [Nov 2009, p.106]

Unfortunately, every note is so restrained as to verge on the apologetic, resulting in songs capable of being forgotten even while they're playing. [Oct 2009, p.101]

The backing are stately, most elegant on the trumpet and Wurlitzer of 'Mississippi River Running Backwards.' [Oct 2009, p.108]

Dense and challenging, with an unmistakable humanist undertow, ...Snow is a riveting trip. [Nov 2009, p.90]

Their fifh album reveals no radical stylistic shift. [Mar 2010, p.89]

The generic patchwork of this debut LP suggests it's business as usual at the modern pop production line. [Oct 2009, p.102]

Wild Beasts summon up the ghosts of that decade’s [1980s] brainier, more flamboyant indie bands.

Yo La Tengo's 12th album finds them operating well within their comfort zone but it's no less delightful for the absence of envelopes being pushed. [Oct 2009, p.123]

Ignoring the misstep--'O Mensageiro'--this is a pleasure. [Oct 2009, p.106]

Everything Goes Wrong is almost sickeningly good: songs are tight, short and fun, none outstay their welcome, all leave something behind in your brain as they rush to completion on a wave of multi-layered vocals, euphoric guitars and wall-of-chrome production. [Oct 2009, p.119]

Fusing dub, psychedelic funk, prog, art rock and roots reggae with their native mbaqanga and township blues, they've fashioned a fresh (Afro) funky debut, politicized not sollely by colour, but also by their genre-bending vision. [Dec 2009, p. 87]

Still short on humanity, true, but possessed with an alien sort of beauty. [Oct 2009, p.98]

Puny production and fey, knowing, songwriting provide little to hook the attention. [Nov 2009, p.88]

As ever, the combination of sincerity and sentimentality is overpowering. [Oct 2009, p.89]

The results are gorgeous. [Oct 2009, p.112]

TMBG's nagging pop tunes are useful mnemonics, albeit irritating ones. But there is no reason why anybody over the age of eight should listen to this. [Jun 2010, p.100]

Something dignified and yearning arises from the mass of programmed details. [Sep 2009, p.88]

The pulse never rises above a heartbeat, but as the nine songs clock in at 34 minutes, the absence of tempo changes is barely noticed. [Oct 2009, p.112]

For the most part this is classic fuzzy heavy rock, bordering on self-parody but all done in good spirit. [Nov 2009, p.96]

Good fun. [July 2009, p.84]

For the Black Crowes, this is an inspired move, maximising their virtues (virtuosity, passion, guilelessness) and minimising their principal flaw (the fact that it all starts to feel a bit silly if you stop to think about it).

His blurry lullabies, full of crimson moons and devils' wings, carry a Biblical sense of foreboding and disquiet, somewhere between J Tillman and a more whiskery Neal Casal. [Dec 2009, p. 106]

"George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues" "The Great Car Dealer War", and covers of Tom Petty's "Rebels" and Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" are among highlights of an album that many of the DBTs' peers would cheerfully claim as a career peak. [Jan 2010, p. 106]

It's a sincere but over-comfortable trawl-lovers of the man's rockin' fire will be disappointed. [Dec 2009, p. 92]

A rich, rowdy and mostly rewarding listen.

It's the skeletal accompaniment that lends the sound real brawn--primitive and intuitive, yet sophisticated at the same time. [Jun 2009, p.113]

Arctic Monkeys were never comfortable as the ‘voice of a generation’. Humbug subtly shrugs off that unwanted mantle, and in the same deft movement, promises a much more interesting future.

Fiendishly clever, but not easy to love. [Oct 2009, p.104]

Light is a dog's breakfast of weedy vocals, preachy platitudes and banal melodies that makes Sting sound like The Last Poets. [Jul 2010, p.112]

Jet's third album has the Guns N' Roses references to the fore, but is worryingly lacking in pizzazz. [Aug 2009, p.94]

Caillat has a sweet, clear voice and the songs are crisply tasteful ("Fallin' For You" is all hook) but rarely go beyond formula. [Nov 2009, p. 83]

It's grisly. [Sep 2009, p.90]

If the initial effect is underwhelming, after several plays you find the tunes have buried themselves in your head and layers of intriguing subtlety are revealed. [Aug 2009, p.98]

My Dusty Road is facinating as an archive set. [Oct 2009, p.120]

Her career path - Staten Island barista to MySpace to Old Navy commercial-is less conventional than her songs, which build from folkie beginnings to big, optimistic pop choruses. [Dec 2009, p. 103]

Nestled between krautrock clatter and art-school drones are tracks that feel like stadium-sized anthems, particularly the Coldplay-meets-MGMT chugger "He Falls To Me" and the Afro-pop singalong "Underage". [Dec 2009, p. 97]

This time he's crafted a more parent-friendly brand of earnest pop that isn't quite as irritating, but is sadly no more engaging. [Aug 2009, p.101]

Even in cliched moments the airy swooning music lends her breathy confessionals a vulnerable, charming intimacy. [Jul 2009, p.99]

Beneath the catchy hooks, a collection of bleak songs about nihilism and failure are revealed. [Sep 2009, p.92]

There have been worse ideas, it's true. All round, though, it feels like a man with a gun in his back, being forced to be upbeat. [Sep 2009, p.79]

This time around they've learnt to loosen up slightly, enlisting the help of Amber Webber from Black Mountain and adding a pleasingly West Coast sensibility to what was previously a rather monochromatic Americana mix. [Sep 2009, p.81]

Best is "Sylvia", where Bon Iver's intimacy, Arcade Fire's ambition, Sigur Ros' other-worldly reach and Flaming Lips' psych experimentalism collide. [Dec 2009, p. 98]

Henry lacks Wait's distinctive voice and lyrical personae, but his way with deftly arranged melodies is often superb. [Sep 2009, p.84]