An album of two halves, 'Green' has its pop, counterbalanced with its noise-outs but above all, it's a very traditional, straightforward tunesome half hour which slots in effortlessly with its predecessors. A welcome return? Oh yes.

'Reveal' sees REM exhale, relax and ease into a new confidence with a collection of songs to fill your heart. Every track here sifts with a live energy that was previously polished out of 'Up', and they sound all the better for it.

It is dense, it is long, it is complicated. It is also a magnificent triumph of artistry over blind anger.

Cowboy Junkies have made a 'growing older' record - there's a greater preoccupation with loss and death, reflected in a heavier, darker musical cast.

Raises the nu-metal bar by weaving maturity, passion and the craft of songwriting into its steaming pile of passive-aggressive chord chomping.

Often thought of as ahead of his time perhaps Byrne is now in the perfect position to articulate the angst of socially unskilled western white men who find themselves taking over the world via new technology. The album's glut of different rhythms speaks of a man trying to find his groove.

Harping on in their own innocuous, oblivious manner, like the shy cousin of Squarepusher the four music makers have succeeded in creating a selfishly inviting album of great beauty and delicacy.

This is an awesome album, almost certainly Placebo's pinnacle, although I'd love to be proved wrong.

There's precious little of the extravagant muso twiddling and indulgent nonsense that has waylaid the band sometimes in the past.

After a first listen 'The Optimist LP' simply drifts over your head like yet another take on a well worn formula, but given a second chance reveals a glorious, often ornate sensibility that simply can't be ignored.

Possibly the band's best album yet, destined to be loved by fans and loathed by critics, 'Mechanical Wonder' will be the soundtrack of spliffed up barbecues and boozed up afternoons with your mates for this summer and beyond.

At just over half an hour long, 'Rock Action' is a concise and robust statement of intent. It also contains some of the most beautiful and mesmerising music you'll hear this or any other year.

This is a much more satisfying album than 'The Velvet Rope', even if most of the songs are overlong and a few juggle satin sheet-cliches with self-help ones to numbing effect.

A bit of judicious pruning to remove the filler tracks would have resulted in a cohesive, dynamic album that would have easily been their best release to date.

The Stereophonics are trying to say something, expressing something more than the exuberant rock songs with which they made their name. Only time will tell whether their fans will lap up an album almost entirely starved of the big guitar sounds and sweeping choruses they've grown accustomed to.

'Old Ramon' is a slight affair cut from similar cloth to '...Blue Guitar', fuzzy with distortion, hampered by less than inspirational songwriting.

What makes 'No More...' Cave's best album since 'Henry's Dream' (which it most clearly resembles), is a return to melodrama (or rather the juxtaposition of melodrama with the album's ballads) where Cave crafts a deliciously potent mix of the visionary, the bizarre and the everyday...

Either they've been taking too much heroin or not enough, but 'Black Rebel Motorcycle Club' is as limp as a soggy spliff the ragged morning after.

If it was 1985, they'd be the biggest band on the planet.

Luke Haines, of nineties nobodies The Auteurs and Baader Meinhof, together with Sarah Nixey and John Moore, appear to have taken Saint Etienne's 'Like a Motorway' (from 'Tiger Bay') and driven away with it in a battered Ford Escort to a distant destination, a concept album about motorways and travelling.

A magnificent return to the band's brutal, almost hardcore punkish, roots.

In Hammond, [Waits] has found a worthy collaborator, one who gets to the heart of what these strange lyrics are actually about and imbues their sharp angles, acute observations and nicotine-stained introspection with some real insight and understanding.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this album - just the airbrushed production of tracks like James Taylor's 'Don't Let Me Be Lonely' robs them of any true grit and soul they might have had. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem afflicting Clapton at the moment, making for yet another average album to add to the list.

Taken as a whole, 'Discovery' is a compelling concoction of styles that continually surprises.

Palatable but bland easy-listening.

What it all adds up to is an effective commercial album, littered with potential singles, taking few risks and adding little to hip hop culture.

Admittedly, this is bedroom indie, but it's bedroom indie with strong production and songs that are always self-deprecating enough to not be self-pitying.

Where the 'Farm break new ground is by exploring far more than the quiet-loud-rage-quiet formula with real singing and everything and a fair does of pop melody that place them more on a radio-friendly rock keel than no holds bared metal.