The change is clear from the outset with 'In The Mode' sounding like an album made by an act that no longer feels the need to pamper its audience. Gone are the gently loping double bass grooves and feathery vocals, replaced by a feverishly paced percussive assault that challenges both vocalists and live instruments alike to keep up.

It doesn't disappoint, if beatific, rhythm-infested melodies, resplendent in wondrous brass, stark string accompaniment and obscure found sounds are your bag.

A cryptic but brilliant record, radically stripped of Radiohead's supposed musical strengths and charged throughout with a feverish desire to subvert and, perhaps, alienate.

But its modesty is its weakness. For the last 15 years, Simon has been rejuvenating himself with challenges, with awkward collaborations and unusual idioms, testing and experimenting with his talent. With this collection of gentle, wry ballads and witty, shuffly songs he is, nearly, just coasting on it. Not that this makes 'You're The One' a bad album. It just makes it an ominous one.

This second album from rappers Will.I.Am, Apl.D.Ap and Taboo is served with a hefty helping of soul sensibility and there are pinches of jazz and calypso thrown in for good measure.

Generally an upbeat dancey album which finds Madonna still ahead of the game sixteen years into her career, 'Music' takes an occasional breather with some more grown-up, reflective balladry.

A refreshingly old-fashioned orchestral score intercut with rather less appealing jaunts through an atonal avant-garde.

Last year's 'Bleeps Tune' proved conclusively that he could do drum & bass better than anyone else around, 'Solaris' proves that he has the nerve and range to go beyond it, continuing to source new sounds and create rewarding albums. The best, you feel however, is yet to come.

And fortunately, Rickie also goes beyond the cliched songbook, choosing songs which the soaring yet contemplative voice lends itself perfectly to, and makes her own...

This is bound to be praised to the hilt as the Next Big Thing, but rock outfit At The Drive In have only one thing going in their favour - the absence of competition. It's so close to being something beautiful, something to cling on to in these aurally barren times, but it's just so not quite.

As tear-soaked and gorgeous as we ever might have hoped.

The Ecleftic' just tries to please too many people, open up too many markets, and simply ends up diluting the sound in which it purports to be rooted.

G.O.A.T.' is depressingly bereft of considered content. There's nothing outrageous or offensive, just plenty of the unthinking and inarticulate sex talk that L's been spouting between the brags for years.

It's New Order-lite.

The Golden D' is Coxon's second stab at recording the most pointless album of all time and rest assured he's getting there.

This, like the last joint 'Stakes Is High', sees the crew making even more stylistic space between themselves and their very own creation of the late eighties, 'the daisy age'.

A fine writer, possessed of a honeyed, deep, richly expressive voice, Ice-T may have been the rapper of choice for white suburban teens in big shorts, but that doesn't mean he or his music have ever been anything less than grippingly authentic. He might not have always walked hip hop's artistic frontline, but 'The Evidence' proves he should always be ranked among the music's great practitioners.

Rarely lifting itself above mere mediocrity the album is no doubt destined to provide background music at thirty-something dinner parties and sedate wine bars.

With this ramshackle spread of spiked beats and filthy-fingered funk he's produced easily his best work.... An intoxicating, headstorming brew of desire and despair 'Bow Down To The Exit Sign' is the first great album of the millennium.

Music that is designed to smother, to sedate, to lull the listener into a soporific state of boredom.

Despite Brown's unquestionably limited vocal range, the minute pitch shifts of his voice are well suited to the stoned-wonder of tracks like 'Set My Baby Free', 'Neptune' and 'Dolphins Were Monkeys'. It's on these blissed out, chilled moments that the album really shines.

'Mwng' or 'Mane' (as in horses) is a purely Welsh language album and is a theoretically disorientating and complex, but triumphantly audacious, experience.

In drawing on rock, hip hop, electro, drum 'n' bass and early electronic artists, Van Helden mirrors the developments dance acts have been making in the UK and Europe, rather than US artists.

Kid Rock's sound rarely deviates from the explosive metal guitar rap synthesis he has made his trade mark...It is when Kid Rock strays from these familiar musical pastures that he gets into trouble, as in the case of 'Abortion', a rather pathetic attempt at soul...

The production, however, is first rate, Dre proving that he really is on fire at the moment. Eminem's microphone skills are similarly beyond question ' though a little too shouty on occasion. It's just that his self-indulgent and irritatingly stupid rants will prove too much for any audience that recognises irony in Beavis and Butthead.

In the main they have done away with their more stodgy, pretentious material and distilled their sound into a stripped down rawness, and they sound all the better for it.

This time it's the cover of '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' that grabs the headlines. The surprisingly credible version limbers into life with Britney chatting away to her pals on the phone.