Hence we get an album which, musically at least, veers all over the place, from chamber pop to glam to, God help them, hotel lobby jazz. In other hands, this would be a terrible mess, but in each instance you feel like the group are inching ever closer to that perfect pop moment.

Expect to hear a smattering of gems from Time On Earth, more than holding their own with the band's much loved and more famous moments.

Musically, DC continue to improve, supplementing their acoustic, sparse approach with radio-friendly pop and tracks that subtly ebb and flow; just beware of a few lightweight and labouring moments.

It gathers momentum slowly, making for a brew so quietly potent and pulsating with repressed energy you're almost afraid to leave the room while it's playing in case it explodes messily all over the walls.

The Frat pack are back with the impressive, Here We Stand, a confident, storming, guitar-driven rollercoaster of an album with more hooks than the North Sea fishing fleet, all bobbing along on a blitzkreig of overdriven, pop guitars.

There is a feeling of carefully constructed, mellow folk simplicity running through all these songs.

Laetitia Sadier's vocal melodies soar, so that even when you get two hints of classical minimalist Steve Reich in the first two tracks, there are still tunes to hum.

Scarlett Johansson has proved herself as much a rock queen as a roll queen.

This still isn’t the kind of music that you’ll hear looped on adverts or behind sporting highlights, but instead simple, affecting songs that use the human heart as an instrument as surely as acoustic guitars.

Callahan's trademark cold brittle voice - part Lou Reed, part Droopy - remains intact, but musically and lyrically he's a lamb in springtime.

Reflecting their influences without becoming burdened under them, their self-titled debut is an impressively varied beast.

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.

'White Lilies Island' sees Imbruglia free herself from the Alanis Morissette-clone image that you sense was very much forced last time around and actually manage to carve out an identity, both in her vocals and as a personality.

With his languid, prolific philosophising, twisting humour and consistent melodic achievements, its tempting to see Benji Hughes as a kind of cartoon successor to Stephen Merrit and The Magnetic Fields (though it's more "25 Songs About Women 'N' Stuff" than "69 Love Songs"), but either way he's just snuck in from the back of the field with one of the most endearing albums of 2008.

Taking the death penalty as the central theme for an album -the sleevenotes feature anti-death penalty quotes from the like of Bono, Chuck D and Nirvana's Krist Novoselic- may not sound like much of a party, but there's a human warmth and gentle humour in Franti's delivery, hitched to hugely danceable and uplifting music.

The Raveonettes have something the Mary Chain lost around the time of 'Automatic': an understanding of how to make a tight three minute pop song feel exhilarating.

There's a gleefully fluid rock'n'roll dynamic driving this whole record, more evocative of modern-day US psychedelic reprobates The Dandy Warhols or The Brain Jonestown Massacre, rather than students trying to be clever.

It's mixed-up, mashed-up and flagrantly, unapologetically odd. It's everything we want The Go! Team to be. But with added extras.

This is the sound of an emboldened, beefier Beta Band, certainly, the new songs sounding fuller, freer and more confident than ever before.

You must surely marvel at Thom Yorke's insistence to challenge his audience and his enemies.

For all the moments of heart-stopping splendour, the backing tracks sometimes sound as creaky as a "Prisoner Cell Block H" film set.

Soulsavers shove the mic in Mark Lanegan's hand and tell him to growl as loud as he can. He brings his friends, they all join in, and they make a lot of sense.

Full of heat haze lethargy and sun scorched sing-alongs, it’s a resolutely romantic vision of the all American singer-songwriter as viewed through unmistakably French eyes.

Gomez continue to make powerfully relevant music.

Everything, you suspect, that people hate about Björk is multiplied a thousandfold here. But by the same measure, to her fans, “Medulla” is an intimate, ecstatic wonder.

TV On The Radio sound wise beyond their years, youthful stars whose mouthpiece contorts itself into funk shapes and whups without sounding like an out-of-depth chancer.

Like listening to DJ Shadow after vast amounts of Angel Dust, 'Out Of Nowhere' is a sonic Hall Of Mirrors that bulges and bristles with restless inventiveness and illustrates an impressive attention to detail.

It's a wonderful, kaleidoscopic groove-fest that has nothing at all to do with a world in which Oasis still hold sway.