Ruthlessly, relentlessly refined, the surprise is that you don't get sick of what is, despite its surface changes, a fairly predictable formula. Rather, you want to hear it again. And again. And again.

There is strong instrumental feeling - sometimes joyful, sometimes melancholic and sometimes alluring and seductive - in every single track.

No, it isn't as good as that, but getting anywhere close is proof that Damon Albarn remains a musical alchemist, turning what could easily have been crude and leaden into something that often gleams like gold.

"Thunder, Lightning, Strike" is an immensely derivative album, but one which cuts and pastes its influences in a strikingly original way. Chiefly, by piling them all on at once.

More dutty than rock, "Trinty" fully establishes Sean Paul as not only a dancehall great, but one of black music's brightest talents.

It's not the best thing he's ever done, but it's up there with it.

Even the lesser efforts are superior to typical chart fare.

Hurley's feet are firmly rooted in the present but this collection is, without doubt, the closest the band have come to recapturing their glory days.

Though Manitoba's constructions are joyously slap-dash and defiantly experimental, he still manages to lure the listener in with woozy melodies and strangely beguiling textures.

It's eclectic, electrifying, eccentric and more than a little bit ludicrous, but Sir Lucious's ambition is as infectious as its madness is dazzling.

Yes, and it's just as frustrating, too, and fiddly and awkward and self-conscious and self-important and neurotic and panicky, and as often ugly as it is beautiful, and as often pompous or irrelevant as it is profound. Just as you've come to expect.

Quite honestly, he's never sounded so alive and free - or, more importantly, human.

A tremendously odd hour of music.

Sexy, credible, committed, In Love And War works damn hard for the money, and stands as another thoroughly modern record from a lady embodying strangely old-skool virtues.

He's turned his gaze back on himself and created a record that brilliantly summarises and even critiques his own past.

A supreme return to form.

It's a rich, bright, clever and engaging album that should trash those lame prejudices against Belle & Sebastian once and for all.

Modern Guilt takes that album's insecurity in the face of technology running away with us, to a tightly-written 10 songs that in part seem to focus on what, precisely, we have done to the world; and how on earth are we meant to get back in touch with it?

The Defamation Of Strickland Banks is an unlikely, remarkably successful stab at launching the first major new male star of the decade.

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...

Blige's eighth studio album [is a contender] for being the best of her career.

This is something unique, often flawed and often flooring, and as fine and fitting a memorial for its lyricist as could be imagined.

System Of A Down's music is highly layered and complex, but never succumbs to self-indulgence. Every track is tightly-coiled and urgent because, even while they're trying to broaden your horizons, SOAD are aware of the need to rock hard.

Like Pitt and Clooney’s sharp suits and nonchalant one-liners, it’s a deft balance of style and humour. And not since Quincy Jones’s score for 'The Italian Job' has it been executed with such precision.

Back with the same band that helped her notch up such smoky, smooth jazz hits as 'Your Love Is King', 'Smooth Operator' and 'The Sweetest Taboo', Sade has produced an album of class, sophistication and melancholy soul.

For some, the excursions into god-bothering territory ("Create Me", "Man Of God") will be too mawkish, but few could deny that we're now in the full swing of a fascinating new era - a place where rock'n'roll, formerly the preserve of the doomed teenager with nothing to lose, has grown old.

An intoxicating record from a re-energised Moby, for the first time in years he isn't struggling to work out how to follow "Play" and "Last Night" is all the more convincing for it.

The first truly great rock band of the 21st century.