It’s not as remarkable a transformation as the one Rick Rubin performed on Johnny Cash, but this is a fine collection and as pleasurable a listen as it undoubtedly was to record.

It's a masterclass in why they were, and still are, the greatest rock band to grace the Earth.

A definite tour de force for indie hip hop.

'Love And Theft' is a much tricksier, elusive and - important, this - entertaining beast, one that mingles reflections on ageing with a host of jokes, both good and bad, and some wickedly limber music.

This release at least gives some sense of the visual brilliance, media spectacle and utter fertility of artistic energy that came together in Tropicalia.

'In Search Of' throbs with an innovation hewn from the patchwork of the past yet anxious to transcend it and head for undiscovered planets. The real revolution is here: support future music, reject imitation - 'In Search Of' really is one of the best albums you'll hear this year. [Review of UK version]

"Orphans" is that rarity of an album: one that will satisfy hardcore fans as well as the uninitiated.

Delivering his lyrics in a breathless barrage, 'Boy In Da Corner' packs the energy flash of London MCing into its grooves and for that alone it deserves attention.

'Elephant' is already this year's most crucial purchase.

Their records sound very different, but they're both astounding.

His eye remains sharp.

Not since Oasis in their gloriously unstoppable and unapologetic heyday have we been given the opportunity to embrace such straight-ahead, ebullient, desire-fuelled guitar music.

Once you've taken in how wonderful it sounds, it'll be time to thrill at how much of it there is, then how dense it all is.

What 'Original Pirate Material' makes abundantly clear though, is that - whilst Skinner may not be at the very cutting edge of Garage's club soundtrack - he's a man blessed with an astonishing aptitude for pop and a mainline into the Zeitgeist.

Show[s] that the early chapters of the Staton story may not match the later commercial success, but trump the four-to-the-floor stuff with grit-in-the-grooves southern soul.

“Funeral” is the sort of perfectly-realised record you’d hope from a band at the top of their game. For a debut release it’s unmatched in recent years. Hearing it is to wake from a black and white slumber and to view the world in widescreen Technicolour.

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.

Untrue is a devastatingly accurate depiction of urban UK--plugging the listener into the matrix of some godforsaken south London satellite, with its identikit fast food joints, repellent inhabitants and anonymous decaying sprawl.

Throughout the album, Primal Scream set a furious pace that only narrowly stops itself before the last note is spat out. In the preceding 65 minutes, what you get is as monumental a sonic statement of the times as 'Screamadelica' was over ten years ago, the first great album of the millennium and probably the best record of the year.

A modern day classic.

Squeaky genius.

A unique and beautiful work that will be returned to again and again. Definitely, already, an album of the year.

'Since I Left You' is nothing short of stunning.... There's more imagination in this hour-long odyssey than most sample-based artists manage in their entire career. Not since DJ Shadow's 'Endtroducing' has an album showed what you really can do with a bunch of old vinyl.

"Modern Times" offers further evidence that this man remains more than capable of greatness.

It's hard to believe a better advertisement for music's capacity to be simultaneously adventurous and entertaining, funny and moving, leftfield and mainstream will be released all year.

This is music that sounds like it was plotted by sad psychics graduates in lab coats. It's clean, melancholic and sterile (in a totally non-derogatory sense) - full of gently undulating rhythms and melodic pulses.

Merriweather Post Pavilion's rare combination of great songs and vital invention make this one of the year's most important records, already.

'The Sky Is Fallin' is a beast.... 'God Is In The Radio' has got just such an awesome riff, like the Lord himself hotwired to a Marshall amp.

Fortunately, the depth of great songs written by Francis results in something that feels more like a proper album of still-dynamic psycho-rock than a shoddy cash-in.

If you didn't like the casual misogyny, glorification of crack dealing and unapologetic thuggery of the debut then stop reading now, because "Hell Hath No Fury" makes it sound like "Meat Is Murder" by The Smiths.

If anything, this 25-song double set sees Belle & Sebastian at their finest.

And to anyone that contends they don't make them like they did anymore: listen to this. They still do.

If you can’t find something here that has you smiling and quoting the old saw about rumours of indie’s death being greatly exaggerated, it’s time to take up opera.

Although "Hypermagic Mountain" is no less a terrifying, red-eyed and rampaging behemoth than its predecessors, the duo have unleashed a beast that assumes a more recognisable form.

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.

Take the time to squeeze inside, and you'll discover a startling, significant, endlessly inspiring album.

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.

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.

This time around Polly's drama school project is playing a Rock Star, and therefore this must be a Rock Record. And from the opener 'Big Exit', a simplistic, effective stomper so swathed in echo that she seems to be singing from the bottom of a pit, to the raucous semi-bonus 'This Wicked Tongue', it's just that, a back to basics special.

It's unlikely you'll hear anything as near to perfect, magical and downright lovely all year.

A fine collection of songs from an immensely talented, tragically lost soul.

It's not radically new - although the Timbaland and the Trackmasters contributions are genuinely exciting - but it's exactly what a lot of people want to hear from a hip-hop album right now.

Happily, In Rainbows is pretty, pretty good.

A fragrant bouquet of melody, light, love and naughtiness wrapped in an unfamiliar joie de vivre.

"Fishscale" is a purist's delight, an album seemingly crafted solely for those who've been chasing his maverick tail for the past decade.

“Arular”, as well as being a particularly great and brave album, could well be this year’s Portishead or Massive Attack.

It might not be the dance album of the year - but it's certainly pushing musical boundaries and deserves to be in your record collection.

Ironically, though defined sartorially and sonically by this short window in history, the songs on their debut album are mostly timeless. Few better will be released in 2008.

Panda Bear has created one of the most unusual and beautifully strange statements of the avant-garde.

There will be few better albums released this year.

'The Argument' is the sound of a band stretching out and thereby consolidating their position as a unique entity.

There's a rolling, free and expansive feel to the album as a whole that is not only one of its most attractive features, but is also the most difficult thing about it to pin down.

It's not too ambitious to suggest few other releases this year will match its grace, humanity and power.... A magnificent album.

A deeply special album, and one you hope enough people will allow to get under their skin.

It won't usher in a bold new era where boys are boys and bands play guitars, but there is more than enough here to chew over and enjoy.

As it is, with all their knobs set to downbeat, there's something restrained and knowing here that will trouble some newcomers. Still, there's very little on "xx" to suggest this band will end up on the compost heap.

'Post-rock', which Sigur Rós most assuredly are, may be little more than the shoegazing of a decade ago in an ironic T-shirt, but that's no reason to dismiss it outright. For a start, much of it is very lovely.

If "Neon Bible" doesn't quite dazzle as "Funeral" did, that's more a measure of the latter album's benchmark brilliance, rather than the inferiority of the former.

Tweedy takes conventional songforms birthed on his acoustic guitar and scrambles them completely, reassembled into fractured, dissonant epics with the help of the reliably brilliant Jim O'Rourke.

What is different about the overall feel of this messy and ambitious album is that it marks The Roots' liberation from genre, the neo-soul meanderings of 'Things Fall Apart' only appear when they're wanted and never outstay their welcome.

It's likely to be a defining point in their career even if it's not their definitive release.

"Seven Swans" is as a graceful tour de force of an album - beguiling, bewitching and beautiful.

Three loud cheers for her scattershot creativity, please.

A dreamy, sun-dappled delight, blending pastoral folk, psychedelia, free-wheeling, West Coast Americana and orchestral pop with such apparent effortlessness that its darker lyrical themes - the workings of sinister, invisible forces and the destruction wrought by war - are uncovered only by careful listening.

[A] strong contender for album of the year.

This album feels like it's tuning into everything, connecting with everything. Welcome to Maii. And welcome to the future.

It's a canny mix and results in Hercules And Love Affair making music for feet and heart, but also for the soul.

A record to throw yourself into with the same glee Robyn clearly has.

Beyond the shiny surface of these songs lurks an unusual wealth of detail decorating the landscape through which the Furries power, scattering verse after chorus after verse at breathtaking speed.

"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.

Despite its branding as work-out music, 45:33 feels more like an amazing club DJ set than something to quicken one's pace on the treadmill. [Review of UK release]

If you're the sort of person who can see music--even if you can't, perhaps--this is so colourful.

A mighty fine album which neatly sidesteps the tired alt.country tag, 'Feast Of Wire' is an engaging musical road trip that you wish would never end.

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.

A single-disc equal of "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below".... Even if it only sold 14 copies, it would still be the best record of the year.

Over fifty minutes of slick, loungey, cinematic music.

The record that Bright Eyes fans have been praying for - carefully played, quietly honest, dripping with glorious poetry and painful insight, truly the work of utter genius.

Exquisitely detailed, you can well believe that this is an album many years in the making and one with twice those years of pain inscribed in its emotionally wracked songs.

"Late Registration" feels more comfortable in its own skin than its predecessor.

They've resurrected with this, their fourth album, the seemingly outmoded concept that with enough nurturing and faith, a band - and by extension it's audience - can grow into a beautiful thing.

A far more sonically ambitious statement than its predecessors, perfectly fusing organic sounds with production techniques that are usually the preserve of underground dance producers or R&B mavericks.

It's startling that a commercial rock band could sound this blood-and-oxygen vital, this meaningful and mighty six albums into their career.

No doubt Helplessness Blues will win Pecknold further fame and success, whether he likes it or not.

Even if "Hypnotize" is simply more of the same, with SOAD operating at such astonishing creative and emotional heights, it'll still leave every other metal band on the planet scrabbling in the dust.

That every track here reinforces that memory of him makes it an unexpectedly fitting tribute.

Quite simply, "The Drift" is unlike any other record on Earth.

What really makes this record engaging is that the simmering tension often chooses not to explode, yet somehow it works.

They don't make a better sound than your average bunch of Sonic Youth fanatics, but they make it feel better, make it seem more important, more romantic almost.

The 'world-music' excursions of the previous 'Global - A Go Go' album are less in evidence and 'Streetcore' is a sharper, leaner collection for it.

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.

Overall, Smother is brilliant, and a record by a band with a big brain, a generous heart, hungry ears and a permanent erection.

It may be epic, sprawling and too unwieldy a tool with which to prise open a place in the charts, but it's also nothing short of remarkable.

The quintessential much-loved cult band, they’ve yet to make an album their fans didn’t adore, but the good news is that “Oceans Apart” is one of their finest.

With such songs as 'Southern Point,' which builds from shuffling, folk-jazz grooves into a squelchy, winding fairytale, breathtaking piano-pop anthem 'Two Weeks' and the towering drama of 'I Live with You,' we join the consensus: this is a record to swoon over.

"Kicking Television" documents a band on fire and a frontman in clarion clear voice.

It will undoubtedly top some end of year lists this Christmas.

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

All in, this is probably their best work.