Yet though the music may not win any originality awards - Sebadoh and Guided By Voices spring instantly to mind as precursors - there is a refreshing lack of pretension throughout.

Proof Of Youth was made for rolling back the years and the rug, not chin-stroking contemplation. If shredded Axminster was The Go! Team's aim here, then mission well and truly accomplished.

Goes on a bit, predictably (20 tracks!), but only Jay-Z can match its highlights for party soundtrack of the year.

This minor masterpiece of an album is nothing less than a precision exercise in deconstructed songwriting.

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.

If Avril Lavigne dealt with her 'issues' by adding whiskey to her skinny latté, bummed about on a Californian beach at sunset and listened to The Go-Gos, this is what she'd sound-like.

Skim the surface and you'll find ten slabs of icily slick electro-pop, spend a little time and you'll uncover an altogether darker core; either way Unicorn delivers in whichever form you're looking for.

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

Ultimately, 22 Dreams is, simply put, Weller's best album since "Stanley Road", and one to be remembered for years to come.

The result is pretty much what you'd expect from an album bearing Lynne's name on the credits.

It's not just that these sentiments are timeless - these songs, in these hands, are only now receiving their definitive interpretations.

Despite not being quite as smart as "Fishscale", The Big Doe Rehab certainly marks another reason (along with recent GZA shows and the release of "8 Diagrams") to suggest the Wu-Tang dynasty is going through something of a renaissance.

Rather than mimicking and rehashing "Simple Things", she's found a warmth and depth of feeling that makes "Colour The Small One" the logical progression.

Happily so, as well, as any adherence to the backstory would ruin what's simply the best dumbass party album of the summer.

It's not original or slyly crafted enough - a couple of songs could definitely have benefited from a quick edit from Damon - to feel truly classic, but it has a charm and a vibrancy that's impossible to resist.

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

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

It’s the way “With The Lights Out” fleshes out the plot that makes it so compelling.

Lady Gaga apart, the most interesting stars in 2010 are women in their 30s and beyond, artists with phosphorescent personalities that might burn the fingers of anyone wishing to mould them. Singers like Alison Goldfrapp, Grace Jones and Robyn Miriam Carlsson.

There's a connection with the contemporary world, with the apparatus and detritus that layers 2010 up around us all, that hasn't really been seen in Sigur Ros's music before.

'I Might Be Wrong' is Radiohead trashing the notion that 'Kid A' and 'Amnesiac' were difficult and sterile studio bound affairs.

It's another solid and undeniably enjoyable album. But from a woman as supremely talented as Blige, somehow enjoyable rates as a disappointment.

This debut sets the newcomers head and shoulders above the neo-Britpop pack.

'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.

Beautiful songs one and all, there’s much to recommend "Eye To The Telescope", and given enough time and patience, Tunstall’s subtle charm seeps through making it an album to love.

It may be a scrappier collection than the exquisite, Tindersticks-in-aspic perfection of "The Hungry Saw", but somehow it adds up to something greater, the album as a whole bristling with creativity and the joys of trying something new.

The Coral have refined their influences, dropping some of the more incongruous blasts and revelations for a more concise, controlled dervish of Northern guitar colour and shade, West Coast psychedelic fever and Spaghetti Western landscapes and atmospherics.

While her second album is frequently more drama than action, over the long haul, the magical world she creates is one worth being immersed it.

You simply have to marvel at the talents of a man who is surely amongst the most gifted and fascinating musicians of modern times, even if "The Avalanche" does feel like a vaguer retread of the absolute bravura seen on its big brother.

"The Back Room" is, principally, a triumph.

Overall, aside from the crummy rock-out of 'What If', 'Aaliyah' is accomplished fluid soul, with nothing too jagged or startling to spoil the polished veneer.

The album's predominant mood is not glumness, it is togetherness, and it invokes images of storytelling, late nights, campfires, whiskey and beards. The stuff of men with things on their minds.

Superficially then, White Denim might, on first listen, ape the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion but unlike garage revivalists like The Hives--whose studied revivalism has all the innovative spirit of a 19th century theme park--they've kicked all the best things about red-blooded rock into exciting new shapes.

Big by design, poignant yet relentlessly uplifting, it has the feel of a career crowning glory, or at the very least a second album, not a first attempt.

These 10 songs evolve unhurriedly and, as with all Mogwai's best moments, like time-lapse photography from the heart of a dark storm.

What makes 'Paid Tha Cost...' such an unexpected joy is the way in which Snoop's comic persona offers all involved an opportunity to loosen up and have some fun.

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.

there are many who will find this record torrentially annoying....But to many others, Manners will be a welcome zephyr of optimism ushering away the angst of epidemics and impending environmental oblivion.

In a time where we could have fairly expected another state-of-the-world sermon, Dylan's thankfully stopped the overdone end-is-nigh bell-ringing that's characterised his late-period, allowing the ghosts of romances past and present to permeate Together Through Life.

An intelligent step forward from a unique and prolific troubadour.

Although only eight songs long, Body Talk Pt. 1 is a fully formed, imagined futuristic world that uses technology to propel it into a future version of the present day.

Danger Mouse hasn't commandeered his charges' muse and forced The Black Keys to change, simply encouraged them to co-operate and collaborate for the first time. Clearly, company becomes them.

As with previous LPs, “The Secret Migration” works as a set-piece but, with the strings kept on a tighter leash and the production less fulsome, it’s easier to notice the details.

While unlikely to ignite the zeitgeist as "Parklife" once did, "The Good, The Bad & The Queen" probably says just as much about Britain 13 years on.

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.

A terrific gonzoid metal album.

Alight Of Night is a garage-weaned, art rock, squat-dirty masterpiece.

While the die-hard These New Puritan fan might be annoyed that six of these tracks have been released before, there's enough to make it abundantly clear here is a band with a brilliant sense of invention.

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.

Think Giorgio Moroder, The Art of Noise and Michael Nyman with - if you like your reference points with less padded shoulders - a touch of New Order and Boards of Canada.

There is more than enough pop fuel here to maintain La Roux's unlikely momentum for a while.

An uncompromising work from an uncompromising artist, To Survive doesn't zip or sizzle. But yield to its gentle undulations and its hypnotic, brooding and utterly original genius becomes clear.

Almost by accident, it seems, The Rapture have pulled it off: the album of the year.

Across forty minutes, this is epic yet compact, a film noir in garish technicolour, an album made up of potential singles.

New album No Way Down is one of the year's best so far; its title apt for vertiginous synths and strings that litter the mix like vapour trails on pure blue sky.

Febrile, idiosyncratic, epic yet fun: "Open Season" may not raise eyebrows but it has – thank God - raised the hitherto pitifully low bar for British guitar rock.

Carrying the minimum amount of filler and fat, this judiciously pruned collection conclusively proves that this is one tiger still capable of burning brightly.

Just a little sensible pruning then and 'When I Was Cruel' would be a triumphant return to rocking form for Mr Costello.

As ever, Wagner's narratives, such as on 'National Talk Like A Pirate Day,' are impressionistic, shifting time and perspectives, like the Norman Raeburn-influenced Dylan of 'Blood On The Tracks.'

The Flaming Lips' most effortless and varied exploration of their charming and profound tongue to date.

If Adele's debut '19' marked her out as a young chanteuse with a booming voice, her follow-up '21' has shown a maturity in her songwriting that makes her the de facto authority when it comes to soundtracks to broken hearts.

The best approach here is to set aside genre delineations (who needs 'em?) and simply surrender.

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

While the wine-favouring moustache-sporting figure of Franz Nicolay is no longer a fixture, the remaining members are present and correct albeit in a somewhat more reflective mode than of yore. It suits them.

With 'Talkie Walkie', Air are headed back where they came from. That they do this without actually retracing their own footprints and have produced an album with its own delicate but distinct hallmarks is a measure of their talent.

Actually, closer to the truth is that it sounds like a QOTSA record with the kind of solid rhythm-section money couldn't buy. And if that's the case then this is the best QOTSA record since 2002's "Songs For The Deaf".

Detractors will point to a failure to effectively up their game with 200 Million Thousand but the sly sense of craft remains.

It's clear that this is Harvey and Parish unpredictably unhinged. If there's one thing that you can't do with PJ Harvey is pigeonhole her. And why the hell would you want to?

Not only have The Kills delivered a rock'n'roll album of note, it's one that achieves the rare trick of weaving timelines and timelessness with indecent ease.

Still only 22 (!), Lykke Li has constructed one of 2008's most ambitiously grandiose statements. Madonna can shuffle off to her Live Nation millions, a new pop saviour has been found.

You can't help feeling that, with a little less self-indulgence and a bit more camp brilliance, Brakes could be the side project that turned into something special.

A genre redefining album from the most innovative and exciting voice of a generation? Not exactly. Yet while predictably wide of the genius mark, at its best it does tag Drake a breath of fresh air.

Towards the end, Herren's love of the glitch tentatively tries to reassert itself, but poetry and seductiveness manage to pacify it for the duration.

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.

Old loves Liquid Liquid, ESG and A Certain Ratio haven’t been abandoned and their percussionist still works overtime, but the spirits of Prince, Kraftwerk (both on the wryly self-referential "Dear Can"), Chic and even ABC (on the politicised "Shit Scheisse Merde Pt 1") make cameo appearances.

It is a qualified success, at times brilliant, at others rather vague and off target.

Song after song, this is hardly an album that boasts of its riches but, in a determinedly low-key fashion, the music asserts itself in honest textures captured in naked performance.

Playful yet touching at (almost) every turn, Write About Love may not shake any musical foundations but it certainly proves that Belle and Sebastian still can't be pigeon-holed.

Jewellery then is not quite the set of glittering pop gems its title implies but boasts a handful of rough diamonds nonetheless, fidgety and uncompromising though all the more enjoyable for it.

"Fundamental" is the sound of the Pet Shop Boys reborn, and mindful of the important role they fill in the pop family.

Sir Paul is largely on top form.

There are moments when The Concretes ape Mazzy Star a little too closely for comfort on this album, but overplaying a talent for languorous, delicious fuzz pop is hardly the most horrific of crimes.

Eno and Byrne's twist, however, is the optimism and hope that breathes through every minute of what is not another boundary-demolishing collaboration, but a delicately crafted work that could only have been recorded after dispensing with the rules.

Maccabees have not just merely avoided a sophomore goring with Wall Of Arms' bar-raising pop. They have got the crowd firmly back on their side in doing so.

The sheer scope of 'Latin', however, is what rescues it from feeling like a box-ticking completion of a mission--as 'P.I.G.S.' races off into the distance after its lull, there's the feeling that there might still be more to see, more work to be done.

Ignore The Ignorant looks for escape into the US indie underground, "Last Year's Snow", "Cheat On Me" and "Nothing" sulkier than The Cribs we've come to know, reluctantly 'pop' dismissals rather than worried cures for a mainstream malaise The Cribs apparently regard as terminal.

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

We've heard it all before, we know the punchline, we've bought into the joke, but still we want the delivery again and again.

It might not turn out to be his biggest album, but 808s & Heartbreak could well be his masterpiece.

Few records will be made this year with such love and devotion, and you'll be able to tell it too. It's delicious.

It's not a perfect record, but "The Cure" does achieve something quite remarkable and unexpected. It leaves you looking forward to their next one.

Busting out of car speakers on hot London streets this summer, 'Ego War' is gonna make you think that, finally, we've got a Brit band worth adoring.

An impressively rounded, engagingly inventive record that ranges across British blues / R&B, Mod pop, psychedelia and American country rock.

While 'Make It Go Away (Radiation Song)' lacks the subtle lyrical twist (and a decent tune) of some of the other moments on Detours, it is a sober counterpoint to the image of Crow as all hair, tan and teeth. It also contrasts with the album's stand-out, 'Love Is All There Is,' which brings us back to more familiar Crow country on an album of big themes and surprising depth.

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

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.

This is 'All Killer No Filler' with bells on and 'Does This Look Infected?' will rightly have the Blink 'boys' quaking in their trainers.

An album full of highly dramatic and almost cinematic entertainment moments.