Brilliantly sequenced, the album reaches a euphoric climax with the "Yes, we can change the world" hook of 'Black President,' a close cousin of Lupe Fiasco's 'Superstar.'

Incredibly, 'Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots' is a record that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 'The Soft Bulletin', refining that album's themes and defiantly charging into unchartered musical territories. Another masterpiece.

This is true cosmic American music and possibly the best thing all concerned have ever done.

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

This is an awesome album, almost certainly Placebo's pinnacle, although I'd love to be proved wrong.

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

Make no mistake, this album sounds incredible: cascading orchestrations, pulsating and instantly memorable tunes, an atmosphere that's both accessible and palpably psychedelic.

There will be few better albums released this year.

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.

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.

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

In-between the chaos and peace, 'Drukqs' induces a whole host of emotions using acid squiggles, plucked piano strings and 80s electro-breaks.

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

“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.

'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]

While those seeking a quick fix of cheap thrills hip hop will be disappointed, anyone who likes their music lush, multi-layered and lyrical should pick this up without delay.

This is a brilliant record, just as it's always been.

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.

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

Definitely in the hat for album of the year.

A modern day classic.

The suspicion lingers that Band Of Joy will be remembered more fondly than its wonderful predecessor.

It's dark but without employing the dull monotone formulas that have dragged drum and bass down.

This is so rich, so intelligent, so feeling, that most of us will throw our hands limply in the air and join voices with mum Kate McGarrigle who, according to the dedication on the back, "still whispers in my ear that I'm great".

Three albums in and Basement Jaxx are still so far ahead of the pack that they're a barely visible dust cloud on the horizon.

The most inventive and exhilarating rock music Britain's producing right now.

There's no getting away from the fact that the goofy guy who used to play drums for Nirvana just made a classic album.

You could get lost for days in the depths of these arrangements, and still find something moving and transcendental at every gilded turn. It's a towering achievement...

While other albums may have been more groundbreaking, none have been as excitable or infectious.

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

The results breathe that same rarefied air as Nick Drake or Vashti Bunyan.

Both artists have stepped outside their regular roles to make what feels like a genuinely instinctive, love-fuelled record that zings with an enthusiasm for all spectrums of 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.

Frequently staggering.

Over fifty minutes of slick, loungey, cinematic music.

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.

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

At last Ryan Adams has made a record every bit as good as his heroes.

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.

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

"Everything Ecstatic" pulses with imagination and subtle talent, choosing to follow a sweet technicolour road rather than take a harder, and far well trodden path.

It seems only logical that the three of them have relied so heavily on synths to create It's Blitz--despite Zinner's natural gift for manipulating the guitar--an album that's effectively a love letter to the dancefloor.

A great lost album in the making.

It’s a phenomenal album. And best of all, it’s unmistakably Prince.

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's tumultuous. It's breathtaking. It's expressive without the barest hint of Radiomuse indulgence.

The triumphant "Star's Of CCTV" will be to guitar bands what The Street's "Original Pirate Material" was to the UK urban music: essential listening.

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

The Canadian-American boho remains as feisty and red-blooded as ever, her hewn-from-marble voice--part-cowgirl part-Patti Smith--crooning and bawling tales of feckless lads and late night disappointments.

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

But while "3121" might suggest that, at 47, Prince isn't looking to change the face of music anymore, he's clearly still more than capable of delivering classic Prince albums.

His eye remains sharp.

It's a gut punch of a debut, and one that makes you believe Glasvegas are one of those rare, rare bands who might just have that perfect record in them.

It is beautiful, uplifting stuff.

What Seventh Tree actually does - successfully - is tap into a very English spirit of eccentricity, taking the mellow floatiness of Goldfrapp's earliest work and imbuing it with a dash of Hammer horror and the aroma of country meadows.

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.

'Quixotic' can't fail to mesmerise even those who thought Tricky too clever for his own good.

Almost everything here boils down to Cave's perennial concerns of sex and violence, rather than any Dark Lord of rock'n'roll stuff, coming loaded with lines to make even the most grave-faced goth chortle into their gruel.

Possibly the band's best album yet, destined to be loved by fans and loathed by critics, 'Mechanical Wonder' will be the soundtrack of spliffed up barbecues and boozed up afternoons with your mates for this summer and beyond.

With "Life In Slow Motion" he's delivered an album so rich and deft that it pushes beyond the realm of the humble singer-songwriter, to earn him a place alongside the likes of Springsteen and Van Morrison as one of music's revered elite. Without question, this is a classic album.

'Insignificance' is an album fraught with contradictions: tightly funky guitars sit alongside angelic piano and crunching 70s rock riffs shoulder belligerently up to honeyed pop harmonies. These are fascinating contradictions glued together with a binding harmonic honesty.

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

To anyone who's felt like they've been along to share even a little bit of that journey, it's an album-of-the-year contender that's bound to do nothing but delight.

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

With filth, loose morals, anger, frustration, big guitars and even bigger choruses at every turn, it's got all the DNA of a pure-bred rock classic.

Compact and succinctly direct, its 16 tracks rarely break the three-minute mark but are packed with a greater density of ideas than its predecessor.

Maroon 5 are the new Police, the new U2: a wildly exciting rock band who understand how to make great pop music that works everywhere from the bedroom and the iPod to the radio and the stadium.

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

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

[Dalle] may be the New Courtney Love, at times even the Punk PJ Harvey, but she also has a depth of emotion that was last displayed by Kurt Cobain.

It's probably Bjork's most succinct and inventive statement yet.

The key to 'A Rush Of Blood To The Head' is to be found not in Martin's presence, but in the intensity, dynamism, verve and style that Coldplay have now nailed, when comparisons to Radiohead, Echo and The Bunnymen and, perhaps most pertinently, U2's 'Unforgettable Fire', manifest themselves in a series of killer strides.

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

This is rap of mesmerising, addictive quality, written and delivered by a master in charge of every aspect of his craft.

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.

This is rock with a big fat drunken grin scrawled over its face in lurid red lipstick.

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

It might be a little too airbrushed, arch and meticulous for some, but it's brilliant all the same, and, in the tradition of all great second albums, it could prove to be Hard-Fi's defining moment.

New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War is an insane, obscure and exciting record of the kind that very few artists have the guts or imagination to make anymore.

Beyond the grooves etched in this record, what is most exciting is the ease with which Arbez brushes aside the canon of 90s giants.

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.

The most genuinely interesting addition to The Beatles' canon in years, it actually makes you want to dig out the originals and fall in love with the music all over again.

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

A work so consistently stirring, stately, and pop-aware it makes most recent guitar-based art-rock albums look tawdry.

As sleek and assured as anything the trio have done.

'Deep Down & Dirty' just reminds you how influential and important the Stereos were, and continue to be.

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

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

This is not merely a good album, but a truly great one.

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

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.

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

This is a record that will happen to you, and when it clicks, the realisation that As I Am is a genuine classic is overwhelming.

There isn't a second's worth of music here that doesn't come mink-swathed in note-perfect retro sound, or a song that isn't worthy of it.

Most artists are well-aware of the pitfalls of the difficult third album, of course, and try to disguise their on tour / hotel room songs - but when has Mike Skinner ever been most artists?

The most obvious comparison for 'Tomorrow Right Now' is Roots Manuva's 'Run Come Save Me' and the UK's bouncement brigade. And the comparison is a favourable one all round.

Yet cartoon and divorced from reality as it is, his vision is so vivid that it never fails to seduce and fill you with the uneasy sense that maybe, just maybe, somewhere his disturbing dimension of bums and misfits really does exist.

Simultaneously laid back and bursting with intensity, 'Lost Horizons' is a film score inviting each of us to direct our own personal movie.