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.

To be fair, "The Loon" stops short of pastiche, but it is too transparently a paean to Tape 'n Tapes' heroes.

Like a slightly under-serving best of, though, we get glimpses of what they've done before, but nothing substantial enough to set a new high-water mark.

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.

It makes for a cool sound that might be too inoffensive at times but which grabs all the right places most of the time.

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.

There are precious moments on here and hints that something truly magnificent could emerge in time, but first Broadcast need to work out exactly where they're going and why.

It's a dubious album whose chief innovation is a guest appearance by Nelly Furtado.

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.

A refreshingly old-fashioned orchestral score intercut with rather less appealing jaunts through an atonal avant-garde.

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.

It's almost like neither [Dave Fridmann] nor the band could decide whether they were making an electronic or rock record and in dithering between the two settled on the awkward, frustrating middle ground.

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

Could 'Blood Pressure' restore The Kills fortunes to their early glory days? It would seem that Hince's luck might be running out.

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".

Their strength lies in Turner's lyrical precision, his way of taking a scalpel to the minutiae of real life to make his heckling of fluorescent adolescents, weekend rock stars and scumbags seem like more than just booze-maddened ranting. Here, Turner's words aren't as direct.

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.

Great fun to record, no doubt, and probably great live, but an annoying conceit on record.

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.

An incredibly accomplished record, a true testament to the band’s imagination, intellectual curiosity and outrageous musical talent.... Unfortunately, “Frances The Mute” is also awful.

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.

New frontiers for rock aren't exactly broached, but then that was hardly the point.

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.

Robbed of any arch qualities they might previously have hinted at, Art Brut are shown up as cuddly pop-comedians happy to tell the same joke over and over, devoid of any real insight and normal to the extent that you half-expect Argos to launch into a diatribe against aeroplane food.

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.

For fans, a job well done, and surely appreciated. For the rest, digestion of any of Luna's five studio albums may be advisable first.

It's just hard to find much of Jeff himself in these amiable, head-nod-friendly, immaculately crafted but ever so slightly sterile tracks.

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

It's all good sauce, one supposes, but as Mills wheels out of earshot, tongue and balls dangling in the warm night air, it's hard not to wonder where the thoughtful, sullen kid whose eyes cut like lasers through sink estate bull**it has got to these days.

This, like the last joint 'Stakes Is High', sees the crew making even more stylistic space between themselves and their very own creation of the late eighties, 'the daisy age'.

The Rakes' debut is by turns profoundly unsettling and savagely funny as each song is propelled by a seething sense of purpose.

Black Light is, as it implies, a dark record. It's also a brilliant, shinning beacon of electro-pop sophistication, but it's a dark, dark record all the same.

'100th Window' is every bit the production masterpiece its predecessors are - in places harkening back to, if not quite matching, the collective's glorious debut.

It's hard to deny Papa Roach have a certain knack of crafting big, glossy, annoyingly catchy anthems for the Kerrang TV generation.

It is dense, it is long, it is complicated. It is also a magnificent triumph of artistry over blind anger.

This is the first Muse album to sound - brace yourself, outrageous melodrama fans - ordinary.

Crucially though, what Diddy lacks in eloquence he makes up for in pop sensibility, which here keeps edgier elements the right side of radio friendly.

It has fire in its belly and an admirable abandon and as a whirlwind tour of rock'n'roll decadence it makes, say, Jet look like the fey, foppish tourists they are.

Like their three previous records, Mountain Battles is a record to return to again and again, like an old and dear friend who can still somehow surprise you.

Not content with making a diverse, punchy record brimming with those trademark riffs, Homme has written lyrics that make you think.

Perhaps with a bit more effort converting the jams into actual songs this would have been a worthy jump off as opposed to the album's incandescent highlight. Your forecast then, occasional flashes of brilliance but largely dreary.

But though the music is as good as anything they've ever done, rarely resorting to that downbeat, drunk-in-pub-tells-his-life-story tendency they've too often made their trademark, the lyrics are way below [Aidan] Moffat's usual standard.

He still tinkles the ivories with dazzling skill and his scything comments on breaking-up and the emotionally inept are all too easy to identify with, yet the most enamouring thing is that he manages to do this all without being zany or patronising.

'Wonderland' is magnificent. An album full of cracking tunes, potential singles and a new found lust for life from one of the best bands of the last ten years.

Enchanting, celestially lovely and as effective at lifting you out of yourself for forty-five minutes as an early evening cruise in a space shuttle.

Beware is a 40-odd minute work that ebbs, flows and carries you along perfectly.

This record can't claim such a free-spirited conception as its predecessor, but that's actually to its credit as not a moment rests idle or is flung in on a whim, every track connects like a pool cue to the back of the head in a bit of Friday night pub rough and tumble.

[His] most satisfying collection of material since 1993's "Wild Wood".

Taken as a whole, 'Discovery' is a compelling concoction of styles that continually surprises.

Much more of this and Shakira will surely take over the whole world with her mix of unthreatening pop / rock, lovingly naïve lyrics and cute tummy.

Hot Hot Heat's religious devotion to early eighties new wave is simply embarrassing.

Eventually you’re left longing for a dash of spontaneity or that the band would break into something adventurous.

It is an important leap forward for one of the few American metal bands left who care about the form's emotional evolution.

Unfashionable as they probably are, Pearl Jam have gone some way to regaining both their fire and their relevance with this, a record that takes equally from classic Neil Young stylings as it does raging, polemic punk.

If not quite the cohesive, brilliant whole it should be, Wild Young Hearts is an impressive sum of beautifully executed parts.