Yet in his desire to create a self-consciously classic album, BDB has erred on the side of generosity. At 63 minutes, 'The Hour Of Bewilderbeast' is true to its title: there's simply too much to sustain one's unswerving attention.

While the album is full of quality tunes that sound nice in isolation, as a complete package, it lacks the versatility to take it to another level.

For all its feats of brinkmanship, the patently magnificent construct called 'Kid A' betrays a band playing one-handed just to prove they can, scared to commit itself emotionally.

The Day's trademark bubblegum punk rock guitars have all been turned down in favour of a less electric, more organic sound. Where once they rocked out, now they polka on the awful Levellers-like 'Fashion Victim' - a song about Gianni Versace. Please.... 'Warning' is the sound of a band losing its way.

They've already featured on a multitude of soundtracks including Stealing Beauty, Shades and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Not to mention cinema ads for champagne and episodes of La Femme Nikita and er, Baywatch. That's pretty much all bases covered, then.

...a spontaneity here that replaces the formality of tradition with something more vital. Like a snapshot's moment captured, the gap between composition and recording seems to have been reduced to nothing, and it's here that the group hit their mark.

Vocodered, stretched, distorted, warped, deliberately upstaged by beats so showy they belong in a strip joint - quite simply, she's almost managed to make herself disappear. That bluntly explicit title isn't just pointless irony. This record is about the music, not Madonna; about the sounds, not the image.

She may not have written the words, but Björk's emotional investment in songs like 'I've Seen It All' (really sad) and 'Scatterheart' (really really sad) is undeniable; making this album - 'in character' as poor, doomed Selma - totally seductive as A Björk Record.

OK, here's some track titles - 'Too Little Too Late', 'Never Do Anything', 'Pinch Me' - and, guess what, THEY ALL FUCKING SUCK! Not just Weller, Ashcroft or Belle & Sebastian sucky but Mike & The Mechanics, Tin Machine and, yes, Hootie And The Blowfish sucky.

It tries to capture the essence of 1973 without having any big hairy old prog hits on it. Which is a bit like trying to capture the essence of the Star Wars films by cutting out all the bits in space.

Electronic, if not exactly rejuvenated, are rewired, recharged and, really quite good again.

And it makes the right choices, that much is indisputable; almost everything here is a monumental Underworld moment.

ATDI's latest album has its amps cranked to the hilt from start to finish. Far from being another in a long line of sanitised American punk rock albums, 'Relationship Of Command' sounds REAL.

The objective was to make a fucking brilliant album where the mood is king, the delivery is queen and studied modern coolness is a jester that's one misplaced quip away from being the lion's breakfast. And, of course, they've succeeded.

The difference this time is small but significant, in the overall high quality threshold - from the silken slo-mo waltz of 'In Love With A View' to the listless Dylan-lite stumble of 'She Broke You So Softly', there's not a bum note here. Which is not necessarily a recommendation. Because if you stand too close to these tunes they can seem suspiciously perfect, like a newly painted Wild West movie set.

Basically, it's the curse of Jewel: Yank bird with acoustic guitar, homespun philosophy and twee poeticism, where the songs ramble on and on to deliver some platitudinal twaddle...

A mammoth indulgence, an 80-minute justification of his own ill-defined status.

Without the gritty substance of the first album, it has all the depth of a packet of peanuts.

Proving he's no slouch when it comes to keeping up with musical trends, he's brought in producers like DJ Scratch and one-time junglist Adam F to make sure his beats match up to his evergreen vocal skills. And it works... Amazingly, this is his ninth album, yet he still sounds fresh.

Sadly, as 'Balls' proves, age has inexplicably withered Sparks' bow-legged muse; where once was genre-bending acid eclecticism and inspired wit, Sparks now seem content to dole out tired, tinny electro-pop and unfunny puns.

What 'Disappeared', in all its stealthy innovation and breathless compendium of sounds, amounts to, is a kind of avant-garde musique concrète - difficult noises shrouded in a cloak of accessibility.

A truly lovely thing to behold; a pretence-free, summery shimmy through pop's enchanted garden, with tear-tugging Bacharachy bits and choruses of angels and everything.

it paints crudely and schematically a portrait of the artist as messed-up, disillusioned, self-indulgent twerp with an unhealthy appreciation of the mid-'80s US guitar underground, whose demo-quality doodlings (Graham plays, sings, produces and paints everything. And all to a rather average standard) should probably have never seen the light of day.

Each track is a treat - a sensible, lo-cholesterol treat, maybe, but still packed with oddly addictive rhymes and beats.

If you really want a definitive collection of Ice-T's work, go and buy his albums 'Power' (1988) and 'OG - Original Gangster' (1991). This is not to criticise this greatest hits package, which, technically, does a decent job of presenting an overview of his illustrious career. However, when you have an artist like Ice, with such an impressive body of work, you have to come with more than 17 tracks.

Anodyne dance music for people who don't go to clubs, comedown music for people who don't do drugs.

With their third album, bijou trippy-hippy souljazzfunksters Morcheeba have let it all hang out - and so all those half-formulated ideas they hadn't the guts to record earlier are here. It's

After a while, the whirling atmospherics give way to the Dandys' dorkier tendencies: the jaunty chuggers, Taylor's dissolute mannerisms, the quirky little twists and tricks.

Thankfully lacking the comedy ska bletherings of their last two albums, this is certainly fast and furious and, where once they seduced the charts with songwriting, now they want to bludgeon with hardcore muscle.

Although clearly Canibus is undoubtedly one of the best freestyling lyricists of his generation, he's still to find the right production team to match his vocabulary.

Diasporic dancehall reggae, spruced up and polished around the edges, but essentially retaining the artist's signature style.

This is a crisp, focused wobble through a primarily 'Philophobia'-derived set with drummer Dave Gow and bassist Gary Miller adding crucial propulsive qualities.

A 60-minute torrent of positivity, an open-ended love letter to his wife -

This is a left-field masterpiece and Brown's best work for a decade.

In a world where a cheap squirt of brass is enough to equal "a new direction", the Super Furries' free-range ideas-farming is a vital antidote to the preservative-pumped junk that curdles music's bloodflow.

Massive in pretension, slightly too long and gothic, but when all the pieces fit, you can't deny its unstoppable power.

Her choice of collaborators is piss-poor, and as every vocal snarl and heartfelt croon is wilfully blanded-out by the musos and their sterile embellishments, we might as well be listening to The Corrs.

Their most well-rounded effort yet.

Thankfully, this is more absurd than mawkish, made even better by the fact that Tahiti 80 are French people singing in English, and therefore do not always make sense.

These ten tracks come with such an earnest passion for the timeless pop form that any snobbery is punctured with an arrow drawn straight from Cupid's quiver.

Despite the fluid interplay of the four MCs and J5's evolving musicality, 'Quality Control' lacks the singalong pop immediacy of 'Jurassic 5'.... Quality then. But it's not the old-skool classic we'd hoped for.

It'll sit nicely at the ultra-sad end of the CD rack, but if you have to listen to it more than twice a year, you should definitely drink less, get out more and consider relationship counselling.

It's as though all the contrariness of Blonde Redhead's angular past has dissolved into a fascination with pop ('This Is Not'), '60s soundtracks ('Melody Of Certain Three') and naked piano ballads ('For The Damaged', featuring one of The Black Heart Procession on the ivories) without sacrificing any of the heart-stopping dynamics or confessional psychodramas.

Ultimately, despite all its self-defeating limitations and annoying, fey affectations, this remains a superb record.

Ultimately, 'Killing Puritans' is well-crafted and commendably diverse, but somewhat joyless and cold. It aspires to social significance without having much serious to say, just as its creator casts himself as a taboo-trashing auteur rather than accept his true status as a skilled artisan in the commercial dance field.

As essays from high-flying, high, high school dropouts go, however, 'The History Of Rock' isn't bad, if a little low on inspiration.

As ever, the detail is dazzling: snippets of woozy orchestral dinner-jazz, wibbly-wobbly pastiches of children's TV themes... But in the fabric of the music itself, Mike and Rich seem to be running out of steam.

Musically this is the sound of middle America at its most ugly and nauseating...

Gruelling assault course of lyrical genius that pours itself into the 18 tracks on this album-

This is a surprisingly decent album, as good as anything they've ever made.

ESG remain a no-wave New York group unlike any other.

It eases up on the rigorous deconstructivist tendencies that have so permeated the last two 'Lab records, taking a cue instead from the carefree effervescence typical of recent live encounters.

A seething, furious album; a declamatory statement against cynicism and passivity and the simple injustices of everyday life.

While it captures the contrary, questing essence of Sonic Youth surer than any SY release since 'Washing Machine', it also never betrays the sluggish, arrogant lack of self-editing that made '98's 'A Thousand Leaves' so bilious and unlovable, and the band's self-released 'SYR' EPs so hit and miss.

Like it or not, the songs penned for Britney by Swedish producer Max Martin, the man behind the even more successful Backstreet Boys, get into your brain like ketamine.

But damn those cruel hormones - Hanson's collective balls have MmmDropped, and the giddy rush of adolescence seeks to mutate Mercury's finest investment into a trio of crack-voiced hulks.

When they're fragile, Looper are precious, when they're whimsical they're plain weedy.

It's frustrating to see them pissing around like South Park's Matt and Trey, when they can produce something as genuinely affecting and pure pop as 'Stay Forever'.

The angriest, least compromised, most utterly justified pop record in years ?

Gently acoustic, peacefully steeped in nostalgia and remembrance, it generates a warm glow of grace...

For, as derivative and daft as The Apples are, it's impossible, like a scowling adolescent laughing at the antics of his irritating kid brother, to hate them.

An album so autonomous and remote it sounds like it's being beamed from a deep-space probe.

While the clipped melodies and eerie tinklings are gently brushing your feet with a feather duster, Margaret Fiedler is fiercely proclaiming, "Something's gotta give/And it sure as hell ain't me" ('T Street') like a mightily pissed-off Edith Piaf.

An album awash with pretty ambiguities and difficult twists.

Imagine if your diary was published in a national newspaper two years after writing it. Now consider what dull and repetitive reading it would make, and welcome to 'Return To Saturn'.

As his musical repertoire has expanded from minimalist folk to occasionally playful pop, so has his tolerance for the foibles of the flesh. 'Dongs Of Sevotion', from its silly title to its intermittent flashes of tenderness and humour, is the proof.

The main criticism of this record is that a few tracks are merely good, as opposed to epochal.

It's a terrible pity: when she stops politicising like a councillor on a complementary therapy summer camp, there's music here that's full of the febrile commitment and unashamed passion that marked her out as a valid icon in 1975.

With her distressed, Southern-inflected vocals and guitar/piano accompaniments tolling like perpetual church bells, Cat Power brings these songs successfully into her own, bleak domain.

Recorded with a Luddite's zeal- no keyboards, samplers, sequencers - he's... managed to document the clanking claustrophobia of modern life.

Sounds as if it was recorded in a hermetically sealed ballroom by a group of misanthropic, jazz-obsessed weird-beards.

Producing an album that distorts time so each second is the temporal equivalent of War And Peace is almost a perverse triumph.

Once more, we're in a world of uptight, high-gloss grooves, wry tales of dirty old men, and, of course, terrifyingly proficient guitar solos.

But if attempting to dress ancient monuments in radical, avant-garde clothing was always going to be a hit-and-miss project, he's still succeeded for the most part in making a richly ambient, evocative record from apparently staid and stale old material.

A clearly adult, unfashionably sensitive document, all grace and understatement, experimental through what it leaves out, and the effects it plants in the background.

Gone are the ill-advised brass and bare-faced chart aspirations of 1996's awful 'Wild Mood Swings', as are the flippant pop songs that commercialised The Cure in the mid-1980s. What we are left with is the dark, dense core of Smith's psyche, and a reminder that The Cure are at their fearsome best when creating soundscapes awash with uncertainty and dread.

By any criteria an astonishing work.

Merely a decent Morphine album.

An album of impossibly adorable disco - Star Wars "ping p-p-p-ping ping" bits, cheesy synths, George Clinton (!...hmm) workouts... all delivered in a slightly unsettlingly ersatz kitschness, half-hinted ironies, indietastic samples, hip-hop phrasings and The Asian Influence seductive throughout.

Narrower in scope than 'Odelay' but more immediate in impact, it's clearly been conceived as an accompaniment to our hedonistic habit of choice, the last great party album of the millennium.

And for her second album of Amos-aping MTV-branded Lilith Fair fodder, the barmiest, prettiest pretender to Tori's throne of corporate crackpot chic deals unashamedly in that tired and trusted heavyweight heart-tugging currency: relationships.

'So ... How's Your Girl?' is precision-tooled to amuse the Beastie Boys, for sure. But it also harbours a wit and dexterity that not only represents the usual cliquey extended family, but also manages to transcend them.

'The Contino Sessions' can mean whatever you want it to. All we know is that it feels amazing. Warhol also said that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Death In Vegas' glory starts now.

'One Part Lullaby' lapses very slightly into generic Barlow-pop two-thirds through, then soon recovers its shimmering grandeur. Sebadoh hardliners will dismiss this record as pop fluff, but few will be listening, too busy hailing The Best Lou Barlow Album In The World... Ever

In the hands of someone less witty and schizoid, a near three-hour epic would be unforgivable, but Merritt at play is frequently magical.

'Remedy' is probably as good a dance album as anyone from these Isles has produced this decade.

A joyous, celestial celebration of sound.

In ploughing a unique furrow in pop music, he demands your enjoyment as much as your respect.

Teasing the limits of pleasure and agony, 'Black Foliage' is a messy, irritating listen. But it's worth persevering just for those odd moments of gorgeousness.

Blur's most inconsistent and infuriating statement thus far. Infuriating, because divested of four solid-gone clunkers '13' could pass muster as the best of Blur.

The absence of quirky samples and lame big beats make it all sound, right now, strangely radical.