For what it is, for what it does, for what it represents and for exposing the idiocy of people who only care about 'what it earns us', then, a truly, TRULY great pop record.

This music is the electronic, Warp-inspired answer to Brian Wilson's 'Smile.' [31 Jul 2004, p.41]

Simply put, Strokes have every quality rock'n'roll requires from its finest exponents and Is This It is where they come together.

Even if you've been fortunate enough to live with these tracks over the last year or so, they still sound more vital, more likely to make you form your own band than anything else out there.

Ten years after their last masterpiece, The Flaming Lips have finally produced another one.

Let England Shake is an album that only the Polly Harvey of today could have written.

By assembling a cast of their favourite musicians and delving into their adolescent memories, Daft Punk have created something as emotionally honest as any singer-songwriter confessional--and a lot more fun to dance to.

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

Burke delivers as pure and proper a record as you'll hear all year. If you've ever laughed or cried, you need to hear this.

It is its author Kieran Hebden's best work to date and confirms the prolific young soundmeister as a major talent.

Despite all this seemingly new wave-laden, impeccably cool, retrograde influence, 'Make Up The Break Down' is indisputably now.

Uniformly excellent.... Few, if any, British bands are making music quite like this right now.

It's thrillingly obvious that Junior Boys have made one of the year's best albums. [31 Jul 2004, p.41]

A record of glorious parts that are just too weighty, too emotionally complex and rich to hang together well as a whole.

Muse have widened the goalposts and re-established what rock is allowed to stand for. Next to ‘Absolution’, even something as majestic as ‘Elephant’ sounds so painfully small.

Soul music full of remarkable sonic ideas.

The eloquence, barbarism, tenderness and sweat-drenched vitality of 'Elephant' make it the most fully-realised White Stripes album yet.

Their world - sexual, drug-filled, and occasionally paranoid - has become progressively darker, and as such we find them nothing less than guardians of the rock flame.

Imagine 'Lost Souls' injected with Prozac and a huge dose of weird guitar noises that give you goosebumps from head to toe. That's 'The Last Broadcast'. It's one of those rare albums that makes sense first thing in the morning but you can still yell along to when your head's exploding.

The Adams of ‘Love Is Hell’ has gone out to make an album that actually is classic rock ‘n’ roll rather than one that can simply impersonate it, and sound convincing. [Review applicable to both Part 1 and Part 2]

The Adams of ‘Love Is Hell’ has gone out to make an album that actually is classic rock ‘n’ roll rather than one that can simply impersonate it, and sound convincing. [Review applicable to both Part 1 and Part 2]

All told, it's incredible this is a debut album. Accomplished, yet subtle, it works perfectly as a whole in a way all the production skills in the world couldn't replicate.

The nerve of it all is breathtaking. Turbo-beats poke up a gospel-jazz revivalist meeting, a mariachi band wanders into the hazy disco sashay of 'Broken Dreams', a Gary Numan sample gets bludgeoned to credibility in the Van Helden-esque pogo of 'Where's Your Head At?'.

By any criteria an astonishing work.

Here's music for the twilight hours - feverish, contemplative, nostalgic. It resonates with the force of a thousand passionate post-club conversations in darkened, smoke-filled rooms, of intense, doomed liaisons, of youthful arrogance undercut by fear and failure.

'10,000Hz Legend' is nothing like 'Moon Safari', then again it doesn't really bear a resemblance to much. Instead, it's a glowing, highly ambitious, quasi-concept album that sees Air spiralling off on a wildly idiosyncratic and brilliantly insane tangent all of their own.

Filled with both a clarity of instrumentation and thought, this is an album of undeniably mature work. And one which knows how to effect a large emotional impact without unsightly flexing of the muscles.

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