'Let It Come Down' is another towering achievement - both musically and emotionally.... This is music as it's meant to be: raw, colossal and awe-inspiring. No wonder everything else just pales in comparison.

PJ Harvey's best album since 1991's 'Dry', a return to the feral intensity of that remarkable debut.... The clarity of the electric guitars played by Harvey, Rob Ellis and Mick Harvey is enough to make you fall in love with elemental rock all over again.... You could quibble Harvey has absolved her responsibilities by making an album earthed in the New York sound of 20 or 30 years ago. But when rock is so invigorating, so joyous about love, sex and living, all arguments are null and void.

Low have always sought to make music that can both swell the heart like a gospel tune and capture the amplified absence of a funeral parlour. It's difficult to imagine a more perfect expression of their vision than this.

So contagious is their enthusiasm, you could start thinking that black-clad nihilism has kept music to itself for way too long.

It's every ounce of Idlewild's potential fulfilled at once.

It's an album of outstanding natural beauty, an organic, wholesome work.

Seems that after all the pale imitators, Radiohead finally have a competitor worthy of healthy comparison.

'Since I Left You' is proof that while being a vinyl junkie might not make you a teen idol, crafting a joyous, kaleidoscopic masterpiece of sun-kissed disco-pop definitely will.... Cool? Sure, whatever. Brilliant? Undoubtedly.

A record that anyone who’s ever demanded anything interesting from rock music should hear.

Complete and utter filth from start to finish, and that's as high a compliment as we can bestow on an album.

They’re a shaggy-haired, surf’s up pop band and painfully vulnerable all at the same time.

A joyous, celestial celebration of sound.

‘Room On Fire’ is a refining and tinkering with The Strokes sound, a carefully calibrated attempt not to fuck up too early in the face of untold temptations. The results are still sleek, sexy and thrilling, with a tantalising promise of even better to come.

The funniest, most refreshing British debut in years.

What 'Drukqs' never is, of course, is boring. It's also beautifully paced. No track sounds like the one before, even though Aphex rarely strays far from the musical palate that's served him so well in the past.

It's easily the electronic album of the year, but for all that, it doesn't break particularly new ground. The point more is that what ground is broken is done so with exquisite artistry.

An understated classic: a triumph of delicacy over decibels. [19 Jun 2004, p.56]

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

This is murderously good stuff. [25 Sep 2004, p.64]

Album of the year? It's definitely a contender. [7 Aug 2004, p.49]

Lyrically it's astonishing. [28 Aug 2004, p.55]

What you have here is the most agonisingly voyeuristic listening experience in rock, ever. It's also some of the most exhilarating and brilliant rock'n'roll of the past 20 years. [7 Aug 2004, p.46]

'Yoshimi...' sets yet another benchmark.

Daft Punk have pulled off a brilliant wheeze by re-inventing the mid-'80s as the coolest pop era ever. And not even the officially approved retro-kitsch cool of Madonna's lukewarm excursions into post-Daft terrain but all the bubble-permed, sports-jacket-and-jeans excesses they can muster.... Mostly, though, 'Discovery' is simply fantastic pop...

The true masters have finally awakened from their slumber.

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

One of the most assured debut albums of the last five years.

For those of us who still believe in music's power to redeem, 'Funeral' feels like detox, the most cathartic album of the year. [5 Mar 2005, p.49]