This is easily Costello's most instinctive, least self-conscious record of original songs in over a decade.

Far from venturing further into the polyrhythmic interior, four long tracks find him drawing closer to techno's primal pulse, until celestial finale 'Wing Body Wing' squares the Afro/Detroit circle with a single dramatic power-chord.

The songs are deeper and richer than on 2006's "12 Songs," but still naked and raw.

As standout lead single 'American Boy' (on which she raps with West) shows, this could be one of the most unlikely comebacks of 2008.

Never has a pit of despair sounded so inviting.

Soul is about voice and music that connects the church and the bedroom, with elegance and earthiness. And, by that crucial measure, Jim is a great soul record.

Whenever Hard Candy threatens to get boring, something always happens to recapture your interest, but the three songs in which Madonna actually seems to forge a genuine connection with her musical helpmeet leave the rest of the album in the shade.

No Doubt-esque ska-pop forms the record's core, but her belting vocal hooks really come into their own on the robotic indie numbers.

Fans looking for an air-guitar gurning masterclass may be disappointed.

Cajun, unquestionably, are the real deal.

Their fourth album picks up where 2005's "Leaders of the Free World" left off.

Six years after his last album, England, Half English, Bragg has come up trumps: Mr Love & Justice, with his band the Blokes, is his best realised work musically for ages.

This album will make your life considerably better.

The production is glossed to within an inch of its life, the mood is cheerfully upbeat--or 'festive' as Carey might put it herself--and the entire confection rings out with bold, sassy, brutally executed intent.

The follow-up adheres to a winning formula: this is sunny pop in a Sixties vein. But why don't they try something reckless?

World-weary and introspective, frequently discordant, this is the sound of a man pondering where it all went wrong.

Lewis's voice is impressively elastic throughout but lacks any grit or style.

Musically, the album is a triumph from first to last.

Such is the balm-like propensity of her singing that the listener experiences it as a physical sensation as much as a sound. Yet as these 13 brief but perfectly formed songs rush by in 35 hectic, blissful minutes, the overall effect is galvanising rather than palliative.

A perfectly executed debut as might be expected from a band championed in OMM53 for their mathematical precision.

There's a fine songwriter somewhere inside frontman Liam Fray--but first he has to bust his way out of a genre that the world has long ago left behind.

X is merely a slightly above average collection of tracks.

While their coming-of-age tales entertain some, it's their 'us versus the world ' spirit that makes this such an enthralling debut.

The result is a flawless (post)modernisation of heartland rock that wears its lovelorn pessimism proudly on its ruffled sleeve.

It's mostly fast and unfussy, convincing and committed.

On this relaxed and cohesive set, Van's band fall into simple and graceful grooves and play like a proper group, not hired hands.

The first album by the B-52's in 16 years sees the Georgia trash-pop veterans keep dull maturity at bay with 11 paeans to partying, space, deviant sex and sly protest politics .

Consolers of the Lonely is heftier than its predecessor, both in its Led Zep-go-garage wig-outs and in its cosmic balladeering.

It's the record's wholesome tracks, such as 'Young Love', a duet with folk darling Laura Marling, that prove Mystery Jets thrive in the gap between naivety and cynicism.

All this Eighties-shaped over-production means Red suffers from the same problem as bedevils the BBC's 1981-set Ashes to Ashes: too much effort has gone into quirky nostalgic jiggery-pokery and not enough into credible plot.

Hypnotic repetition, mysterious soundscapes and recurring lyrical codes render this debut utterly engrossing and totally essential.

With this unexpectedly moving concept album about disgraced Back to the Future car designer John DeLorean, US producer Boom Bip and moonlighting Super Furry Gruff Rhys have come up with a new twist on hip hop's unholy trinity of cars, money and coke.

And yet, as is often the case with music crafted solely in the key of strife, the result is bizarrely life-enhancing, chiefly thanks to the head-spinning fashion in which Gnarls condense 40 years of rock'n'roll into one seamless psychedelic whole.

From the full-on Nintendo Wii panic-attack of 'Alice Practice' to the breezy, off-kilter electro-pop of 'Crimewave' and 'Air War', this sumptuously squelchy 16-track debut already feels like a Greatest Hits.

A welcome return for this premier Leicestershire combo, who specialise is substance over style.

Frontman Pete Murphy overdoes the drama, leaving little space for the songs to breathe, while his colleagues fail to access the mystique that at their peak, in the early Eighties, served to distinguish them from goth's also-rans.

Here Malkmus dispenses with the electronic curiosities that blighted his 2005 solo album Face the Truth and adopts a more polished version of the old indie-rock of soaring guitar solos and oblique lyrics.

It's not a huge departure for the Southern songbirds but proves them to be magisterial practitioners of the dark blues-rock arts.

Straight out of Edmonton, Alberta, fast-talking MC Rollie Pemberton's impeccable second album confirms that the history of Canadian electro did not end with Neil Young's Trans.

Goldfrapp and Gregory have made an album as hummably lovely as it is knowingly referencing of a certain tradition of neo-psychedelic English whimsy.

While Britain and the US are succumbing to a very retro take on the US's R&B heritage, the original queen of neo-soul has taken a giant leap forward.

Yes, there's plenty of God and glitz. But the purity of that voice is still brilliantly captivating.

Now working below the corporate radar, the venerable producer's sound is thinner, but still effective, especially given the presence of old stagers like Redman, whose rhymes ('When I run out of ink I kill another octopus ') are as addictive as the retro backdrop.

The good news is that the ninth album from these inveterate melancholics is a burnished pleasure.

For Emma, though only nine tracks long, is as beautiful, bleak and intimate as anything 2008 is likely to throw up.

Join With Us's classic radio pop unveils a band so accomplished, so guilelessly in love with the joy of a good melody, that they now sound like no one but themselves.

BSP have every right to feel content. After all, the almost men of sylvan, jagged rock, the pride of Britain's bookish, bird-watching bohemia, have made an album that's deserving of their swagger. Do you like rock music? If not, here's the perfect place to start.

Perhaps Made in the Dark's greatest achievement is to keep back a bit of mystery for itself above and beyond the enveloping sense of destiny fulfilled.

KD's first album of new material in eight years doesn't disappoint.

Jackson is back with his old producer JP Plunier and 'Hope' even has a mellow ska refrain. Johnson's vocals--imagine a Noughties take on Paul Simon and Cat Stevens--are utterly addictive, but this time there's a grown-up vibe to the trippy prose.

Though rather generic--grainy emoting; overwrought lyrics; crisp guitar-driven pop--at least Mould can claim that he virtually invented this stuff.

The converted will no doubt welcome their current interest in Middle Eastern superstition, plus intricate tunes such as 'The Second Coming'. Outsiders, however, may remain sceptical.

At less than 40 minutes long, Vampire Weekend sounds paradoxically both brimming with confidence and something put down as a marker for the future.

Versatile but erratic, then, though Joe's emotional honesty is never in doubt.

He performs everything (from drum'n'bass to hip hop beats) on his guitar, leading him to be dubbed a 'one-man Timbaland band'. A true percussive original.

They fail to develop their retro psychedelia influences, and use fairground organs and cutesy strings as lazy shorthand for dreamy nostalgia. The result is a pleasant record that's lacking in personality.

Nat Bed's second has nothing as catchy as 'Unwritten', the tunes are on the airy-fairy side of breezy, and the lyrics on the naff side of plain. But 'Smell the Roses' is a turbulent little pop symphony, and 'When You Know You Know' is sinuous soul that speaks well of her extended sojourn in LA studios.

When they rock out they are truly bruising, but, happily, their music is now underpinned with a new-found serenity.

Minor mis-steps are a fair trade-off for an album that doesn't simply doff its cap in tribute.

Ultimately, there is something refreshing about MGMT's lack of cynicism and the winning way in which they fuse hippy and punk ideals.

Costa's sophomore album is every bit as anaemic as the Johnson connection suggests.

A lovely addition to the noisy canon and a barbed new year tonic.

Consistently framed around a beat, a piano and her voice, her plucky and at times eccentric songs generally stick to themes of female neurosis, emotional fragility and, occasionally, what she likes to eat on her toast.

Unquestionably, it would have been better still had the songs been layered with a little less sugar.

Between the odd pretty guitar motif ('She's Too Much') and marching drum roll ('The Valley') the pile-driving beatwork and rapping cameos only highlight the fact that the weakest element here is Duran themselves.

A brave, if samey, affair, System is undoubtedly sincere.

For the most part, the lyrics are so reliant on stock phrases - 'feel your touch', 'hold me', 'shoulda known', etc--that you could read anything you like into them without them carrying any personal feeling at all. If you can listen to that fluting, fierce, clear, dirty, magnificent voice while simultaneously shutting out the banality of what it's expressing, you'll have hours of pleasure from this gorgeously melodic, curiously old-fashioned album.

For all American Gangster's conceptual flair, the purest joy comes from 'Success', a tune which could have slotted into any Jay-Z album.

Whether live or unplugged, though, the effect is much the same: disbelief that one band can convey this much emotion when, for all the unearthly beauty of the music, the lyrics amount to little more than gibberish.

Untrue crackles with high-tension, excitement and yearning.

Britney has delivered the best album of her career, raising the bar for modern pop music with an incendiary mix of Timbaland's 'Shock Value' and her own back catalogue.

As wonderful as it is unexpected, Dirt Farmer is a strong candidate for comeback of the year.

Teenager is as flat as the Mojave Desert, and, like a fusty pastel sweater bought as a birthday present, it's cosy yet bland.

It's also about love, loss, the British urban landscape, laughing at yourself, great guitars, exciting chord changes, tight rhythms, the Stones-Who-Kinks-(Small) Faces-Clash-Jam-Smiths-Happy Mondays-Stone Roses-Oasis-Blur history of Britrock, rich, simple production, songs with layers, a really good band and a singer who has relocated his voice.

Backed with the gusto of big horns, Young's guitar is once again a thing of wonder on this track, now slashing and burning, now playing transcendent dance riffs.

Tankian has always got one more surprise up his sleeve. But his scatter-shot approach does not detract from the acuity of his polemical insights

This kind of electro-glam was acceptable in the Eighties, and Hourglass proves that it still is.

Raising Sand is an album of deep, dark Americana, a scintillatingly stitched patchwork of country, R'n'B and singer-songwriters that represents what Plant describes as "the America I have always loved musically."

A brave new direction it isn't.

Overpowered's bubbling, sensual, and soulful glitterball gems effortlessly tap into the perennial glory of feeling lost and lonely at the disco at the end of the world.

The quality veers wildly, but every so often he hits upon a great song. 'Just As You Are' in particular sets the smoothest of melodies and a haunting cornet solo from Wyatt against the most world-weary of lyrics.

It's been four long years since the Banshees' last live release. But now we have a CD of brand new material from the high priestess of punk herself. And she doesn't disappoint.

Magic is a record aimed squarely at radio, stadiums, open car windows and the solar plexus of guys who don't notice passing musical fashion. Magic sounds big. And it sounds great.

Check out the dissonant 'Womankind' ("Wish I had a lover who could turn this squalor into wine"), while the show stopper is 'Sing'--a collaboration with 23 female superstars that is incandescent.

At times it feels like someone's watered down the acid Kool-Aid, but with shining technicolour romps such as 'Bullets,' the sun is an optional extra this summer.

Nothing Harvey has done in the past, however, can prepare you for her eighth album, White Chalk, whose cover is as singular as the tunes therein.

Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace sticks to what it's good at: undemanding arena rock that's just--just--leftfield enough not to jar alongside Grohl's previous incarnation.

'My Dearest Friend' ("I am going to die of loneliness I know / I am going to die of loneliness for sure") is among the most tender tunes that Banhart has produced.

This album proves that when Earle reconnects to the sheer joy of making music the results can be powerful.

Best is the title track, a roll call of compassion that embraces the darkness of 'Frankenstein technologies' and the hope of "a safe place for kids to play/ bombs exploding half a mile away." Both sombre and defiant, it's Mitchell at her finest.

While his lyrics sometimes verge on the platitudinous, musically, this is his most arresting solo set, thanks in no small part to the John Barry-esque strings.

Once Upon a Time in the West is a well-written, well-recorded, mainstream rock record.

Drastic Fantastic feels neither brave nor raw; Steve Osborne, working with Tunstall for the second time, has produced an album of flawless pop hits.

But snobbery apart, this is a terrific album.

A unique combination of masculinity and creativity, Let's Stay Friends is proof that few bands rock quite like this.

As its title implies, though, Strawberry Jam is strange: luxurious and fractious, wistful and atonal.

The best track on this typically polished but ultimately quite disturbing album (the back-to-basics self-examination of 'Everything I Am') is a brave attempt to confront such uncertainties head on.