Closer to the big production of Have You Fed the Fish? than 2004's more acoustic-led One Plus One is One, it's also the most obvious manifestation of his longstanding Springsteen obsession.

Bleak and evocative.

A weary, beautifully realised work.

Merritt's lyrical dark wit chimes nicely with the books' macabre surrealism.

So here they are, doing again what they've done before: mostly slow and sombre songs, sometimes delivered with a wary hesitancy that can be endearing but is occasionally frustrating.

Crucially, Sam's Town sounds like a complete collection, with a far better strike rate than its predecessor.

It's brainy and brawny: Springsteen and E Street Band comparisions valid.

The Dears sound like a band who have finessed their vision and are ready, finally, to take on the world.

Ta-Dah is easy to like but hard to love.

The band's favouring of big brass accompaniments and enthusiastic vocals gives this album momentum, but it's their preference for substance over style that ensures Tired... puts their modish peers to shame.

Shadow's head scratching choice of singers detract from the potency of his fluid beats.

If the naivity and high-pitched voice don't grate, chances are the shifting soundscapes will still leave you charmed.

Unlike the calculated, humourless thump of Razorlight, this is stirring, ecstatic and - just sometimes - brilliantly OTT stuff.

The Letting Go's marvellously grandiose taster single, 'Cursed Sleep', suggested that this would be the album to finally reward our patience. And so it is, though not always in the way that might have been expected.

In a musical climate awash with just-above-average singer-songwriters, Elton is still among the brightest exponents of what can be done when you combine piano, voice, melody and heart.

His orchestral Kanye-meets-Nas muse lacks originality.

A warmer, more linear record than their debut... Spellbinding, frustrating, wonderful.

This early-Roxy-Music-meets-late Led-Zep-style third studio album finds the band stepping back from total impenetrability with a pithy, eight-song, 76-minute set, guaranteed to restore the faith of those whose confidence in this grand enterprise was waning.

Crazy Itch Radio cements Basement Jaxx reputation as Britain's gold-standard dance duo.

A truly original, innovative, heavy-as-hell, interesting heavy metal record that you can listen to more than twice without wanting to smash it to a million pieces with an axe.

It's still a career high, but B'Day could have been released at any point in the last three-and-a-half years and, in a year which has given us tracks like Justin Timberlake's 'SexyBack', it already sounds stale.

Now, more than at any time since his first few folk albums, he sounds like a traditionalist. He's walking down that same road that Sonny and Cisco and Leadbelly walked down.

Razorlight have dropped the urgency and brashness of indie-disco floor-fillers like 'Rip it Up' and traded it for the boldness of tracks such as 'Somewhere Else'. It isn't easy to graduate from teenage bedrooms to coffee-table status without compromising on credibility, but the quartet have managed it somehow.

The Future Crayon isn't the 'new Broadcast album', but it might actually be their best album.

Damaged is a transcendent record - poetic, mysterious, witty, wise and at times so musically grand that it changes the colour of a room and the weight of the air.

Like a silly holiday cocktail with umbrellas and sparklers, there is much to enjoy about Paris Hilton, albeit for one mad Med fortnight only.

The album occasionally misfires... but there's still sass and creativity here.

The first disc contains all the major American radio hits, but at no small price. It's all craft and very little heart. Disc two, then, comes as welcome respite.

Barat does a great job of revitalising the ramshackle thrills that the Libertines did all too briefly so well.

Their most rigorously conceived and focused [album] for years.

Yell Fire! offers little bar platitudes over a bed of reggae-lite and tepid bluezak.

It's the kind of rollicking, party-rockin' fandango which, genuinely, nobody has the spirit or wit to put together these days.

All we need to know is, he was a master and this is his masterwork.

[It has] an unexpected depth, unity and resonance.

It's often quite wonderful, occasionally pretty woeful, but endearingly frantic and chaotic.

Entertaining and rabble-rousing, daft and deadly serious, it's a fantastic record, with almost limitless appeal.

You can't help but wonder what the results might be if she turned her lyrical flair to some subject other than doing the nasty.

All the songs here are fully realised and often the equal of those on their parent album.

Difficult, certainly, but not without its charms.

Here lie gorgeous tunes that are lithe enough to cope with the little bursts of sonic madness that flit around like overproduced Eighties butterflies.

Virtually every song sounds like a leave-taking, though the overall mood is reflective and restrained, in places almost easy-going.

This album's every percussive aspect has been honed to impart the maximum amount of pleasure.

The Pet Shop Boys' best album in over a decade, sitting neatly between their previous career highpoints of Very and Behaviour.

Lyrically absurd, musically turbo-fuelled.

Surprisingly, the album's blend of Mitteleuropean melody and American eccentricity is diverting enough to overcome any misgivings.

There's more fear and loathing on Ben Drew's first album than in a year's worth of Daily Mail headlines.

Fast Man/Raider Man is sluggish country rock.

This is glorious, 21st-century Technicolor po.

When they're not apeing War-era U2 ('Crystal Ball') they're apeing Achtung Baby-era U2 ('Is It Any Wonder?'). Otherwise they plod along, piano clip-clopping under all the electronic fuss, in thrall to their own pseudo-profundity.

Inspirational stuff.

They are very good at making sleepy, hapless trip-pop sprayed with whimsy.

Largely extraordinary... They write ornate and soaring conversational love songs, full of heart, bittersweet observation and unashamed street-level Englishness.

The end result sounds much like the Red Hot Chili Peppers produced by Massive Attack.

Despite its complexity, every twist and turn of The Drift is absolutely compelling.

It's Never Been Like That reunites the quartet with the kind of jubilant, foot-pumping power-pop that, at best, is informed by the brevity of new wave and the breeziness particular to pre-punk West Coast rock.

Eschewing the Incredible String Band nostalgia of Espers et al for a more complex hybrid somewhere between the Kinks at their most relaxed and the Band at their most committed, Vetiver have made a record that's as summery as a field full of butterflies.

[A] vital, dolorous treasure.

As with the conceptual aspect, knowing the peculiar provenance of the noises on The Rose Has Teeth is actually supplemental to one's enjoyment of this suite... which stands alone as an enthralling aural experience.

There's hardly any doodling or misfiring to undermine the sheer vastness of Stadium Arcadium.

It's a bravura performance on both men's part.... A thrilling return to form.

Big, bold, cleverly-executed, thoroughly hollow stuff.

The tumescent, endlessly inventive songs are seldom less than exquisitely performed.

Predictably, it's not among the quintet's finest hours.

Lovely.

Where fellow Aussie pasticheurs the Vines get more depressing the more they manage to sound like Nirvana, listening to Wolfmother's hilarious attempt to board the long-departed cock-rock bandwagon - singing 'She's a woman, you know what I mean!' as if they have never seen a woman, let alone touched one - is actually quite fun.

Although they are more focused on Ten Silver Drops, they also sound more reined-in and less idiosyncratic.

The Hardest Way... is twice as good as any album about the price of celebrity has a right to be.

The problem is that these songs are mostly too corny to have much drama restored to them. This is not folk music as mystery or romance or danger but as communal singalong.

It proves a warm, agreeable affair, though likely to disappoint anyone expecting creative sparks.

A brilliant collection of spanking, multi-layered tunes.

There is a new-found ferocity at play.

Lunatico won't alienate fans by having evolved too fast, nor disappoint by excessively rehashing old themes.

A wonderful record that is flawed - that'll be those flatulent synths again - but by design.

An unexpected winner.

Thankfully, Bones is neither a heated-up knock-off of Fever To Tell nor a fan-alienating abandonment of their signature sound. It is instead, a supremely confident 12-song cut that has a remarkable weightiness.

Ghostface is in typically brutal form.

An album so overblown yet inspiration-free as to be worthy of national shame.

While Gilmour is in good voice, the unvarying pace is ultimately grating.

So many of these 11 songs are variations on the title track's closing line ('Look at that old photograph, is that really you?') that this sentimental journey becomes one of just a few too many miles.