A masterly work.

Female duo Melissa Livaudais and Busy Gangnes make stark, witchy electronica that's subtle and exciting, their mantra-like voices drawing you in like a sinister nursery rhyme, with melodies breaking through their oblique, half-muttered lyrics like beams of winter sunlight.

While the dewy-eyed mood of his last album, "Woke on a Whaleheart," suggested Callahan's romantic entanglement with Joanna Newsom had turned his brain to mush, this miraculous return to form finds the artist formerly known as Smog losing his girl, but rediscovering his mojo.

A cosmic, contemporary Human League.

Khan is a fantastic package and a good, if not as maverick as some believe, songwriter. In a year when no one wants to sing about making a cup of tea, she's just the ticket.

Previous albums never quite lived up to the band's facility for knockout singles, but this one holds the attention.

Here the folk legend rings in the new with songs from the old, sensitively produced by Joe Henry.

Their third album offers an advance on the ecstatic dance punk of 2003 debut "Fever to Tell" and beefy rock of 2006's "Gold Lion," boldly pushing synths centre stage while sacrificing none of their vitality.

Although it's as uncentred as 2004's "Uh Huh Her," this album broadcasts confidence rather than confusion.

Standards given a sensual bossa makeover

The great thing about this follow-up is the way it builds on that foundation without lapsing into self-consciousness.

This muscular follow-up ratchets up the internal tension until his exuberant toy-town techno becomes a shot of pure musical adrenalin.

This song cycle concerning Margaret, her swain William and forest queens is as dazzling as it is beautiful.

If this all sounds a bit heavy going, Crack the Skye offers plenty of simple pleasures as Mastodon heap on the musical melodrama, with a more-is-more approach to fretwork that's bound to see them liven up moshpits when they support Metallica this summer.

Born Like This finds DOOM back to his scalpel-tongued, scatter-mouthed best.

Beware is one of the more playful entries in the Bonnie "Prince" Billy canon. It's also one of his fullest sounding records.

There's the odd jarring note but Bare Bones remains a work of high class, deep feeling and, let's not forget, magical singing.

Terius "The Dream" Nash is the song-writer behind Rihanna's Umbrella and other more intriguing than average R&B hits. His second album continues the theme, with assistance from Kanye West.

With bands like Vampire Weekend so keen on appropriating the polyrhythmic thunder of their African peers, it's only fitting that these childhood friends should often sound like art rock sensations from Brooklyn.

It starts out blustery and familiar, before gradually revealing an unexpected and almost lovable sense of vulnerability.

Anyone familiar with Boden's usual extrovert singing will be amazed by his restraint and, despite outbursts of percussive grunge, the arrangements are primarily gentle and acoustic.

With three full decades of sardonic wordplay behind him, these unusually expansive musical settings inspire the mordant West Midlander to some of his freshest and most subtly intoxicating work to date.

By the time he closes with fittingly open-ended encores of 'Listen to the Lion' and 'Summertime in England'--neither of which is on Astral Weeks--he is truly gone. And in a triumph as unlikely as it is complete, Astral Weeks is reborn.

Mozzer's ninth solo album is still a good solid guitar-rock record, even though it's his worst since 1997's career nadir, "Maladjusted."

They appear to have set out to make the world's trendiest record, and succeeded. The tracklist on their album of terrific party songs commands a kind of double double-take.

The banjos and root-tootin' bass might seem overly reverential but there's something comforting in her landscapes of small-town America.

This previously unreleased mini-album (recorded in late 1974) turns out to be a marvellously invigorating blast of proto-punk intensity.

It's Not Me, It's You is a wonderful record, and, better than that, a pop album brave enough to have a go at defining the times.