Adding a plaintive beauty and combining it with coke-ravaged, mid-Seventies, Spector-ish AOR and some playful studio trickery, the album is a raw, introspective and melancholic delight.

Rockferry is a fantastic album of burning blue soul.

It remains extraordinary this ability to jump from Tom Lehrer to early Tom Waits.

It's a way more focused album than usual.

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.

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

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

London Zoo provides the perfect showcase for its colourful menagerie of MCs and singers. And the Bug's no-nonsense clank and grind production fosters a rare intensity of focus on this album's higher purpose, which is to take the eloquence of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Michael Smith's Eighties dub-poetry, and blast it into digital hyperspace.

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

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

It really shouldn't hang together but somehow does, and effortlessly so, without ever seeming gimmicky.

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.

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.

Med sud I eyrum ... is a beautiful collection that blows Sigur Rós beyond the place they come from, geographically and musically.

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.

Hell Hath No Fury is as lyrically kaleidoscopic as it is conceptually monochrome. Track after track flays the central theme, but with such consistently inventive language it seems almost churlish to dwell on its moral bankruptcy.

What lends Proof of Youth a whiff of genius is its ability to evoke exuberant innocence without making your teeth ache.

Liars might have moved a little more towards the mainstream, but they're still a long, long way from easy listening.

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.

Like Animal Collective, Lennox pulls off the trick of being simultaneously poppy and abstract, winsome and deranging.

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

This Is Alphabeat feels like the story of a band having embarked on an ambitious experiment in classic pop, having pulled it off, and having turned in something of a modern pop masterpiece to boot.

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

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

It's an effortless success, from the opener, Ruby, big on melody and plaintive harmonies, to the dream-like Bells of Harlem, moving river-slow to a brushed snare and ending this quite terrific record with a meandering coda of wistful strings.

It adds up to a light-hearted, sometimes poignant elegy for the American working man and his music.

The dreamy 'Cold Desert' is the perfect maudlin end to this short, sharp, 42-minute, no-filler album, revelling in every miserable blues-rocker cliché as Matthew's guitar goes all shoegazey and then briefly threatens to turn the whole thing into a 'Purple Rain' wig-out.

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