Confrontational, clammy, brimming with confidence... ‘Royal Society’ is as majestic as its title implies.

We’re filled with consternation when we first give it a whirl.... Thankfully from [track 4] on in, it gets a damn sight better.

It’s stripped down, tough and raw, but a world away from any gangsta pose – this is more inward facing, an attempt to expand the horizons of hip-hop, striving for a new rap language, with a free flow sprawl of image and polemic.

An unfinished album, and also a beautifully accomplished one.

They’re waay better than The Coral, exhibiting none of the tedious, skunk-smoke wackiness that characterises their labelmates.

But the use of the twin-pronged vocal attack as an instrument in its own right is never relied upon to be the sole weapon in Blood Brothers' arsenal. Intelligence is mirrored in the deployment of the music behind it.

A worthy endeavour from one of the most important bands alive.

This is an album on which EVERYTHING ace you can think of in indie happens.

The key flaw with this album is that it doesn’t have any of the bangers that GC can do so well.

Of course, if you've never particularly liked rickety, no frills, folk albums complete with twanging country guitar solos, banjos, the odd duff note and gloriously lo-fi percussion, then 'Where The Humans Eat' really isn't the record for you.

R.E.M. still have the remarkable distinction of never once producing a bad album, but this is perhaps the biggest example yet of the group merely treading water, whereas once they majestically swam.

In ‘Real Gone’s fearsome complexity of rhythm, lyric and device, Tom Waits appropriates like a shoplifter without much time, and creates something entirely his own. A new music.

'Has Been' is just about as far as you could possibly get from your regular solo offering and as such arrives as one of the year's most strangely captivating albums.

From track five onwards, they rarely put a foot wrong.

'Pressure Chief' sees the California quartet merge their trademark post modern kitsch with something vaguely approaching proper singing and the results are, by and large, pretty favourable.

What need for artless posturing and sloganeering when you have music so powerful, so ugly, so revolting, so incredible?

'Young Prayer' is a piece of work that feels both mysterious and honest; a truly rare combination.

They no longer rely on dense production and atmospherics, because they don’t need to: ‘Antics’ is bare-boned and beautiful.

For anyone with even half a hankering for electronic heaven, this is non-stop introspective wonderland.

A collection of rehashed moments from his brilliant though patchy career, a sowed together patchwork of pastiche.

There are several duff tracks, certainly. And, sure, as a whole 'American Idiot' can easily be criticised for its simplistic, occasionally naïve sixth form lyrics, all round pomposity and general adherence to the group's tried and tested formula of punchy three-chord pogo-pop. But it's still a wonderfully entertaining, polemical punk rock record.

This is a record for the late night after a later one; the cauterised throat, the yellow of the reading lamp, and the restless shifts in twisted sheets.

This ain’t no classic.

A Victorian freak show with a cracking voice, but just a few stolen Prince and Stevie Wonder tunes, Har Mar Superstar seems to be humiliating himself and reaching for the lowest common denominator in search of lays and some fleeting personal success.

Bottom line: One dimensional ghetto fodder this is not.

The stuff of magic.

It's a clever, chic and defiantly underground record, alright, but it's guilty of trying too hard when clearly it doesn't need to.

Their zeal is such that, for the most part, we can overlook their failure to be flawless.