Even if it's a joke, it's a joke you don't wanna hear.

There are times in this 100-plus minutes of a concert recording duplicated over two CDs and one DVD where you want to jog Mehldau's elbow, but overall it's a triumph of imagination and structure.

Not really "folk" at all but a programme of music for solo guitar (and occasional clarinet) drawing on three centuries of complex harmony; or at least the harmony which appeals to the gruff old Pentangle picker.

Commendably, the Bury band's fifth album doesn't see them chasing the mainstream or pandering to the ear of the daytime radio dilettante.

R.E.M's 15th album could trade places with almost any of the previous 14.

Just simple, old-fashioned talent and charm.

In a crowd of loudish country and R&B guitars he tells brief stories of everyday lives with a correspondingly everyday voice, but with a kind of unslung abandonment that goes rather well with the guitars. It's very good.

For anyone who lived through grunge, this is mere nostalgia. Anyone who didn't is advised to go straight to the source.

Set your sights high, by all means, but when each track sounds like an attempt to emulate a specific great (Bruce, Bob, Leonard, the Band etc) the confused listener can't help but be left thinking "Will the real Low Anthem please stand up?"

The songs are mostly shaped in her traditional chord-to-chord method, their melodies looping behind the tempo of the guitars and, for once, in a spirit of uplift.

Oasis minus the organ-grinder needn't be an entirely horrific prospect.

It's touching, witty, and like everything else the Bostonian ever does, brilliant.

It's still a cut above most epic global-influenced rock.

Bradley, a 62-year-old ex-plumber and James Brown impersonator, has a raspy, infinitely pained voice but there doesn't appear to be any real interaction between him and the band.

Pervaded by children's laughter, this is a lovely departure from the Mambazo norm, as befits the quest it reflects.

While Wagner's voice is not always up to it, Tidwell's authentic country pipes are the real revelation here.

It's a little too polished for the Oh Brother... crowd, but fans of Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss should take note.

There is in these performances a slightly mannered theatricalism which you will need to reconcile with any desire you may harbour for either simple affect or no affect at all.

The King Of Limbs, named after a famous oak in the Savernake forest near the studio where In Rainbows was made, is good but not great.

This is meditative, spacious, profoundly dark music, evidently haunted by Miles Davis's early-1970s excursions into free electronica, as well as the wolves of the Nordic imagination.

It's coated in a layer of pseudo-authenticity, but ultimately it's a record which aims for Bo Diddley or Johnny Cash and merely attains Dire Straits.

It borders on the twee. That it doesn't cross the frontier is the reason this is worth your attention.

Desperately, painfully arty but worthy of your recollection.

Subjects resulting from such reveries include imperialism, the environment and the more familiar home turf of love and longing. Nobody does it better.

Conor Oberst has always been an artist to inspire, irritate and frustrate, and on what he says will be the final BE album he does these things in equal measure.

The sound is a return to the Whigs' finest and the mood is whiskey, cigarettes and damnation.

It's an album about what war does to the aggressor, as much as what it does to the vanquished victim.

Parker's music is approached from a post-Coltrane, post-free jazz aesthetic, with the rhythmic edginess of bebop elided into an all-the-time-in-the-world fluidity. A masterpiece.