Content is their best record since the late-Seventies, packed with savagely danceable riffs and rousingly incisive lyrics about consumerism, domestic fragmentation and political resistance.

Atkins makes the material sound genuine, largely because it is perfect for her. Where previously her slight, observational songs seemed barely able to carry her powerful voice, the emotional and musical heft of these styles enables her to really spread her vocal wings.

For all its despair at the cost of war, this is not a protest record, rather a consideration of our place in the greater scheme of things.

Their last album, The Seldom Seen Kid, managed the rare feat of winning the Mercury prize and huge public affection. So how do Elbow follow it? With continued greatness and without fuss.

This album is a musical gumbo: a rich, surprising and ultimately satisfying stew of Simon's folk, rock and pop influences from all over the world.

This isn't mere cleverness, it's instinctive musicality, buoyed up by three other fine players.

This fabulous box-set finally unites the trilogy. Tragic, poignant, yet uplifting, Newbury's tough-guy singing will often inexorably reduce the listener to tears.

There cannot be another musical duet around at the moment who are able to make two acoustic guitars and two voices produce a sound that is so subtle and yet powerful.

Though consistently ground-breaking and lyrically challenging, Ritual Union never feels like hard work.

Perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of this funny, hard-hitting, thrilling album is that it actually sounds like a coherent and purposeful piece of work, a statement of what hip hop can mean, and where it can go.

Despite the subject matter, this is an invigorating celebration of the joys of great songwriting and proof of the power of one man and his piano.

The song kick-starts the album's powerful sense of forward motion, of a woman struggling to wrestle free from expectations, relationships and religious convention.

Hynes's voice is refined into an emotive croon. Inventive pop from a bright indie talent.

Her approach is confident and challenging, but not arch – several direct, haunting love songs are as delicate and affecting as any Adele tear-jerker.

The sound of the album is deliberately vibrant and varied.

It's an album undiminished by time, that can still make me want to throw myself around an imaginary mosh pit or curl up in a fetal ball.

Underneath the almost soporifically smooth old-soul and country polish, Adams's ear for a delicate melody and feel for the shadowy nuances of emotion give this latest chapter beautiful depth.

From the clarion call of The Hosting Of The Shee to the haunting The Faery's Last Song, the result is a fabulous feast of words and music.

It's surprisingly accessible, hypnotic and beautiful if you give it time and concentration.

Does it succeed in his aim? Triumphantly. With bells on. Tinker bells, even.

The wild, rattling bawlers are each distinctively turbocharged with reckless and richly textured energy, while the ballads run poignantly on their rims, leaking emotion.

High Flying Birds is the best collection of Gallagher tunes since his Morning Glory days.

Bush is still making music that intrudes and abducts.

Prine is extraordinary, one of the most eloquent artists of modern times and seeing where it all started, in this super CD, really is something very special.

It is, in short, and as we might have expected, a work of genius.

This is a record Guy Clark can surely be proud to have as a tribute.

Beautifully nuanced collage of soulfully rocking flavours.

An extraordinary debut from a new British-based band who combine a gipsy swagger with tremulous sensitivity and gothic rock drama.

Mixing up elements of rock, pop, blues, jazz, soul and funk, each song finds its way into a supple groove and just bounces around there as though Amadou's guitar strings and Mariam's vocal chords were made of musical elastic.

From its raucous, raw-edged opening salvo to the softer, weirder, ruminative closing tracks, Blunderbuss crackles with life and energy, hauling roots rock out of the dusty museum and into the dazzling light of the modern day.

It is not reinventing the pop wheel but everything is done with an appealing combination of taste and passion.

What feels right (or at least absolutely right now) about Metric is the perfect balance, every element in its place and in service of a set of sinuous, hook-laden, elegantly crafted pop songs.

Channel Orange is as dazzling as it is baffling, rarely staying still long enough to get a grip on.

On a production level, this album is cutting-edge, on a lyrical level it is brutally brilliant. It will melt your ears and your heart.

Hegarty has mastered the art of turning performance into a kind of ritual ceremony and the magic of these symphonic concert recordings blows their previously released versions out of the water.

Scrub away reputations and this album is so much stronger than the latter-day works of many of Fay's contemporaries.

This anthology provides a marvellous opportunity to revisit Mitchell in her glorious prime. Indispensable.

It is an enormous pleasure to report that the new David Bowie album is an absolute wonder: urgent, sharp-edged, bold, beautiful and baffling, an intellectually stimulating, emotionally charged, musically jagged, electric bolt through his own mythos and the mixed-up, celebrity-obsessed, war-torn world of the 21st century.

Grant brilliantly skewers his own depression, addiction, bitchiness and heartbreak throughout a record which finds him mixing his penchant for corduroy, laid-back melodies with a new, rawly exposed synth-pop that feels like it's seeped up from an underground carpark, all hard concrete and cold, flickering fluorescents.

Bloodsports is bleeding good.

Their return should be heralded from on high, because it is the boldest, smartest, most colourful and purely pleasurable dance album of this decade.

Once I Was An Eagle is a masterpiece, and, at 23, she’s still only getting started.

It's simply a great album from start to finish - wonderful tunes, superb musicianship, star guests and a unity of purpose about delivering a fitting tribute to the music he loves that raises this album to such a high level.