New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War is an insane, obscure and exciting record of the kind that very few artists have the guts or imagination to make anymore.

With Flock, their third album but only the second to get a British release, Ireland's Bell X1 have unearthed the missing musical link - and it's marvellous.

A whole album as hyperactive would be exhausting, of course, but unlike the majority of indie plodders, The Feeling have real range.

Little Death may well resemble stolen kisses behind the bike shed rather than an evening of prolonged love making with the object of your desire, but that is still preferable to a night in with just a box of Kleenex for company.

They muster compelling music that sounds like triumph in the face of adversity, building something beautiful out of the building blocks of sadness and despair.

Amid such hi-octane dancefloor tracks such as this, current single 'Ready For The Floor' is, in context, pedestrian--its uncomfortable resemblance to Russ Abbot's 'Atmosphere' becoming more apparent with every listen.

While 'Make It Go Away (Radiation Song)' lacks the subtle lyrical twist (and a decent tune) of some of the other moments on Detours, it is a sober counterpoint to the image of Crow as all hair, tan and teeth. It also contrasts with the album's stand-out, 'Love Is All There Is,' which brings us back to more familiar Crow country on an album of big themes and surprising depth.

At its heart there is a beautiful record in there for anyone with the time and patience to find it.

The viscous, darkly choppy, sexily fulsome and ferociously hard-driving blend of post-punk and country noir that distinguished their long-playing debut, "The Repulsion Box" is still evident, but it's matched with a bracing new breadth, dynamic diversity and myriad light/shade variations.

It's rather a genuinely exuberant, joyously infectious and sheerly celebratory affair, its tribal drums, parping keyboards and rippling, brassy guitars offset by sweet vocal harmonies and reverb-laden solos, with Koenig's witty and literate lyrics marking out their crucial difference.

Hey Venus! is conspicuously short and sweet, and as a result among the greatest things they've ever done.

If you're not a fan of their weighty retro riffs, Into The Future is not going to sway you; but those who loved their self-titled debut will thrill to the darker, more convincing sounds of former single 'Stormy High' with its Plantish wails and solid Sabbathy riffs.

Any decent covers album should reveal its songs, not dress them up - but by Marshall's standards, Jukebox is an overly polite and frustratingly removed listening experience.

It's that time of year when critics are desperate to anoint the first "great" record of the year. Distortion is too tricksy and knowing to be that, but it's a thoroughly entertaining also-ran nonetheless.

It's one of the most exciting debuts by a young female pop artist in ages. If occasionally it veers a wee bit too much towards the cutesy-kooky.

In short, it's the album everyone's been waiting for her to make.

Blige's eighth studio album [is a contender] for being the best of her career.

This is rap of mesmerising, addictive quality, written and delivered by a master in charge of every aspect of his craft.

The result is the best end-to-end Wu-Tang Clan album since their debut, 15 years ago.

Despite not being quite as smart as "Fishscale", The Big Doe Rehab certainly marks another reason (along with recent GZA shows and the release of "8 Diagrams") to suggest the Wu-Tang dynasty is going through something of a renaissance.

This is a record that will happen to you, and when it clicks, the realisation that As I Am is a genuine classic is overwhelming.

Despite its branding as work-out music, 45:33 feels more like an amazing club DJ set than something to quicken one's pace on the treadmill. [Review of UK release]

Hearing him coast is still better than listening to most rappers trying; but the Jay-Z of today sounds like someone for whom making music is an enjoyable hobby, not a burning need.

If Hvarf is a mixed bag of treats and curios, then Heim represents something rather more thrilling: the future (perhaps).

Smoke pulls off the neat trick of seeming weightless and disassociated but never slight, playful, yet neither inconsequential nor silly.

Untrue is a devastatingly accurate depiction of urban UK--plugging the listener into the matrix of some godforsaken south London satellite, with its identikit fast food joints, repellent inhabitants and anonymous decaying sprawl.

The trio can't sustain this energy and inventiveness over the entire album.

Yet cartoon and divorced from reality as it is, his vision is so vivid that it never fails to seduce and fill you with the uneasy sense that maybe, just maybe, somewhere his disturbing dimension of bums and misfits really does exist.