Either way, this latest effort is set to be interpreted more ways than the Qur'an and see him sat atop an almighty fence pushing anyone who hears it either side with reckless glee.

This is pure non-homogenised, heart-on-sleeve, downright meaningful music, the sort of thing The Wombats cry themselves to sleep over on a nightly basis. For that alone it’s worth a tenner of anybody’s money.

His latest album, Hold Time, is as finely wrought and thoroughly affecting an indie effort as 2009 is likely to see.

The disc ultimately hangs together on mood; Price unfailingly accentuates the bright, shiny, and happy. This not only makes good pop sense, it provides an effective counterbalance to Flowers and his achy-breaky vocals.

Q-Tip's flow on his new disc remains mellow, freewheeling, and vaguely inspirational. But it doesn't feel relevant.

Though the album can’t really stand with the Pretenders first three, it approximates them pretty well, like a faux vintage T-shirt that’s faded just right.

There are no state-of-the-art flourishes (like Kanye West’s sped-up soul samples); he furnishes most of his own hooks, without the assistance of Auto-Tune, the now ubiquitous vocal effect favored by rappers who can’t really sing (Devin sings, and quite nicely too); and the only big-name rapper he invites is Snoop Dogg, with whom he shares some genuine stoner chemistry. Track after track (there are only twelve, and mercifully no skits), the beats land just so. And nowhere is he more confident than in his rhymes.

The whole record is about the band skillfully weaving in and out of dramatically different textures and arrangements; each song plays with several musical ideas, not just one or two.

It rewards that attention with small pleasures: guitar and organ playing off each other’s reverb, bass and drum dancing in and out of step, horns and vocals collapsing into a single bellow. In essence, it offers that luxuriant buzz that made rock and roll one of the great narcotics of the last half-century.

When in doubt, crank the amps. This is the philosophy behind R.E.M.’s new album, Accelerate, their best, and certainly their loudest, in years.

Badu has rejected the role of soul princess and chosen instead to embrace a raw, unhinged spirituality that separates her from the pack.

If you give it the chance, though--and if you’re not already a member of the tribe, it takes perseverance--Bedlam sinks its fangs into you.

Put the last eight years of Williamsburg micro-genres in a blender— all that electroclash, disco rock, retro glam, and psych-folk—and you’ve got a sense of the charming mess that is this Connecticut-via-Brooklyn duo’s debut.

Dirt Farmer is an iconic album, this year’s "Time Out of Mind" or "Freedom." Just give him a Grammy.

It’s their most accessible and coherent to date.

Packaged in big, bright doses of piano-pop, her expressions of puppy love are as irresistible as puppies themselves.

Their debut album, released in the U.S. this week, proves that the Brighton lasses aren't only well constructed, but sharp and tough all on their own.

Though his voice is strong and sincere throughout the album, most of the material has a certain karaoke-like vibe.

Although it lifts off with a flawless indie-pop opener and sounds somehow lively even at its most melancholy, the lovely new Weakerthans album disc is all about the art of settling in and telling a good, unhurried story.

Notice it now, or wait until people start hailing it as a lost classic in a decade's time.

Animal Collective has evolved; its songs continue to meander and digress, but the mania seems driven by a greater sense of purpose.

Per Vulture, the Curtis-shaming Graduation "has better songs waiting in the wings. Bonus: No Jamie Foxx!"

The latest electro-folk offering from these Canadian twins is somehow cuter, catchier, and more heartache-y than their last disc.

Underneath all of those lush, gorgeous strings, [producer] Hogarth then layered the electronic beats, delays, fades, and distortions that lend the album its freshness and vitality.

Each and every hand clap and piano chord on their foot-stomping, flawless new album, now streaming on their label's Website, is obsessively placed.

Like The OC, Easy Tiger manages to be pleasurable without ever being interesting.

Sky Blue Sky shows his restlessness as an artist, his need to keep moving - not always forward, but never merely standing still, and certainly not dipping into the back catalogue for an idea or two.

There is nothing tentative or unpolished about any of these songs.

What really makes Ghosthorse and Stillborn worthy of a jump for joy is CocoRosie’s transformation from self-conscious oddity into an actual songwriting force.

It is a tutorial in finely textured songwriting.

If he hasn’t yet invented a persona intriguing enough to live up to his music, give him credit for being one of the few white men still brave enough to make black music.

Entertaining and surprisingly consistent.

A deeply satisfying work of storytelling through pop.... What Are You On? is emotionally complex in a way that few of the more prosperous songwriters of Cornog’s generation are capable of producing at this point in their careers.

The first half, in particular, has irresistible momentum... The second half drags a little, and you wish Madonna would strip the synths back to work a bass line every now and then.

Too much of Aerial fades into a soft-focus background of soothing synthesizers, murmuring bass, and twittering birdsong.

Broken Social Scene has pulled off the rare feat of making a heavily produced record sound instinctive and spontaneous.

The best record of his career, a collision of the idiosyncratic charms of Portastatic with the exuberant rock power of Superchunk.

Her songs still revolve mostly around the adolescent hell of looking right and pleasing jerky guys, a shtick that would be old if Hatfield, well into her thirties, didn’t genuinely sound as if she were still living through it.

Marrying his sturdy rock-guitar talents to lively beats, he’s found a comfort zone.

It is a noble effort, modeled on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, but the results are underwhelming.

Your level of interest in their music probably correlates with your willingness to be bored.

The songs, which have the choppy angles and elegant dissonance of Pavement’s, are painstakingly layered with keyboards and all manner of funky blurps and beeps. It all sounds very labor-intensive—and pretty smart, too.

Many of these songs are thin schematics for “perfect” pop songs. They’re impressive in their commitment to formula--deploying catchy, whiny hooks, taut structure, loud-soft interplay, and well-timed guitar peals. Yet for all their nakedness, they offer little in the way of revelation.

Stands somewhere between Nebraska and Joad in terms of impact and quality.... But this album doesn’t merely find the middle ground between those two earlier releases: Its best songs break new ground for Springsteen.

Beck integrates his personae into a fairly seamless whole, and his knack for synthesizing disparate musical elements (hip-hop, robot funk, blues, country, jazz, garage rock, etc.) extends beyond samples and individual tracks. The songs migrate smoothly from one to the next; there aren’t any throwaway numbers to sabotage the album’s momentum; the whole thing coheres.

The Massacre is as frustratingly uneven as Get Rich or Die Tryin’, but it’s longer and messier.

While Aha Shake Heartbreak showcases four feckless stoners speaking in their own shop-class patois, it also captures them playing alarmingly sophisticated pop.

The songs, engaging as they are, sound cursory, as though Lee wrote them while riding the bus on his way to the studio, staring at his watch and an empty notebook.

A profoundly emotional, uncynical brand of songwriting that showcases Antony’s obsession with nature.

Manages, despite an excess of throwaway material, to be an appropriately eccentric testament to Cobain’s talent.

Despite its faults--and there are many--Ray Ray is a startlingly inventive record.

It’s a lot less monotone than its predecessor.

[It] doesn’t help in pinpointing the moment Costello veered into self-parody, but it does catalogue nearly everything that’s become impossible to take about him.

On Showtime, Dizzee doesn’t give up his sonic adventurousness, but he is a lot more disciplined about it.

It’s merely another nice try, charmingly forgettable.

Especially when heard on headphones, Medulla is an overwhelming sonic bliss-out, Phil Spector’s wall of sound channeled through the voice box.

Cover albums tend to be self-indulgent stunts, but not for Dulli. She Loves You comes across as the most natural expression of him as an artist.

Bubblegum is a blues record, a powerfully original reinterpretation of the genre.

The band take their experimental ethos even further without sacrificing the emotional power of their debut.

Uh Huh Herb is a disappointment, the tepid, not-quite-there record that many artists seem to make after hitting a career peak.

Skinner’s finely honed sense of place still has a nearly hypnotic effect.

Quarry doesn’t have great songs, just not-so-clever quips.

A darkly compelling masterpiece that taps into the pitch-black id of Johnny Cash’s best records.

Musicology is a thrilling, electric statement by an artist who just might be building toward another creative peak.

Damita Jo, sadly, is an outdated product of the turn-of-the-millennium pop scene, in which female singers conflated sexual openness with empowerment.

Endlessly pleasing (or trying to please), Feels Like Home dilutes even Jones’s brand of comfort-food jazz, grinding it down to something like a chewy gob of baby food.

You can’t help but get lost in Minogue’s music.

The songwriting is scattershot... and the sound strains for punk-on-a-budget but is as three-chord conservative as other retro acts like Rancid and the Distillers.

A sprawling and undisciplined mess... but it’s fully attuned to what made West so compelling in the first place, namely chunks of samples that feel raw and convey an underdog sensibility.

The carefully constructed sonics, though beautiful, can be so snoozily contemplative.

While Tasty features predictable envy-inspiring flaunts of sex and cash, the album is good-hearted, too.

The note that truly dooms Diary is thematic, not musical. The disc collapses under the weight of one song about heartbreak after another.

Like the market-minded collaborations that run rampant on hip-hop records, Elliott’s range here feels like base-covering.

Once in a Lifetime shies away from the Talking Heads’ life force. It presents them as winking ironists, not the true black-music believers that they were.

Putting Naked together was likely satisfying for McCartney, but like a lot of inherently selfish artistic endeavors, it’s somewhat less rewarding for everyone else.

Pink pitches a brand of seriousness that is pure Lifetime-TV mawkishness.

The central flaw of Room on Fire is the lack of hooks.

Wainwright’s powers of observation recall both Morrissey and Cole Porter.

Unlike her recent work, Stumble Into Grace is made up solely of Harris’s work--love songs like “Can You Hear Me Now” that perfectly suit her voice, which is sweet and whispery yet never sentimental.

Speakerboxxx--by itself the album of the year--makes the failings of The Love Below all the more evident.

Clones testifies to how familiar (and hollow) the Neptunes’ studio tricks have become.

Everything Must Go is a profound disappointment.

Hail to the Thief is overloaded with miraculous sounds.

Utterly raw and rocking.

How the West Was Won proves that Led Zeppelin was nearly peerless in creating gigantic, thunderous rock.

The album feels like a romp, with Thompson performing everything from delicate waltzes to roadhouse rock.

When you’re treated to such a powerful front woman, it seems almost unfair to complain about the lack of sophisticated sonics.

It is stranger, thornier, and meaner than anything in the band’s past.

What gives A Little Deeper its heft, though, is Dynamite’s voice: She can hold a word so long it almost floats in the air, and she purposefully embellishes her girlish, almost kewpie-doll-like whine to deliver her most stinging rebukes.

Without question, 50 Cent has one of the most distinctive voices in hip-hop: He raps in a molasses-slow, beyond-laconic drawl, and chants in a singsongy patois reminiscent of dance-hall stars like Sean Paul. But there isn’t enough invention in the rhymes, and, worse, barely any humor.

Reed coaxes great performances out of a few unexpected collaborators--Ornette Coleman delivers frenetic sax playing on “Guilty,” and downtown singer Antony warbles in a truly otherworldly soprano on “The Bed”--but these players are crowded out by the album’s sprawling mediocrity.

Here, Nas is so fierce, so plainspoken, so lean with words, that he demolishes not just the oeuvre of our ruling rappers (yes, including Eminem's) and recalls the music's lyrical champs like Rakim, he even brings to mind hip-hop progenitors like Muhammad Ali in the "Rumble in the Jungle" era.

What's particularly, notably bad here is its production.

Strange and wonderful.

What a curse Jay-Z's ideas represent: Nearly everything about The Blueprint 2 sounds like a retread, including its title.

Charitable fans and critics will probably seize on the few sparks generated by 3D to eulogize TLC as vanguards. The truth -- that their riskier impulses were often tamped down by a conservative industry -- is somewhat more depressing.

Timberlake and the Neptunes work hard at creating memorable songs, an admirable undertaking given the pathetic state of songwriting in pop music. But little more is expressed in songs like "Señorita" and "Take It From Here" than flowery notions of romance or brusque come-ons.

American Supreme proves that Suicide can reach backward and still remain ahead of the pack.