Straight out of Edmonton, Alberta, fast-talking MC Rollie Pemberton's impeccable second album confirms that the history of Canadian electro did not end with Neil Young's Trans.

They are very good at making sleepy, hapless trip-pop sprayed with whimsy.

Masters at building tension upon tension then gently letting it go, their cyclical instrumentals are both sorrowful and consoling.

The Letting Go's marvellously grandiose taster single, 'Cursed Sleep', suggested that this would be the album to finally reward our patience. And so it is, though not always in the way that might have been expected.

Anyone familiar with Boden's usual extrovert singing will be amazed by his restraint and, despite outbursts of percussive grunge, the arrangements are primarily gentle and acoustic.

Smith's trademark combination of breathy - almost whispered - vocals, deceptively resilient acoustic melodies, and sombrely introspective lyrics, is shown off to sufficiently good advantage here to make New Moon a worthy companion piece to 1995's Elliott Smith and 1997's Either/Or.

This kind of electro-glam was acceptable in the Eighties, and Hourglass proves that it still is.

Life in Cartoon Motion is so exuberant, so accomplished, so crazysexycool that it's all a little overwhelming.

The Dears sound like a band who have finessed their vision and are ready, finally, to take on the world.

Six years after his last album, England, Half English, Bragg has come up trumps: Mr Love & Justice, with his band the Blokes, is his best realised work musically for ages.

Beyonce's superstar status is not in danger, but she should hand her A&R man a copy of this album.

Stunning in places ('I'm Wild About You'), pedestrian in others, the song remains the same, which is achievement enough at Al's age.

Tired of her peculiar singer-songwriter pop being a fringe taste, the Russian-born New Yorker's gone for the commercial jugular, polishing her strangeness with help from ELO's Jeff Lynne among others.

They appear to have set out to make the world's trendiest record, and succeeded. The tracklist on their album of terrific party songs commands a kind of double double-take.

There's an intriguing synthetic wheeze lurking in the upper reaches of Jackson's vocal range. Those who feared this effect might pall over a whole album will find solace in the unexpected emotional intensity of her lower register.

Certainly Levi's mannered vocal style, with its brittle helium edge, requires a bit of commitment from the listener. Immerse yourself in Black Magick Party's world, though, and you will become hopelessly attached.

While not everything hits the mark... there's enough here at least to draw comparisons with the aforementioned Britpop mainstays and keep them among the forefront of 2007's elite.

Still challenging preconceptions (with son Sean and Cornelius joining the band), and tender with it, too. Easily the best LP to be released by a 76-year-old this month.

It offers a thrillingly accessible demonstration of hip-hop's limitless creative possibilities to those whose experience of the medium stretches no farther than the occasional random episode of "Run's House."

A brilliant collection of spanking, multi-layered tunes.

I wasn't sure whether to listen to the record or call Ghostbusters. But once I plumped for the former, I was somewhat shocked to discover a pop record, full of grooves, melodies and recognisable chorus type-affairs.

Where fellow Aussie pasticheurs the Vines get more depressing the more they manage to sound like Nirvana, listening to Wolfmother's hilarious attempt to board the long-departed cock-rock bandwagon - singing 'She's a woman, you know what I mean!' as if they have never seen a woman, let alone touched one - is actually quite fun.

Razorlight have dropped the urgency and brashness of indie-disco floor-fillers like 'Rip it Up' and traded it for the boldness of tracks such as 'Somewhere Else'. It isn't easy to graduate from teenage bedrooms to coffee-table status without compromising on credibility, but the quartet have managed it somehow.

She writes everything, and has a feel for timeless songwriting that means she can cover Eminem's 'Lose Yourself' live, and it works.

Jackson is back with his old producer JP Plunier and 'Hope' even has a mellow ska refrain. Johnson's vocals--imagine a Noughties take on Paul Simon and Cat Stevens--are utterly addictive, but this time there's a grown-up vibe to the trippy prose.

Consolers of the Lonely is heftier than its predecessor, both in its Led Zep-go-garage wig-outs and in its cosmic balladeering.

While the dewy-eyed mood of his last album, "Woke on a Whaleheart," suggested Callahan's romantic entanglement with Joanna Newsom had turned his brain to mush, this miraculous return to form finds the artist formerly known as Smog losing his girl, but rediscovering his mojo.