An outstanding musical creation... that nods to almost every known genre of American music, and some that have yet to be named.

This live double album, recorded in July 1998, offers another take on those great songs.

This exhaustive project is the most impressive retro-fest of recordings, photographs, video footage and digiti sed memorabilia ever assembled.

London Zoo provides the perfect showcase for its colourful menagerie of MCs and singers. And the Bug's no-nonsense clank and grind production fosters a rare intensity of focus on this album's higher purpose, which is to take the eloquence of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Michael Smith's Eighties dub-poetry, and blast it into digital hyperspace.

Untrue crackles with high-tension, excitement and yearning.

Now, more than at any time since his first few folk albums, he sounds like a traditionalist. He's walking down that same road that Sonny and Cisco and Leadbelly walked down.

Even by their own exuberant standards, though, AC's ninth album is a dizzying knees-up that makes most music, indie rock or otherwise, sound both bloodless and pathetically timid.

Hell Hath No Fury is as lyrically kaleidoscopic as it is conceptually monochrome. Track after track flays the central theme, but with such consistently inventive language it seems almost churlish to dwell on its moral bankruptcy.

It's a real thrill to find TV on the Radio pushing through the portal into the ethereal space-rock paradise that they always seemed destined to inhabit.

A warmer, more linear record than their debut... Spellbinding, frustrating, wonderful.

Ghostface is in typically brutal form.

For Emma, though only nine tracks long, is as beautiful, bleak and intimate as anything 2008 is likely to throw up.

Adding a plaintive beauty and combining it with coke-ravaged, mid-Seventies, Spector-ish AOR and some playful studio trickery, the album is a raw, introspective and melancholic delight.

Like Animal Collective, Lennox pulls off the trick of being simultaneously poppy and abstract, winsome and deranging.

Musically, the album is a triumph from first to last.

Raising Sand is an album of deep, dark Americana, a scintillatingly stitched patchwork of country, R'n'B and singer-songwriters that represents what Plant describes as "the America I have always loved musically."

A unique combination of masculinity and creativity, Let's Stay Friends is proof that few bands rock quite like this.

There is a lightness of touch at play that gives the XX a sophistication beyond their years. It probably means that their dream pop will become the ubiquitous dinner party album du jour.

The Canadian septet are the greatest art rock group since Talking Heads stopped making sense.

There are the terrible lyrics and more than a few moments where her one-style-fits-all MCing grates, but there's also the politics that no one else would touch, an intelligence, colour and humour, and the added benefit of centrifugally heavy production. Skip a couple, and you're in for a treat.

It's occasionally like a dream collaboration between Bill Hicks and New Order, with Giorgio Moroder producing.

The quality veers wildly, but every so often he hits upon a great song. 'Just As You Are' in particular sets the smoothest of melodies and a haunting cornet solo from Wyatt against the most world-weary of lyrics.

The great thing about this follow-up is the way it builds on that foundation without lapsing into self-consciousness.

Battles combine the power of hard rock with an experimental aesthetic.

The hipper-than-thou trappings mean people are talking about H&LA, but it is the record itself which is a deft delight.

It remains extraordinary this ability to jump from Tom Lehrer to early Tom Waits.

Not everything is perfect here, the five live cuts, in particular, not particularly inspired choices. But you could lose yourself in these recordings.

Maxwell's voice is so unusually rich and supple that at best, as on the mercurial 'Bad Habits,' you cannot help but disregard his fondness for cliche.