Although looser, Draw the Line doesn't reinvent the Gray wheel.

It's the best pop album about beating depression since 1983's Soul Mining by The The. Buy now, and avoid the winter rush for Prozac.

This early-Roxy-Music-meets-late Led-Zep-style third studio album finds the band stepping back from total impenetrability with a pithy, eight-song, 76-minute set, guaranteed to restore the faith of those whose confidence in this grand enterprise was waning.

The kind of album that sounds like it should be No 1 in Germany, which, of course, it was recently.

North London outfit from the same school (literally) as Cajun Dance Party, earning high marks for their winsome indie tunes.

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.

For fans only.

Eighteen months touring and producing themselves at home have toughened the bands sound. And broadened it.

There's an OK cover of Tommy James and the Shondells' 'Crimson and Clover,' but mostly this album's where Prince has stuck his fill3r.

So here's what's brilliant about this band: the 11 songs here offer no solution, no way out and very little hope, making We'll Live and Die in These Towns as bleak in its own way as the Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible. The songs are brilliant, too.

Britney has delivered the best album of her career, raising the bar for modern pop music with an incendiary mix of Timbaland's 'Shock Value' and her own back catalogue.

It starts out inchoate and hard to put your finger on, then coalesces into something wiry and unshakable.

The album's surfaces gleam, but its flower-power proselytising never quite dispels the notion of Empire of the Sun as MGMT copyists with pretensions.

Between the odd pretty guitar motif ('She's Too Much') and marching drum roll ('The Valley') the pile-driving beatwork and rapping cameos only highlight the fact that the weakest element here is Duran themselves.

A New Tide is a respectable affair reminiscent of the Beta Band at best (Airstream Driver) and David Gray at its coffee-table worst, courtesy of vocalist Ian Ball's folksy bleat.

Surprisingly, the album's blend of Mitteleuropean melody and American eccentricity is diverting enough to overcome any misgivings.

On their charming debut, the four-piece fulfil their promise of being the edgy, sexually voracious Ace of Bass.

Their foppish indieboy spin on classic folk-rock is, more often than not, perfectly listenable. But you can't help but wonder, between all the gleeful strums and wizened howls, whether they possess the inner torment to carry off such worldly material.

Invaders Must Die lacks their freshness and like all supposed returns "to form" it might prove they can compete with the present generation but, ultimately, it's more facelift than rejuvenation.

There's a fine songwriter somewhere inside frontman Liam Fray--but first he has to bust his way out of a genre that the world has long ago left behind.

All this Eighties-shaped over-production means Red suffers from the same problem as bedevils the BBC's 1981-set Ashes to Ashes: too much effort has gone into quirky nostalgic jiggery-pokery and not enough into credible plot.

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.

With three full decades of sardonic wordplay behind him, these unusually expansive musical settings inspire the mordant West Midlander to some of his freshest and most subtly intoxicating work to date.

Stereophonics deserve doughty, workmanlike praise: they're a safe pair of hands, and this record does exactly what it promises. There are worse crimes.

A handful of upbeat numbers–-including an unexpected foray into frothy high-speed electro–-pull Leona back from the brink of boring, while 'I Got You' is an impressive distant relative of 'Bleeding Love.'

Amid the sighs and groans, she hits the pop G-spot with her savvy hooks and superlative rhyming.

Costa's sophomore album is every bit as anaemic as the Johnson connection suggests.

Fast Man/Raider Man is sluggish country rock.