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.

Never has a pit of despair sounded so inviting.

Reliability is the Hold Steady's calling card, and on Stay Positive they don't stray far from the tried-and-tested combination of orthodox guitar rock and gritty, observational lyrics.

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.

Despite its complexity, every twist and turn of The Drift is absolutely compelling.

Veckatimest's only down side is a touch of preciousness, a need for refinement that, unchecked, might nudge Grizzly Bear towards the polite rather than imaginative. It's a small quibble. For now, this is almost perfect.

Their seventh album remembers to add tunes, and is thus less baffling than before.

Not just a dignified salute to an absent friend, but a cracking album in its own right.

It's brainy and brawny: Springsteen and E Street Band comparisions valid.

Ys is an exceptional piece of art in the broadest sense - give it the chance to grow on you.

This might just be their best record in a decade.

Like a futuristic remake of "The Wicker Man," it is all splintered beats and frosty light-night soul, and at best, as on 'Pity Dance,' quite remarkable.

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.

Inevitably, Vieux Farka Toure is not in the same league as his father. But he has still managed to make a very impressive and enjoyable debut album.

Wry, understated and occasionally heroically sorry for itself, his fourth--and best--album mixes folk, pop, country and rock to superb effect.

The heart of Two Dancers lies in these seemingly jarring juxtapositions. The individual ingredients may be a decidedly mixed bag, but the final product is both coherent and very satisfying.

His piano versions of standards such as Winin' Boy Blues show that the funk was always in the Big Easy's blood.

His orchestral Kanye-meets-Nas muse lacks originality.

Love vindicates the Beatles' status as master musicians and conceptualists.

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.

While Britain and the US are succumbing to a very retro take on the US's R&B heritage, the original queen of neo-soul has taken a giant leap forward.

You know, deep down, that the These New Puritans set is the one that you'll be listening to in a decade, enjoying the fact that you can never quite decipher its codes, and probably being amazed at how many more commercially successful records it inspired.

This is mostly a brutal-sounding, and often brutally funny, record full of odd surprises.

Terius "The Dream" Nash is the song-writer behind Rihanna's Umbrella and other more intriguing than average R&B hits. His second album continues the theme, with assistance from Kanye West.

For all American Gangster's conceptual flair, the purest joy comes from 'Success', a tune which could have slotted into any Jay-Z album.

This is the sort of album which is destined to be talked about in hushed tones by people who can remember exactly which improbably funky Manfred Mann tune it was that Kieran Hebden once put on a compilation. But it deserves a much wider audience than that.

Profound and intense, they had reached a level of interaction most bands can only dream of. Svensson's loss goes deep.

A truly original, innovative, heavy-as-hell, interesting heavy metal record that you can listen to more than twice without wanting to smash it to a million pieces with an axe.

Overpowered's bubbling, sensual, and soulful glitterball gems effortlessly tap into the perennial glory of feeling lost and lonely at the disco at the end of the world.

It's most beguiling when the eastern influences are to the fore.

Virtually every song sounds like a leave-taking, though the overall mood is reflective and restrained, in places almost easy-going.

If this all sounds a bit heavy going, Crack the Skye offers plenty of simple pleasures as Mastodon heap on the musical melodrama, with a more-is-more approach to fretwork that's bound to see them liven up moshpits when they support Metallica this summer.

Of all the 32-minute concept albums inspired by Paul Auster to come out of Sunderland this year, it's comfortably the best.

On the evidence of Favourite Worst Nightmare, the Arctic Monkeys are playing at the very top of their and everyone else's game.

This is sexier than it should be by rights.

At the end of an extraordinary year in America, hip hop is witnessing the start of its lost icon's second term.

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.

BSP have every right to feel content. After all, the almost men of sylvan, jagged rock, the pride of Britain's bookish, bird-watching bohemia, have made an album that's deserving of their swagger. Do you like rock music? If not, here's the perfect place to start.

At less than 40 minutes long, Vampire Weekend sounds paradoxically both brimming with confidence and something put down as a marker for the future.

Their fourth album picks up where 2005's "Leaders of the Free World" left off.

Detractors will complain that there's nothing to rival the brutal impact of his earlier recordings, but only towards the end does the new-found positivism grate.

The problem is that these songs are mostly too corny to have much drama restored to them. This is not folk music as mystery or romance or danger but as communal singalong.

This set has 21 unreleased folk and pop tracks, their conventional framework unable to contain the childlike dreaminess that marks their creator's best work, whatever the genre.

Lowe pulls it all together with warmth, wit and searing emotional honesty.

Their third album offers an advance on the ecstatic dance punk of 2003 debut "Fever to Tell" and beefy rock of 2006's "Gold Lion," boldly pushing synths centre stage while sacrificing none of their vitality.

The result is a fifth Four Tet album which has the power to delight someone who has never listened to a Kraftwerk record all the way through, just as much as those who know their Walter from their Wendy Carlos.

Beautifully sequenced, Jarvis makes the case for albums as opposed to downloads.

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

A brilliant collection of spanking, multi-layered tunes.

Any fears that the zippy Afro-pop of these New York-based hipsters was a novelty--so very 2008--are quickly dispelled on this confident and completely entertaining second album.

At its core, Cross is loud, restless, and daring. A creative tour de force, Justice have unleashed an era-defining album for the children of acid house.

Here the folk legend rings in the new with songs from the old, sensitively produced by Joe Henry.

Yet far from heralding a more obviously commercial taint, major label backing finds them ever more extreme. This album may not be quite as bleak as The Bairns, and the sound is more sophisticated, but they still sound like nobody else.

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."

Someone to Drive You Home is undeniably derivative, and over 12 songs the appeal of Jackson's fruity voice can dim. Still, with its cynical heart and high-octane bite, it's impossible not to warm to its visceral, lusty company.

It's an effortless success, from the opener, Ruby, big on melody and plaintive harmonies, to the dream-like Bells of Harlem, moving river-slow to a brushed snare and ending this quite terrific record with a meandering coda of wistful strings.

It's an inventive reimagining of hip hop with huge basslines underpinning the otherwise cinematic atmosphere.

Fantasy Black Channel is a tour de force comprising glam, techno, and rave, all of which he twists into unimaginable shapes.

Damaged is a transcendent record - poetic, mysterious, witty, wise and at times so musically grand that it changes the colour of a room and the weight of the air.

Med sud I eyrum ... is a beautiful collection that blows Sigur Rós beyond the place they come from, geographically and musically.

It works - even though this area of pop culture has been mined remorselessly for the past 50 years - by dint of its clever melody lines and smart lyrics.

As with the conceptual aspect, knowing the peculiar provenance of the noises on The Rose Has Teeth is actually supplemental to one's enjoyment of this suite... which stands alone as an enthralling aural experience.

Those with the patience for deft songwriting willl want to wait for her.

White Denim somehow manage to cover all points of the musical compass without ever losing their overall sense of direction.

Trumpeter Mathias Eick has a sound that gently beckons and, like softly spoken conversation, you instinctively lean forward to catch every gesture. One you'll listen to on repeat to fathom its subtle meanings.

Here lie gorgeous tunes that are lithe enough to cope with the little bursts of sonic madness that flit around like overproduced Eighties butterflies.

While their coming-of-age tales entertain some, it's their 'us versus the world ' spirit that makes this such an enthralling debut.

Embryonic is certainly not without charm, but its title gives the game away. Largely, it's the sound of a band seeking inspiration rather than finding it.

Offend Maggie is head-spinning bliss from beginning to end, and proves that the quartet are the best prog-rock post-punk Afro-Oriental art-pop folk-jazz band in the world.

Think Scott Walker punching a side of beef, and know that here's another who's wandered off the path of teen pop success to find a world that's far more interesting (if far from easy listening).

This is a heavyweight album in every sense of the word.