Out of Control is more of a lucky dip, with scintillating trinkets and humdrum knick-knacks.

It's a more varied listen but also markedly lesser in impact.

It proves a warm, agreeable affair, though likely to disappoint anyone expecting creative sparks.

When they're not apeing War-era U2 ('Crystal Ball') they're apeing Achtung Baby-era U2 ('Is It Any Wonder?'). Otherwise they plod along, piano clip-clopping under all the electronic fuss, in thrall to their own pseudo-profundity.

It's anthemic ('Tell Me it's Not Over') and slushy ('Hurts Too Much'), but it might just work.

Shadow's head scratching choice of singers detract from the potency of his fluid beats.

Reflections on love, life and 'the wife' abound as horns parp Ronson-ly. But only Sixties cover 'I'm Alive' soars.

MPLSound could be a thank-you note to those Parade-era purists patient enough to have stuck around.

A heavier take on their gothic moan-rock.

But OutKast's "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below" aside, it's debatable whether there has been call for a double album since "Sign O' the Times" in 1987, and this is clearly another case for the prosecution.

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.

If you can fight through the toxic stench of cod-reggae that envelops the opening track, this 15-strong San Franciscan jug band have certainly got something.

An album so overblown yet inspiration-free as to be worthy of national shame.

It's a bravely eccentric selection and a captivating homage to a singular writer.

He performs everything (from drum'n'bass to hip hop beats) on his guitar, leading him to be dubbed a 'one-man Timbaland band'. A true percussive original.

While his lyrics sometimes verge on the platitudinous, musically, this is his most arresting solo set, thanks in no small part to the John Barry-esque strings.

His post-Pete Doherty project evinces dreary futility: he thinks he's Morrissey, but he sounds more like Sandi Thom.

There is little here to delineate her above her far less interesting contemporaries, Fergie and Nelly Furtado, both of whom have presented fresher minted records this year.

A vessel that can't help but feel a little under-populated by comparison to N.A.S.A.'s "The Spirit of Apollo."

Largely extraordinary... They write ornate and soaring conversational love songs, full of heart, bittersweet observation and unashamed street-level Englishness.

Mostly, Jon McLure's against Bad Stuff and in favour of Good Stuff, as well as being dead keen on 90s sounding dance-rock.

Lovely.

With Uncle Dysfunktional there's no faulting the band's ambition - the music veers from country to samba to electronica - and Ryder's lascivious drawl and surreal wordplay remain intact.

Closer to the big production of Have You Fed the Fish? than 2004's more acoustic-led One Plus One is One, it's also the most obvious manifestation of his longstanding Springsteen obsession.

Cure-sampling single So Human proves ingenious, Jigsaw effectively swaps swearing for singing and Britney songwriter Dr Luke earns his keep. Alas, though, the backchat of Let's Be Mates proves as edifying as the top deck of the 43 bus.

Like a silly holiday cocktail with umbrellas and sparklers, there is much to enjoy about Paris Hilton, albeit for one mad Med fortnight only.

Cajun, unquestionably, are the real deal.

Asleep in the Bread Aisle is promising, if unspectacular.

Somewhere between Ennio Morricone, Talk Talk and late-period Massive Attack, it is atmospheric, if relentlessly bleak, with the exception of cult director Abel Ferrara's imitation of Bob Dylan on 'Open Up Your Eyes'.

If the naivity and high-pitched voice don't grate, chances are the shifting soundscapes will still leave you charmed.

Predictably, it's not among the quintet's finest hours.

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

That's the problem with social realism, but the Enemy do their best to vary their sound and mode of address.

It's an undeniably impressive range of talent and, for the most part, Shock Value pulls off every trick it tries.

An absolute howler.

But snobbery apart, this is a terrific album.

Only My Chemical Romance are funnier, albeit by accident.

Proficient and predictably salacious.

Shorn of his camp finery, not to mention his preferred subject matter - androgynous boys from suburbia kissing under nuclear skies - his voice, still an acquired taste, proves ill-suited to introspection.

World-weary and introspective, frequently discordant, this is the sound of a man pondering where it all went wrong.

Daffy girl pop with just the teensiest bit of attitude, enough retro influences and the odd acceptable ballad.

Word-heavy, tune-light songs don't help... Worse, O'Connor's delicate voice can be heard puffing, straining and - horrors - singing flat!

Elixer is at least a more pleasant listen; ignore the Prince mystique and it's a collection of reasonably well-turned pop ballads.

Fans looking for an air-guitar gurning masterclass may be disappointed.

Ultimately, its a fun teen party album. Just don't call it girl power.

They're not quite back to those heady 'Connected' days, but the Stereos still have a mesmeric knack of making music bounce like a rubber ball.

Brett Anderson has reached a creative menopause.

A brave new direction it isn't.

Their sixth album (and the first on their own label) is their most self-assured set yet, veering from sparkling glam to funky New Orleans boogie by way of early Nineties shoegazing.

Unquestionably, it would have been better still had the songs been layered with a little less sugar.

What an astronomically bad parallel universe. Queen's star is dead.