'De Stijl' is just about better song for song, but the sheer vitality and energy of this one alone makes 'Elephant' their most accomplished record to date.

'The Mysterious Production of Eggs' is unmalicious, delicious classical indie with enough originality to mark it apart, and what it lacks in jaw dropping charisma it somehow makes up for with songwriting and instrumentation of the highest order.

'Rooty' isn't going to change your world - 'Remedy' did that - but it is another indispensable, truly, properly, madly inventive and utterly enjoyable album of the sort that, at the moment, only Basement Jaxx make.

'The Hardest Way To Make an Easy Living' is a far more skilfully crafted album than the 'A Grand...', despite what you might have heard.

The effect of the new bleak mood lurking beneath the glimmering pop is to pare away the occasional over-cutesiness that has marred Of Montreal's work in the past and enhance the freaky psychedelic sublime of Barne's best moments.

Daring, inventive and groundbreaking.

What's great about this album is they've managed to wield the same monolithic power riffs but make them count, with melodies and ideas way more consistent than before.

Their most contemporarily relevant and best album since 'Fox Base Alpha.'

With that warm soapy trumpet now hinting at something a flutter more soulful than the usual dose of despair and despond, the Tindersticks have actually moved on and started meaning something again.

No less of a passion-scratched, damp-sheet-scrumple of an affair than its predecessors.

The Books make the incongruous harmonious, the silly sensitive and the complex easy to understand. 'Lost And Safe' will sweep you up into an aural world where, for once, beauty and humour co-exist.

How deliciously perverse, and how very, very her.

They've managed to produce a seventh album that's the equal of their baggy debut.

Leaning closer towards the fiercer end of the guitar spectrum, 'Molé' is a splurge of intense and angry songs, a reaction to the filthy Bush era.

'The Warning' is a splendid combination of braindance and footdance.

There's a rural beauty, crafted by man and machine, in places as exotic as an orchid.

It's every bit as essential as any of its predecessors; completely essential, in other words.

Distant connections are subconsciously weaved into an undulating whole that fans of electronica, Tortoise and Mogwai will all appreciate - at least in parts.

There is nothing groundbreaking about this LP; it's just classic.

Simply put, 'Worlds Apart' is a delicately violent piece of art.

When the tempo is slower on certain tracks such as 'My Interpretation' and 'Any Other World' the initial comparison is unavoidably that of one to Robbie Williams or Elton John, but there is none of the dead-eyed cynicism of the former and none of the bellowing oafishness of the latter.

A quite beautifully realised album.

It’s clear that Lemon Jelly have well and truly upped the ante.

If 'Fever To Tell' was a scratchy post punk effort, then this is their gothic record.

With 'The Argument' arriving awash in the unmistakably sinewy and elliptic post-hardcore sound Fugazi have made their own (sonically at least) this is more or less business as usual.

It has the electric hot valve excitement of sixties garage rock, the stomping sexuality of glam and the amphetamined rush of punk rock all dusted down and mashed together in its fever pitch workouts.

He has humour and cerebral sharpness in spades.

This time, as well as simply delivering the goods, Wilco come bearing a basket of extras.

'Young Prayer' is a piece of work that feels both mysterious and honest; a truly rare combination.

They've created a world of tender reflection encompassing engaging melodic cycles, pastoral textures, glitchy interjections, acoustic decoration, melancholic strings, loose, jazz tinged drums, lonely horns, yearning guitar laments and delicate vocals: All melded into ebbs and flows that form a coherent universe through songs which all have their own defining characteristics.

By applying themselves to proper songs with words and everything like Mogwai did last year they've demonstrated why they still belong in the upper echelon of Outpoppers That Matter.

This is a brilliant, visionary album and needs rewarding with units - MTV won't have the scoobiest what to do, radio programmers will freak, and hip-hop will, once again, move forward.

The most worth-the-wait long-awaited album in the world... ever? Could be...

The sound is small scale, but the bewildering range of styles shows he thinks big -­ listen with your brain plugged in.

Having created the noise to which great hip and ace hop is made, they are now infusing the genre with new blood, vibe, and funk. The future just happened. [Review of UK version]

It’s like this: ‘Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers’ sounds like every record ever made, somewhere along the line.

No-one makes gizmos and machines prong like fruity tuning forks as well as this man, nor do they construct such vivid atmospherics with such cunning simplicity.

This is probably the most exciting record that Domino will release in 2006, eleven songs of hillbilly hoe-down, gothic atmospherics, scuzzy rock & roll, acerbic post punk noise, and dark sexuality.

This is a standout record even by his high standards.

This is woeful, otherworldly - and wonderful.

It displays the kind of emotion and movement that Four Tet, Boom Bip and Stereolab would all appreciate.

The production is perfect - not too cluttered, lush, beats melting beautifully into the now-understated guitar - and his vocals are warm and unpresuming.

What "Happy New Year" really represents is Oneida's finest, most complete record to date, and as such it's the perfect starting point for anyone who's as yet unfamiliar with their rather daunting back catalog.

'Songs For The Deaf' is a triumph, a record forged with fire and sweat in the pits of Valhalla... It is the very essence of Rock.

This is a fragile, beautiful music, it all nearly falls apart and then flops back together.

A beautiful ramble of a record.

'Fall Heads Roll' as a whole might not quite scale the heights of 'The Real New Fall LP', but there's no doubt that elements of it are up there with it.

'Nightlife' is a record that demands to be heard, for not only is it Erase Errata's best album yet, but also one of the finest to emerge from the leftfield this year.

Cex played with Mogwai last year, and the experience seems to have had a profound effect on him. The best moments of the late nineties Scottish post-rock explosion seem apparent here, and there are even hints at prime Arab Strap, which is of course quite brilliant.

'Has Been' is just about as far as you could possibly get from your regular solo offering and as such arrives as one of the year's most strangely captivating albums.

Probably the best post-punk album you'll buy all year.

On 'Impeach My Bush', Peaches has significantly upped her game with a greater leap from 'Fatherfucker' than there was between that album and debut 'The Teaches Of Peaches'.

Yes, of course it's a touch on the pretentious-sounding side, and it's also one of the most remorselessly miserable records of the decade so far, but none of this should discourage you from embracing it wholly.

Not only is Folds singing better than ever, and not only is his song-writing oozing confidence - but the musician in him is also at the peak of his powers; the piano playing is just mesmerising.

This is music that never quite settles; it's in perpetual motion.

Come and pay homage to the new Lounge Lizard King.

The only disappointment is it's all probably way too leftfield for generic consumption, meaning most people won't actually get to hear it.

A return to form: no tongue-in-cheek pop motifs, but a welcome re-embracing of the mid-American rock that always informed Pavement's more enlightening, abstruse moments.

'Iowa' is a fantastic metal record, ferocious and inventive, but their rage is that of psychotic adolescents rather than reasoning adults. You'll love it!

A honky tonk Leonard Cohen, the music of Smog sounds like it's spent all its life half cut in a saloon bar way out in the American mid-west thinking far too deeply about love and life for far too long.

There's a kind of timeless haze that drifts through 'Yellow House' and makes it a pleasingly elusive listen.

They entwine eastern canticles and fuzzy finger picking and electronic trickery like no other.

Building on the shaky, disjointed, but strangely beautiful foundations that they first laid twelve months ago with the release of their debut, 'Some Loud Thunder' is a gloriously shambolic second album from a band that continues to sound like no one else.

An eclectic ragbag of influences coerced into great exciting guitar pop.

Thankfully, it's even better than expected.

This will be one of the best things you'll hear all year.

Mostly, it's Chan's wonderfully bold and understated piano and guitar work that makes 'You Are Free' what it is, a collection of shapely and becoming lo-fi oddities.

There are several duff tracks, certainly. And, sure, as a whole 'American Idiot' can easily be criticised for its simplistic, occasionally naïve sixth form lyrics, all round pomposity and general adherence to the group's tried and tested formula of punchy three-chord pogo-pop. But it's still a wonderfully entertaining, polemical punk rock record.

You will have to surrender yourself completely to this record, for left as background music it will waft pleasantly around your head and out your window.

They seem to have recaptured a lot of the elegance and urgency that characterised the increasingly seminal 'Rings Around The World'... and the songwriting, even if it is roaming mostly uncharted territory, is back towards prime potency.

It's an album that's unlikely to yield any massive hits, but like that other iconic singer songwriter, Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos has survived initial success to end up in a place where she has the space to do exactly what she likes in pretty much the only way she seems to know how.

More difficult when played initially, you will find yourself becoming immersed in it, a generous reward for your initial endeavours.

A triumph of style and content, a precious thing and proof positive that acid is well good for you.

Admittedly, there's not exactly the strictest of divides between the two, although 'Aw C'mon' is arguably the more upbeat of the pair.

A slice of experimental pop, simultaneously bright and bleak.

Lyrically, it's astounding as ever.

This is pristine, state of the art, pop: the usual perfect combination of great melodies and swooping atmospherics that you can dance to.

Although more full-blooded and more rhythmically experimental in places, '...Planets' isn't a giant stylistic leap from ''Homseongs', but then, why would you want it to be?

There are enough pinnacles of musical achievement married with subtle storytelling to justify the scale of this album.

'Alice' finds the twisted surrealisms of Lewis Carroll's relationship with Alice Liddell offering both refuge and escape for the usual Waits suspects: vagabonds, low-lifes and beautiful lunatics.

It's not so much her actual rapping skills but her keen ear for a devastatingly simple track structure that makes her stuff so satisfying.

Most of these songs sound like they're taking down whole walls of your average sonic cathedral and replacing them with huge stained-glass windows with a billion pieces in a hundred thousand colours that sparkle like angel's tears when the sun hits them, like. Yes, it is a bit evangelical. It's reverent.

The mix of spite, beauty and pain in here is compelling and repulsive all at once.

'The Spell' marks their most successful record to date in creating a coherent aesthetic throughout; a beguiling and compelling atmosphere of black magic.

Bottom line: One dimensional ghetto fodder this is not.

They no longer rely on dense production and atmospherics, because they don’t need to: ‘Antics’ is bare-boned and beautiful.

If you were disappointed by 'Antics' then this'll make up for it, and if Interpol's last offering did agree with you then you'll spend the rest of '05 at least giving this a great big hug.

This is a densely structured journey through intense pummelling and dervishes of electronic noise.

This album oozes wackiness.

This is better than anyone could have expected.

Where Ladytron's first two albums might have felt to some to be alienating and monochrome, like a shallow bender on champers and very nice drugs, but a shallow bender nonetheless; 'The Witching Hour' is blessed with a far greater palette of sound and sensation, and is as fine a spell as you'll succumb to all year.

This is a record of outrageous range and unprecedented panache.

From track five onwards, they rarely put a foot wrong.

As good as 'Tio Bitar' is, it's actually a weaker album than 'Ta Det Lungt' in some respects.

You really won't find a more interesting, intelligent or wonderful dream of an album as 'Sensuous' all year.

Hot Hot Heat have managed to find a corner of the rock universe that hasn't been overkilled and have made an impressive and imaginative album.

A stealthy, smoking beast of a thing: hip hop with a British passport and dubplate roots, embroidered with wiggly, scratching sound effects and made-to-measure production.

Beautiful, fun, dark, sentimental, gloomy, hopeful music.