It was possible to ignore Schnauss' new age leanings previously but they're rammed home mercilessly here making too much of this album sound like Enya-period Sigur Ros.

There's little that sounds really new here.

Like post-Kelli Sneaker Pimps or a goth Massive Attack, it adds slow trip-hop beats and whispery vocals to a dreamy soundscape.

'They Were Wrong, So We Drowned' is a remarkably assured second album, and considerably more audacious than its predecessor, but it's a far from flawless affair.

Yes, 'Don't Believe The Truth' is an improvement on the trilogy of folly that is 'Be Here Now', 'Heathen Chemistry' and 'Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants'. But so what? Can't polish a turd, you know.

The Killers album is, whisper it, pretty good in places.

The trouble is that Jay is stuck in an artistic straitjacket of his own making.

A soothing, gentle rock'n'roll opus.

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.

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

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

You can almost see the soul evaporating off this into nothing. But the good stuff struts through the sludge of the bad, and it's worth it.

There are no great ideas, or stunning movements, just ego-driven mush set to chocolate box arrangements. Oh, and a tendency towards the kind of vocals that Pink Floyd or Chris Rea might have been proud of.

Lethally simple pop tunes which sound like they were written during a particularly good seaside holiday in 1974.

While it's got to be said 'Amerika's Nightmare' certainly has its moments over the space of a complete album the familiar themes and reference points start to feel a shade tired and predictable.

There's nothing quite as immediate or fantastic as 'Disposable Teens' here, but the album on the whole is a triumph.

Moffat knows how to conduct, contort and concoct fountains of melancholia.

The Neptunes have lent their Midas fingers on production duties, but they've gone their schmaltzy route rather than into party bangers mode.

With each track they descend further into the mire.

'Pocket Symphony' fails to grab in the same way that previous Air albums have and places too large an emphasis on mood, texture and composition to ever really be anything other than polite background music.

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

Hugely disappointing.

Even in spite of their obvious knack for a beast of a tune that knows no indie fear, they do a cracking job of getting peculiar on us as well.

this is pretty much all good stuff. So why does it feel like there's something missing? Haven's problem is their chosen genre - epic, ball busting indie, guitars that jangle, then jangle harder, vocals that ride melody like diseases might pterodactyls.

A shimmering snowflake of a record.

Aside from track sequencing issues... and dodgy indie geezers, 'The Outsider' is a great album and well worth the wait.

It's a pleasant listen, with twice the beauty of its predecessor 'All This Sounds Gas', but while the songs are easy to appreciate, they are difficult to love.

MSTRKRFT have essentially made an album of great productions and remixes and then forgotten to invite any artists or records along to help them out.

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 record is more riddled with more clichés and pure, retro water-treading embarrassment than anything [Courntey] Love ever conjured up.

[An] irritating abomination.

Many of the choruses are great, but by about track eight you begin to realise this isn't about songs, this is about mathematics, and if you've actually paid for the album with your own money, you've been well and truly had.

For someone so traditionally dancefloor-driven, there are none too many grooves here, and, even for an artist whose most famous lyric may be "la la la", there's not exactly a lot to go on in terms of substance.

For Wu-Headz, this is the piece of the RZA puzzle we've been waiting a decade for. It's that important.

Far from flawless it may be, but this is a fundamentally fabulous experience.

'Kratitude' is a far from flawless record and can be a little too hip for its own good.

A waste of good beats.

It's as if they're trying to mimic Primal Scream but on ‘Let’s Make History’ they’re more like an under the weather INXS, and on ‘Armed Love’ you could even draw comparisons with Ocean Colour Scene. Eeeeeeeeee!

'Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited' is an often fascinating and enchanting compilation as these things go, though I say, somewhat predictably, that there's no substitute for the real thing.

One of the most important rock bands ever meets one of the best, and guess what, they've only gone and knocked out a bonafide masterpiece. It's 1993 all over again, but it's also 1970 and 2002 and beyond, because an album this classic transcends any pigeonholing.

Seriously poor, lowest common denominator bullshit.

'Hey People!' dashes past in such a whippy blur that it's far from immediately apparent what on earth to make of it, although if you suspect it'd be fun going back to find out we wouldn't argue.

[The live disc is] arguably far more interesting and focused and energized than the studio effort.

The good news is that despite the excess verbiage (which at least is hardly a shock), this is a Good Album.

It appears to paint from a more kaleidoscopic emotional palette than some of the earlier Stars endeavours.

An attempted retread that feels more driven by commerce than conviction and suffers as a result.

They have developed into an almost evangelically uplifting and powerful rock unit.

Kaiser Chiefs have absolutely no talent or taste for innovation.

Say hello to the future of electrofilthsoulhop.

As with other really good bands in this genre (such as Franz Ferdinand and Interpol) it transcends being just a mere mash of influences.

A rock-solid album that improves with each listen.

All too often the guitar-led tracks expose their limitations.

There's precious little here not to like, and it's as satisfying an experience as any of the ambient survivors have produced in years.

Basically, this is a fantastic band releasing twelve brilliant songs, and it's not only the best guitar album you'll ever hear with no guitars on it, it's one of the best this year generally.

It feels like a mix-tape or compilation, an in-joke or doodle between the participants rather than a completed work for public consumption.

So, while this might not be Tricky at his total best, it may well be the best you're likely going to get out of him.

Badly Drawn Boy's been sketchy before, but never quite this artless.

There's nothing that catchy here - Manson seems to have used all his best hooks already. But it's not terrible, and it sounds good LOUD.

But this album isn't just really gratingly saccharine, yet simultaneously bland, it's wilfully so.

'Chops' isn't wholly disastrous, but it's all too often a reminder that, for roughly his first decade onstage, Childs was an infuriatingly insular and mildly indulgent performer, and it now appears that he was able to make such genuinely fantastic records in spite of that because of the healthy influence of his band-mates.

There is little to recommend here.

A totally modern album that manages to nearly ignore his wilful, malicious past and embrace the California smog/sun with a polished fervour that is almost nauseating to witness.

For anyone with even half a hankering for electronic heaven, this is non-stop introspective wonderland.

This album, if it came from a newcomer, could kill a career stone dead.

Hidden amongst the bilge, there are six proper songs here, with words and everything. But they only serve to prove how erratic Belle And Sebastian have become.

‘America’s Sweetheart’ throbs, chugs, thunders, blasts, romps, rants and rocks.

A little wanting.

This album is just a purer distillation, a more joyous exaggeration of the smaller, more tasteful thrills offered by every posturing indie rock band out there.

While there are some moments of greatness (the menacing, psychedelic 'Dog Sleep', the mournful, pretty 'Don't Cry That Way'), the majority of this double album is dull, turgid and instantly forgettable.

The problem is that I Created Disco goes on for nearly an hour and barely changes tack once.

Iggy's own production fails to lift it out of the nu-metal quagmire - sometimes the perfectly executed power chords and unimaginative guitar licks feel every bit as raw and dangerous as Bowie's Tin Machine farrago.

Resembles nothing more than a U.S. major label executive’s idea of what dance music should sound like.

How anyone can describe Leeds' The Music as a "best new band" is beyond me. Unless they're over fifty, sport a footballer's perm and weep at Almost Famous.

Excruciating, toe-curling Pain, the sort that makes you want to leap through windows or run over children.

Now we see. It is all clear. DMX believes what they say in Def Jam board meetings. He actually believes that what Mr Budden and Just Blaze did earlier this year is what one should do in hip-hop right now - meaning, shout popular thug slogans over irritatingly OTT beats for an hour or so.

On first listen 'Harmonies For The Haunted' seems slight enough to be a collection of b-sides and discarded songs from the first album.

Yes, it's eclectic and he hasn't just slapped together a ragbag of Ibeefa anfums, but this record essentially suffers from a lack of ambition.

This album oozes wackiness.

They’re perhaps a tad unoriginal - a hint of Felix here, a spot of 'Positive Education' there, a sniff of classic Sabres Of Paradise and some 'Stakker Humanoid' round the corner ­ but hey, what’s wrong with nostalgia? Especially when it gets your hands in the air like you just don’t care.

This record is about as bad it is possible for a record to be. It is offensive on every level - the music is bad, the rapping is bad, the sleeve is bad.

The ham-fisted attempt to modernise Stereophonics' sound... falls flat at every attempt as samples, effects and the odd electronic buzz avoid the underlying mulch like gas-gun fired dried peas off titanium.

The key flaw with this album is that it doesn’t have any of the bangers that GC can do so well.

Too much of it is straightforward four-to-the-floor anodynity, and a number of tracks run out of ideas almost immediately, explore touchstones they've caressed more inspiringly before or, worse, do both.

It's sexless twaddle pure and simple, delivered by an over-contented and conceited artist with nothing left to offer the world than refried lyrics and quasi-profound meaningless phrases.

A Victorian freak show with a cracking voice, but just a few stolen Prince and Stevie Wonder tunes, Har Mar Superstar seems to be humiliating himself and reaching for the lowest common denominator in search of lays and some fleeting personal success.

Lyrically, he's got one thing to say: Kid Rock is back, Kid Rock has lots of money, Kid Rock has the dames licked down, Kid Rock is hard. Which is all good when done properly, with wit, but Kid Rock is not clever, and he's not funny.

'Down in Albion' is a truly abhorrent and occasionally upsetting record.

R.E.M. still have the remarkable distinction of never once producing a bad album, but this is perhaps the biggest example yet of the group merely treading water, whereas once they majestically swam.

A much more brutal and vicious record than its predecessor.

When they're good, they're alright, but when they're bad, they're unstoppable and Dirty Vegas' biggest mistake so far is that, sometimes, they're not nearly filthy enough.

While 'Bleed Like Me' is easily better than 'Beautiful Garbage', it's still not worth buying. It's recognisably Garbage, but it's unarguably garbage too.

While their political musings... are well intended, the lyrics are so heinously bad and the music so incredibly earnest and bombastic, you're tearing it out of your CD player after five or six tracks.

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.

That the band that churned out some of the best records ever made in a phenomenal two-year creative splurge should be reduced to anything as pubby as this is nothing short of tragic.

Timbaland has revealed himself to be a crass, stupid, venal prick who is pretty much talentless outside of production for other people.

The Raven... does fly on the side of the bizarre, but it holds some rich pickings.

Finds her flailing club-footedly some twelve steps behind contemporary R&B, whispering distractedly through a seemingly unending array of interludes and phoning in songs that even Mariah at her most barely-there would dismiss as a trifle on the insipid side.

'Silence Is Easy' is non-challenging "pretty pretty" music for early-ageing types who might recoil at anything without an acoustic guitar and tomtoms.