A colourful, incomparable colossus, a work of breathtaking, staggering genius and no mistake.

Not much here is too likely to blow up on the airwaves... it's too dirty, too ugly, too hard, and too Real.

'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.

No one musical entity, or group in the world comes close to the sum of their parts.

Most of the hooks are appalling - a few, sung by Skinner, like 'Such A Twat', and opener 'It Was Supposed To Be So Easy' are enjoyable, but when he lets his mates croon soupily all over his beats, shit gets distinctly unpleasant.

This album is jaunty, scruffy, carefree and accomplished.

[A] confusing but entertainingly eccentric package.

2002's first REAL classic.

'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.

The stuff of magic.

A beautiful, engaging, enchanting record.

Here Dylan has written a great part and acts it out beautifully. And, as usual, everything is out in the open but nothing, absolutely nothing, is revealed.

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.

'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.

His best music has a kind of timbral vulnerability about it that makes you want to reach out and kiss his computer better.

Recalls the overwhelming splendour of the Go-Betweens at their finest.

What blessed bastardry is this? It's bloody brilliant, that's what it is.

Ejstes... has an innate sense of melody, rhythm and the skill to play some pretty natty fat bass splurges, and psychedelic, peripatetic spider-like drum rolls.

Fascinatingly dense, soulful and utterly divine.

Manitoba is a lunatic and a fool, and his strange music, crafted from nature and machine and birdsong and the wind and the air and the seas and THE GODS... it is a fine, fine thing indeed.

This is a Warp-inspired wonderland of intricate glitches, murmuring glacial low-end smoothness, and subtle, filmic orchestration.

An unfinished album, and also a beautifully accomplished one.

'Abattoir Blues' is weirdly full of wonderment, and - get this - 'The Lyre of Orpheus' is even more joyful! And they both kick Nocturama's arse full of buttonholes.

I don't know when a voice touched me as wholly as Antony's does.

When 'Arular' works - a good three-quarters of the time - it's unmissable.

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.

Bottom line: One dimensional ghetto fodder this is not.

Tender melodies, modern scrapes and traditional beauty merge into a gently unfolded whole that touches the soul with its silky aesthetics.