Its low-budget weirdness will have you laughing into the new year.

Psychic Life is fully in touch with such early-Eighties weirdness, but is also fresh, approachable and thoroughly spellbinding.

Each track has a timeless quality, as suited to a Seventies mid-west saloon as a students' indie disco.

For now Birdy remains a novelty. Her rich, malleable vocals suggest, however, that she won't be caged for long.

There are good things here, but nothing especially new.

It's a pleasure to hear her scatting her way through moods and melodies, sketching vocals out, even when they don't work.

His pensive, personal songs often evoke nocturnal drives on dusty highways with hypnotic allure.

With the right collaborators she can conjure golden moments.

It's not an album that takes itself too seriously (one song is called I'm No Elvis Presley) but it's an upbeat romp of a CD with some fine song songs such as Black Fly.

Bush is still making music that intrudes and abducts.

Prine is extraordinary, one of the most eloquent artists of modern times and seeing where it all started, in this super CD, really is something very special.

Ilo Veyou is a magnificent, kaleidoscopic oddity, unafraid to risk ridiculousness in pursuit of the sublime, fearlessly unlike anything else you'll hear this year.

Here, leading lights of electronic music remix King Midas Sound's underrated debut album to striking effect.

The result is both silkily seductive and moodily narcissistic.

An adrenalised behemoth of a record which reasserts her position as one of pop's most compulsive pleasures.

His second album is a regression. A year on, the gaudy guitar loops and sleek hip-hop beats sound mundane.

Their sixth album, however, sticks too rigidly to the formula.

The Dreamer is occasionally powerful and moving as James ranges across memorable songs including Otis Redding's Champagne & Wine.

The results sound as if Lynch's old protégé Chris Isaak had taken a left turn into lyrical eccentricity, pulsing synths and sinister atmospherics.

The most compelling tracks take drastic liberties with the original material, deconstructing Kinshasa sound systems into industrial-tropical hoedowns that reflect postmodern London more than Africa's teeming townships.

Her overemphasised enunciation puts Boyle firmly in the Julie Andrews stage show tradition but, at her best, she rises above inoffensive background music to gently brush the emotions.

Those who loved The King Is Dead should certainly enjoy the EP--a sort of CD extras from a fine main production.

She really does sweep the listener away, spinning wild webs of sound and carrying us off to her own aural dreamland.

Reed's words dictate the musical structure. Often, Metallica simply fall in behind them in a free-form drone. Like much of Reed's late-period work, this is abstract and literary but even by his standards, Lulu is gruelling.

Smoking in Heaven is hugely enjoyable.

Great pop music with its big heart in the right place.

The wild, rattling bawlers are each distinctively turbocharged with reckless and richly textured energy, while the ballads run poignantly on their rims, leaking emotion.

High Flying Birds is the best collection of Gallagher tunes since his Morning Glory days.