David Gray might not fit most people's definitions of a revolutionary artist, but he's effected his own startling transformation here.

Scars is the strongest Basement Jaxx album since 2001's "Rooty".

What potentially made Album exciting was that it seemed to understand that pop itself doesn't make sense, and that it can still work just as well with all the wrong notes in all the wrong order.

That it is a beautifully realised set of textures and sounds certainly helps, as does the fact that its keenly abstract, exploratory bent makes any attempted comparisons with his debut album practically meaningless.

With Truelove's Gutter, Hawley stands at the other side of his beloved city's bridge, leading the charge for the welcome return of pop that demands your full attention to get the best out of it.

Its ambitions far exceed its ideas, and the record is sunk by the kind of sonic bloat normally reserved for self-regarding sophomore releases.

It's all good sauce, one supposes, but as Mills wheels out of earshot, tongue and balls dangling in the warm night air, it's hard not to wonder where the thoughtful, sullen kid whose eyes cut like lasers through sink estate bull**it has got to these days.

This is something unique, often flawed and often flooring, and as fine and fitting a memorial for its lyricist as could be imagined.

Underpinning all these is a formidable talent for beats and synths most audible on glacial instrumental '10,000 Horses Can't Be Wrong.' It's this that makes Temporary Pleasure so strong and tightly knit and it's the reason it has enough minor-key disco stomps to keep us dancing all through autumn.

What we are given this time round is a rather boring queue of unmemorable songs.

Bellamy wriggles ever freer from the straitjacket of rock music, nearing the point where he can slide between genres as easily as his idols, Bowie, Queen and Prince.

There's a good, possibly even a great, album in here somewhere, but Kid Cudi doesn't get very close to finding it.

Can she master the bustle and colour of Latin pop as easily as she mastered sweaty electro? Tristemente, no. While never less than agreeable, Mi Plan is rarely more than that.

It is a rarity: a proper album, from a proper pop star.

Much scruffier and far less inhibited than Coldplay, and way more compelling than Editors, Two Dancers is widescreen stuff nonetheless and an album that will carry them across more thresholds than their first.

While Popular Songs may contain few surprises for long-term admirers, it is nonetheless a contrary beast in that it demands to be heard in a single, complete sitting.

He still sounds temperamentally incapable of making a bad album, but he's made his first boring one.

For all that she's miraculously clawed back here, the one thing that eludes her is the one thing that made her exceptional: her voice. Without it she's just another R&B singer, and, good as it is in places, I Look To You is just another R&B album.

The Time Of Our Lives is a great pop EP drowning in a sea of bilge.

Their strength lies in Turner's lyrical precision, his way of taking a scalpel to the minutiae of real life to make his heckling of fluorescent adolescents, weekend rock stars and scumbags seem like more than just booze-maddened ranting. Here, Turner's words aren't as direct.

Penate has gutted his sound and replaced it with something expressive, warmly empathetic and, best of all, blindingly spangly.

Soulsavers shove the mic in Mark Lanegan's hand and tell him to growl as loud as he can. He brings his friends, they all join in, and they make a lot of sense.

The Bachelor has more than a whiff of a histrionic West End musical confined to a primary school assembly hall which means it's 10 out of 10 for effort, but for execution...

The songs of OCD Go Go Go Girls stand-up to a certain mood--one, passed a certain age, that's usually buoyant and beer-fuelled.

YACHT don't aim to solve the puzzle of life; they just want you to know you're welcome to party round their house anytime you like.

Everything about Complete Me suggests a pop star of rare originality, charm and talent, and one who will win the world over person by person if he has to.

There exists a plodding, phoned-in emotional evenness here which, for a band trading on matters of the soul, is a big problem and one that will stop them entering the arenas those strings were employed for.

Had the production been toned down a bit, to just Young and some lo-fi synths, these songs would have worked much better. But then that would have invited even more comparisons to The Postal Service. A noble, but ultimately uninspiring, effort.