Pulp - We Love Life

Pulp are back - with the best album they've recorded since His 'n' Hers. With the reclusive Scott Walker at the helm 'We Love Life' has it all - sparkling, sharp pop with the perfect secret ingredient of Jarvis Cocker's slightly pervy 'socialist revenge fantasies'. Pulp's album has a down-to-earth empathetic quality that makes most bands seem hopelessly preening and pretentious. Music made for people, not for the charts and not for the NME.

The Strokes - Is This It?

Phwoar. The sweetest hips and haircuts in New York City belong to The Strokes. As do the punkiest riffs, ass-shaking tunes, and Iggy Pop/Lou Reed stylings. The Strokes ravished young indie broads worldwide with the release of this pelvic-thrust of a punk pop album. So sexy it's almost pornographic - and by the way, it's my ass on the cover.

"What would you do? If you saw spaceships...over Glasgow?" Probably make a (short) post-rock album I expect. And then get Dave Fridmann to produce it. And a nice glossy cover for it as well. Then I might ask Gruff from the Super Furry Animals to sing for me. And then I'd try my best to make it get into the NME album charts, but it probably wouldn't. So I'd get all depressed and wait for ages.

Eels - Souljacker

"You little punks think you own this town..." We sure do. Mark 'E' Everett has cheered up slightly and grown a big bushy beard. He's gone and got himself a wife and he's happy about it even in "this world of shit". He now has a large bushy hound under his arms, and PJ Harvey's right hand man John Parish on guitar. I'm glad that E has survived his dark years, because he's evolving into some kind of bushy dog loving genius.

Mercury Rev - All Is Dream

Full of otherworldly sonic interventions and painfully frail lyrics and vocal melodies, the follow up to the modern classic 'Deserter's Songs' didn't disappoint (...much). Crashing orchestration and spiralling bass and percussion gives this album a feel of being some kind of agnostic invocation... like Baron Munchausen or The Princess Bride, 'All Is Dream' is a surreal and pungent trip to the moon.
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Bob Dylan - Love and Theft

Whoah. This man's voice is getting more gravelly than dirty pit muck from the bottom of a coal mine. Dylan sheds another skin, thumbing through the book of American music history to produce another virtuoso collection of songs. More countrified in direction (as his hillbilly band suggested on the 'Time Out of Mind' tour), songs like 'Mississipi' and 'Lonesome Day Blues' make this an instant classic.