Anyone who thinks that rock stars should have a retirement age is obviously not a big Leonard Cohen fan. Aged 70, Cohen has rolled out Dear Heather, which stands, alongside Ten New Songs and I'm Your Man as proof positive that there is life after youth for this part-time monk. But even on his early albums, Cohen sounded positively ancient, wise beyond his years- you get the feeling that he's at the age he was born to be, and Dear Heather feels like the album he's been waiting to make. As soon as it starts, you know it's not going to be anything less than classic Cohen. His deep rich croon, weathered slightly through the ravages of age, has matured like an oak tree, betraying enough expression that even a man of 50 would sound immature with his words. Musically, he's ably supported primarily by soft keyboard textures and female vocals that sooth the rough edges of his voice, but nothing too obtrusive to blunt his vision. Impossible to pick a standout, the album works as a whole piece, and even when Cohen tackles country standard "The Tennessee Waltz", its heartbreaking content make it sound like his own work. Essential. -Thom Allott.

"Grandiose" is the word that Stephin Merritt uses to describe this album, and he doesn't seem to be the type who's prone to overstatement. After all, his three-CD collection of 69 love songs has the rather under-elaborate title 69 Love Songs. Still, where he lacks creativity in titling an album, he more than makes up for it as a lyricist. Whereas most of his contemporaries would be lucky to write this many songs in their entire career, Merritt-as the creative force behind the Magnetic Fields-effortlessly proves himself as one of the pre-eminent songwriters of his generation. He is also an incurable romantic; his love songs are interspersed with melancholy, bitterness, hope, sadness, joy, longing-all the emotions that seem to coexist with love. The tunes themselves are a mixture of styles, ranging from sunny pop to simple ballads to faux-Broadway showtunes, while also taking in country (Disc Three's "I'm Sorry I Love You"), toy pop (Disc One's "Absolutely Cuckoo") and synthesized Euro-pop (Disc Two's "Long-Forgotten Fairytale"). The scale of 69 Love Songs is absolutely staggering, and not just because of its sheer size and scope. Stephin Merritt and his Magnetic Fields have crafted one of pop music's most beautiful and inspiring tributes to love. -Robert Burrow.

When The Waterboys' Irish violinist Steve Wickham suggested to Mike Scott that Spiddal was a great place to get away from it all, no-one could have guessed how Scott would take his advice to heart. Within less than a year The Waterboys were transformed from stadium rock incumbents to adopted Irish folk-rockers. Fisherman's Blues is the entrancing outcome of that transition. If the family snapshot on the cover is to be taken at face value, one might imagine this to be an idyllic time in The Waterboys career. In truth, the sessions were painstaking, with Scott discarding over 50 songs over a two-year process. What remains though, is a classic of its time: from the yearning euphoria of the title track to otherworldly beauty of "When Ye Go Away", lent cohesion by the singularity of Scott's vision. For sheer inspiration and flow, precedents begin and end at Van Morrison's Astral Weeks-a doubly appropriate comparison, this, given Scott's superlative reading of Morrison's "Sweet Thing". -Peter Paphides.

Throughout the early 1980s, INXS kept threatening to go big league, and with 1987's Kick they broke wide open, sending a sharp quartet of singles-"New Sensation", "Devil Inside", "Need You Tonight" and the shimmering ballad "Never Tear Us Apart"-right to the charts. The rest of Kick, especially the strutting "Guns in the Sky" and the groovy "Wild Life", is of similar quality; all of it is marked by the band's Stones-y guitars and angular, funk-tinged rhythms. Vocalist Michael Hutchence's MTV good looks and Aretha-meets-Aerosmith swagger completed the musical equation for both the girls and the boys. -Michael Ruby.

She-who-has-only-one-name has been responsible for some of the biggest, world-swallowing hits of the late 20th Century and they're all collected here in one convenient, 19-track package: "Believe", "If I Could Turn Back Time", "Walking In Memphis", even the duet with ex-husband Sonny Bono "I Got You Babe". An excellent career overview of one of pop's premier divas. -Ted Kord.

Enrique's bid to firmly place the son of Julio in the mainstream pop firmament leads off with mid-tempo dance-pop airwaves candidate "Rhythm Divine". The track is typical of the rest that follow: highly wrought emotion recalled in a bed of glossy production that uses Latin syncopation as a reminder of the singer's roots while resolutely aiming for chart supremacy next to the likes of Celine Dion. Filled with pop romanticism-a duet with Whitney Houston, a cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Sad Eyes" and proclamations on the order of "I've seen the sun make love to the sea"-Enrique is easy enough on the ears and sounds like a surefire hit. -Rickey Wright.

At this stage in a band's career a Mojo front cover would seem more likely than actually getting their old mojo back. And at 14 albums young, REM's longevity had been taken as a byword for pale compliance-in spite of a melodic obedience, last album Around the Sun lacked the emotional vigour of their key works and was presumed by many to be no more than a footnote in their decline. Here then is where they break all the rules. Accelerate is exceptionally loyal to its title and marks a hefty return to their Document-era heyday, when their Byrdsian post-punk was beefed up to suit the arenas they were then beginning to fill. There's even a new "end of the world" song to back up that assertion-the excitable Stooges/B52s love-in "I'm Gonna DJ" ("Death is pretty final/I'm collecting vinyl/I'm gonna DJ at the end of the world!"). Michael Stipe's voice splinters scattered emotional punctuation, Mike Mills is as ever REM's secret weapon, drilling out bass-lines like rapid CPR and achieving more with a single backing vocal than many lead singers manage over a whole album, while Peter Buck deals out memorable guitar twists a-go-go evoking amongst others The Who, The Small Faces and Neil Young. To summon a cliché, this really does sound like a band-and a band half their age at that-playing live in a room, packed full of all the fire and nuances needed to feel at home in a club or the stadiums they now more regularly inhabit. -James Berry.

Cat Stevens tends to be lumped in with the early-1970s singer/songwriter school led by James Taylor and Carole King but he actually fits in rather neatly with such wistful contemporaries as Nick Drake, Syd Barrett and Donovan. Tea for the Tillerman's "Wild World", "Into White" and "Longer Boats" indicate that he may have been a more gifted tunesmith than the lot of them. As with the best of the Brit folk-rockers, Stevens mixed melancholy with whimsy. Yes, he was prone to airy platitudes but when he harnessed his eccentricities, as he did throughout this 1970's masterwork, you had something truly distinctive. Stevens' greatest drawback was that he was a natural cult artist, à la Tim Buckley and Leonard Cohen. But that's a tough role to play when you're selling 25 million records, as Stevens did before he changed his name to Yusef Islam, established an Islamic school, and raised a ruckus by supporting Ayatollah Khomeini's death decree against author Salman Rushdie. -Steven Stolder.

Although Blur had long been recognised as one of the premier bands responsible for the reinvigoration of Britpop in the 1990s, it's 1994's Parklife that truly provided the template for the entire movement. At a time when Oasis were aping the sounds of their pub-rock heroes on Definitely Maybe, Blur drew from the legacy of the Kinks and Small Faces to create an album that's as English as a rainy Sunday in front of the gas fire. Parklife is full of songs that, quite frankly, don't make much sense outside of the British Isles, songs that find joy in the mundane, like "Girls & Boys" (a song about working-class holidaymakers in the sun) and "Parklife" (a day in the life of a cheeky, unemployed bench-sitter). Witty, ironic and irreverent, Parklife remains one of those rare albums that sum up a specific place and time (Britain in the mid-1990s). For that reason alone, it can be considered one of Blur's finest albums. -Robert Burrow.

Garage-rock? The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' second album demonstrates that if this New York art-school trio were ever anything to do with the stripped-down, lo-fidelity rock ethic, it was strictly by coincidence. Rather, Show Your Bones marks this band out as true 21st Century new-wavers, their sound filled out with gleaming layers of guitar and a dynamic that bucks and coils with devious ambition under vocalist Karen O's gasped, orgasmic yowl. True, like Fever To Tell, Shake Your Bones opens with a snarl and an surfeit of fiery rock-out gumption-see single "The Golden Mile" and "Phenomena", Karen chanting "Something like a phenomenon/You're something like a phenomenon" over crunchy, distorted stomp. But gradually, the album softens to yield emotional secrets. "Cheating Hearts" commences with a triumphant Nick Zinner fanfare apparently cribbed straight from the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant", but blossoms out into a passionate love song that flits between swooning poignancy and elatory triumph, while the hushed "Warrior" belies Karen and Nick's genesis as a singer-songwriter duo-at least until it rears into life like a rattlesnake, Karen letting loose gleeful kung-fu chops atop slices of choppy guitar. A second album that, far from feeling difficult, comes across as almost effortless in its excellence. -Louis Pattison.