"Heatwave", the funk-flavoured track on 1999's Source Rocks compilation, suggested Phoenix were another product of the French filtered disco wave. On the basis of United, it was a red herring because the album is suffused with breezy, retro-flavoured rock numbers. One of the band, keyboard player and guitarist Branco, was in Darlin-the indie act that spawned Daft Punk-but if they went one way, he surely went the other. United is reminiscent of West Coast American FM pop rock, with nods to everyone from Crosby Stills Nash and Young to "Jump"-era Van Halen. The thrilling "Too Young" and swooning "On Fire" are rattling good pop songs that fall on the right side of affectionate pastiche. "Summertime" is an enthusiastic power pop thrash, "Embuscade" a Steely Dan-styled jazz rock instrumental and "Summerdays" a carefree country-tinged trip to the beach. Refreshing, intelligent and successful French rock-now that is a first. -Mike Pattenden.

The Icelandic iconoclast is a past master of deconstructing her studio recordings, and here she plays an active role in helping a crew of re-mixers and guest artistes get medieval with tracks off 1995's Post. Trip-hop, jungle, and industrial flavours will draw the Tricky crowd, and Brodsky Quartet puts a string-driven spin on "Hyperballad", but it's the lush Deodata treatment of "Isobel" that'll make your head spin. -Jeff Bateman.

Whereas other compilations in Pete Tong's Essential Selections series of DJ mixes have featured one or two big-name jocks, Essential Millenium features three-Tong himself, Fatboy Slim and Paul Oakenfold. With arguably the three biggest DJs of 1999 on board, it really should be something special-and most of it is. All three DJs stick largely to their own musical style, leading to three vastly different discs. Oakenfold steals the show with a breathtaking mix of melodic, uplifting trance that's tough, tuneful, euphoric and nigh on brilliant. Fatboy Slim spins a tight set of party favourites, effortlessly moving between big beat, hard acid house and funky hip hop; though it doesn't come close to matching the brilliance of his own On The Floor At The Big Beat Boutique mix album, it's still quite good. Pete Tong proves to be the loser of the lot, completing the set with the weakest-yet most commercially accessible-mix, chopping together disco house anthems (Phats and Small,Basement Jaxx, Stardust, Armand Van Helden) and Ibiza favourites (Bob Marley vs Funkstar Deluxe, Paul Johnston). Tong's cheesy house-set aside, this collection is as essential as the title implies. -Matt Anniss.

Having pretty much cornered the market for great dance compilations with Clubber Guides, Trance Nations, Annuals and the like, Ministry Of Sound took a step away from the dancefloor with its first major chillout compilation The Chillout Session. And as with their more uptempo assortments, the quality of the tracks is superlative. From the subtle downtempo beats and pieces of Jakatta's "American Dream" to the Ibizan sunset vibes of York's "The Awakening" to horizontal classics like Lemon Jelly's "In The Bath" and Leftfield's "Melt", you can almost picture the lava lamp steadily bubbling away in the corner of the room. It's not all instrumental tracks, either, Alex Gopher's "The Child" and Fatboy Slim and Macy Gray's collaboration on "Demons" both pop up to add a little bit of late-night soul. The only problem is who gets up to put the second CD on. -Helen Marquis.

Following in the footsteps of Fila Brazilla, Howie B, Rae & Christian and Zero 7, Groove Armada make their contribution to the Another Late Night series. Selecting their favourite downbeat tunes and effortlessly mixing them, the duo un-earth such gems as Tim Love Lee's "Java Jam", "Standing in the Rain" by Don Ray and "Day Dreaming" by Aretha Franklin. Two standouts to look out for are Groove Armada's own exclusive cover version of the standard "Fly Me to the Moon" and their mix of Roy Ayers' "The Memory" with Jeru the Damaja's "Ya Playin' Yaself". -Georgina Collins.

It's been a slow, almost imperceptible evolution, but on Ultravisitor, the seventh album from Tom Jenkinson's Squarepusher project, we finally see this Chelmsford-based electronica guru shrugging off the rather primitive drill 'n' bass tag, and maturing into a fully-fledged musical auteur. Look at him on that sleeve, all serious stare and mutton-chop sideburns: this record feels like a conscious attempt to install Jenkinson into a serious musical canon alongside his obvious heroes John Cage, Miles Davies and Sun Ra. It's a good try, as over these 70-odd minutes of electro-rave mayhem and frighteningly complex jazz-fusion improv, Jenkinson shows absolutely no sign of slowing his dizzying inventive velocity. The flirtation with UK garage that formed the synthetic exoskeleton of 2001's My Red Hot Car is sadly absent, but pieces such as "Menelee" and "Steinbolt" demonstrate fresh fascination for all manner of mutant strains of electronic hardcore and urban junglism, and fill the gap admirably. Elsewhere, we find Jenkinson's passion for live instrumentation more pronounced than at any time since 1998's "Music Is Rotted One Note". This isn't always a good thing. The thrumming, masturbatory bass-soloing of "C-Town Smash" takes jazz proficiency into new realms of ridiculousness. But "I Fulcrum" carries the interstellar legacy of Sun Ra into as-yet undiscovered galaxies, and "Iambic 9 Poetry" proves Jenkinson's gift for melody remains gloriously intact, a perfect example of chiming instrumental clarity amid the deranged chatter of machine-code chaos. -Louis Pattison.

Justice is the moniker of the Paris-based production duo Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay. Their approach to crazy-quilt dance-pop hybridism is infectious, if a tad off-putting here and there. The duo rose to fame due to an MP3 single and super smart video for the excellent, kiddy-chorused house-pop number "D. A. N. C. E. " in 2007, and they soon thereafter signed to the suitably named label Banger. They manage to make really silly and fun music in a way that frequently comes off in a pretentious manner. It's ridiculous to name your album after a symbol, especially if it's †. [+]

It may sound like a soundclash conceived by graphic designers in Hoxton, but Primal Scream's Evil Heat is oddly fantastic. The plot this time is to streamline the massive sounds of 2000's superb Xtrmntr, and to combine two currently potent genres: raw, sexually charged electro and raw, sexually charged rock'n'roll. The key, as ever with Primal Scream, is their collaborators. Hence old mucker Andy Weatherall returns to the fold and turns "Autobahn 66" into a beautiful motorik meditation that simultaneously recalls their own Screamadelicaand the autobahn fantasies of Krautrockers Neu!. Meanwhile, My Bloody Valentine's genius leader Kevin Shields feeds most of the other tracks through his disorientation and distortion effects deck, so that even the most rudimentary New York punkers like "Skull X" and "City" sound originally twisted rather than mere homages. In the midst of it all there's Gillespie, posing like fury, yelping the received wisdom of a thousand dirty rock biogs, far more camp than he can possibly conceive. But Evil Heat, perhaps accidentally, captures the paradox at the heart of truly great rock'n'roll: that the old myths and ideas can still be reinvented, sometimes as comedy, sometimes as revolution, sometimes as both simultaneously. -John Mulvey.

Versebridgechorus is the second full-length album from downbeat, relaxed groovers, Kinobe, best known for their chill-out anthem "Slip Into Something More Comfortable" which appeared on countless compilations and even a well-known beer commercial. Versebridgechorus is just as easily paced as their debut Soundphilles but has a great deal more acoustic instrumentation and soothing vocals like the opening track "Butterfly". A standout tune to rival their previous aforementioned standard is "Having A Moment", a slinky wah-guitar groove that drifts along under the sound of running water without becoming a new age cliché. With a wealth of downbeat electronica being released in 2001 from new, aspiring artists, it is important to remember that past-masters Kinobe were there some time ago. -Georgina Collins.

Not exactly dance-pop as commonly defined by Erasure or the Pet Shop Boys, Dirty Vegas's self-titled album nonetheless fits into this genre. In fact, "trance-pop" is arguably the best definition, as it is likely the offspring of Madonna's Ray of Light and Electronic's seminal debut CD. Promising, yes, but the songs become rather indistinguishable from one another, mainly because the vocals-compressed and folky-lend a sameness to tracks that are otherwise diverse in tone and pace. About half the album really shines: "I Should Know" marries a thumping techno beat with a euphoric Disney-like wonderment; "7AM" boasts the best melody on the album; the instrumental "The Brazillian" showcases the songs' strength underneath the homogenizing vocals; and finally, "Days Go By", featured in a car commercial, mesmerizes with synthesized bongos and cosmic rhythmic brush strokes. -Beth Massa.

Electronica artists are increasingly in demand as film scorers. Overall this is good news, and this heavily instrumental music fits especially well with action or sci-fi movies (cf. Pi). Since Plunkett & Macleane is set in the 18th century, choosing Massive Attack associate Craig Armstrong was a bit of an odd choice-one that's mostly paid off. Here Armstrong mixes up Carl Orff-style pomp, string-laden trip-hop, and a somber ambience reminiscent of late 1980s Goth. And despite Lewis Parker's inept (and incongruous) rapping, a cover of Talking Heads' "Houses in Motion" provides a soulful break from the heavy-duty atmospherics that make up most of this CD. We're not talking Miklós Rósza here, but this definitely is an encouraging piece of work. -Elisabeth Vincentelli.

The Richest Man In Babylon is the third full-length record from Thievery Corporation and finds this atmospheric Washington DC-based electronica duo indulging their esoteric chill-out impulses, blending far-flung world-music influences into a slick, high-production trip-hop cocktail. With an emphasis on keeping it organic, Thievery Corporation boast a radically different sound to their sterile, mechanical-sounding peers: "The Outernationalist" wraps its ethereal electronic synthplay in dub-tinged passages of trippy Rastfari mysticism, while "Facing East" blends wailing Bhangra vocals and whirling sitars into a hypnotic, downotempo whole. They're not exactly on the cutting-edge of this sort of thing-"Un Simple Histoire" and "All That We Perceive" could easily have slipped neatly onto Air's Moon Safari, while the rolling brass of "Liberation Front" bears an uncanny resemblance to Nightmares on Wax circa Car Boot Soul. But like the greatest bits of DJ Shadow's The Private Press, it's often hard to say exactly how these complex, soulful tracks were pieced together in the soulless environment of the studio. It's a cool, impressive achievement. -Louis Pattison.

With Dummy, their 1994 debut, Portishead not only created a classic of turntable-derived soul, but defined their sound so exhaustively as to spawn a host of imitators. So what to do for a follow-up? As it happened, the answer was simple-refine the template. This self-titled album simply ups the ante on everything that made their debut so special: the brooding sense of menace, that deep streak of romantic fatalism. Much is made of the cinematic quality of Portishead's music-and indeed, many of these tracks sound like they should be accompanying some existentialist spy flick from the mid-1960s. But ultimately, it's singer Beth Gibbons that's their greatest asset: her vocals gliding effortlessly from the furious ("Cowboys") to the forlorn ("Mourning Air"); from the exuberant ("All Mine") to the exhausted ("Only You")-and all set to the group's most ambitious and expansive arrangements to date. A majestic, damaged and frequently terrifying masterpiece. -Andrew McGuire.