Perhaps the most talented "son act" in pop music, Jeff Buckley combined the often harrowing eclecticism of estranged papa Tim Buckley with the rock acrobatics of Robert Plant. This posthumously released collection of four-track demos and sessions helmed by Tom Verlaine indicates that Buckley's astonishing full-length debut, Grace, was no fluke. The young singer-songwriter puts his falsetto to good use on an extraordinary collection of original material, from the soulful "Everybody Wants You" to the psychedelic "Murder Suicide Meteor Slave". And while his bluesy take on Porter Wagoner's "Satisfied Mind" may not be as revelatory as his earlier version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", this album offers ample proof that Buckley was among his generation's most gifted voices. -Bill Forman.

Michael Jackson's Thriller is the bestselling album of all time, with 45 million worldwide sales powered by eight Grammy Awards. The 1982 album was also a success from which the pop superstar never really recovered-subsequent albums seemed to have no other goal than to beat the records set by Thriller. The highly- polished sound of Quincy Jones's production sounds almost organic compared to Jackson's more recent work, and in the same regard, Thriller was significantly slicker than its predecessor, Off the Wall. Both albums established a Jackson style that aimed for the dance floor with songs built on a state-of-the-art bed of percussion and keyboards. Elements of milestone Thriller tracks like "Billie Jean" (arguably Jackson's best-ever performance) and "Beat It" (with its hard- rock solo by guitarist Eddie Van Halen) influenced not just Jackson's records, but those of the entire dance-pop world. On the song "Thriller", Jackson indulged his taste for the juvenile and invited Vincent Price to rap in a really scary voice. With Thriller the album, Jackson created a different kind of monster-a hit album of such magnitude that it would have an irrevocable impact not just on the singer's art, but on his altogether kooky life. -John Milward.

When Life Thru A Lens came out, Robbie Williams was a swiftly-failing music industry joke-"Blobbie Pill-iams", the ballooning drug-freak, drunk and bleary-eyed at far too many parties for his own good. Although his cover of George Micheal's "Freedom" had gone in at Number 2, "Old Before I Die" and "South Of The Border" sounded too like weak-tea Oasis for any real chart action and people were starting to talk about him as a failure. Then the elegiac "Angels" with its simple black-and-white video hit MTV pay-dirt, and six months later Williams was picking up six BRIT Awards, showing off his post-rehab six-pack and dating an All Saint. And so the rest of Life Thru A Lens is a likeable, hyperactive stream of consciousness-much like Williams himself. "Lazy Days" is an unexpectedly gorgeous psychedelic swoon, and "Let Me Entertain You"-"When I'm Cleaning Windows" for the Hooch generation-is still an irresistible offer. -Caitlin Moran.

Containing eight remixed tracks from Jackson's 1995 HIStory, as well as five new compositions, Blood On The Dancefloor tastefully mixes old sounds with new. The new songs which open the album are led by the thrash-pop title track, which is reminiscent of many of the creations on Dangerous. "Morphine" is a dark and emotive track, while "Ghosts" and "Is It Scary" are autobiographical accounts of fatherhood and the problems of privacy which followed the birth of his baby. The disco remix of "Stranger In Moscow", meanwhile, is an excellent up-tempo remodelling of the original track. -John Galilee.

This album, with which the singer reached his commercial peak, reflects Chris Rea's love/hate relationship with the car. The title track is famously inspired by Rea's experiences of the M25, but this is not a simple tract on the evils of the automobile-in 1988, he bought himself a racing car. His vision of hell is the traffic jam that stops you from using all that expensive acceleration. In this sense Chris Rea-the epitome of maturity compared to most in his business-shows himself still very much a rock star. The Road To Hell, despite the melancholy piano riff of the song itself and its Leonard Cohen-ish lyrics, is an optimistic album with a warm, embracing sound. This album is graced with some of Rea's finest creations: the spacey "Daytona", the topicality of "You Must Be Evil" and the catchy "That's What They Always Say". "Texas" is another witty commentary on the need for speed, and like many of the tracks on this disc it has the mellow groove that Rea has made his own. On The Road To Hell, Rea successfully marries the philosophy of the family man with the ethos of a rock star, in a way that many other forty-something crooners can only envy. He also marries a measure of self- expression with real commercial success: his first number one album, The Road To Hell went triple-platinum. -James Swift.

Following the successful formula of their eponymous debut album, Savage Garden's Affirmation is made up of classic pop melodies and sleepy ballads. The title track cracks open the album-a song that sees Hayes philosophising about the inequalities of the world from a liberal minded perspective (and in true Alanis Morissette "Ironic" fashion). Although it leaves the boys open to claims of pretentiousness, the song is a high-powered introduction to an album which somehow manages to alternate between safe and risky. For example, "The Animal Song" is a menagerie of popular music sounds, which manages to be challenging while remaining comfortably familiar. Affirmation is an album that affirms why Savage Garden are one of the world's most important pop duos. -John Galilee.

Released in the glow of Wings' biggest and best album, Band On The Run, Venus & Mars found Paul McCartney in his element-a working rock star, being screamed at again, cheerfully riding the last rays of his youth. Adulation always brought the best out of him, and Venus & Mars is nearly the equal of its more lauded predecessor. McCartney never strays from his favourite themes (sex, drugs, rock & roll and marriage), but his confidence is audibly high, mixing gorgeous, airy production numbers such as "Listen To What The Man Said" and "Letting Go" with the ribald and hilarious. "Rock Show" matches The Who's "Long Live Rock" as the finest and funniest of those self-celebratory Seventies stomps. McCartney's effortless marshalling of melody and arrangement hoists the blander material out of trouble, and the best stuff's powered by genuine, rediscovered verve. Facile and frivolous, but not at all bad. And their version of the "Crossroads" theme tune is wicked. -Taylor Parkes.

Based on director Robert Wilson's horrific tale of a 19th century Prussian soldier subjected to medical experiments after being driven insane by his cheating woman, Tom Waits' Blood Money is-contrarily-the funniest Waits album since his late 1970s drunken cabaret period. The musical landscape is painted by alternately stomping or swaying jazz rhythms and melodies, pizzicato strings, sexy mutant Latin guitars, wailing harmonicas, lyrical clarinets and drunken brass, while Waits utilises every voice-from poisoned croon to martial rant-that he's ever stumbled upon, as his metaphors and killing jokes turn horror into bleak hilarity. Ignore those who say that Blood Money is the evil, inaccessible twin of the concurrently-released Alice-they perhaps don't appreciate the desire for redemption and the love of humanity that lies behind the ironies of all great black comedy. Blood Money is a new musical and poetic peak, and the greatest Tom Waits album yet. -Garry Mulholland.

Randy Newman began his career as a misanthropic satirist and thwarted romantic. It's this version of Newman who shows up for Songbook Vol 1, despite his now being best known as the curly haired Prince of Pixar (he's written hit songs for a number of animated blockbusters, including Toy Story 2 and A Bug's Life). Songbook Vol 1 revisits 18 of his compositions, most written in the 1960s or 1970s, and all stripped down to just voice and piano. The idea is borrowed from vintage tributes to the masters, the "songbooks" of Jerome Kern or Cole Porter. In Newman's case, it's hard to imagine anyone else singing a slave-trader's smooth sales pitch ("Sail Away"), a deity's bemused take on mankind ("God's Song") or a child-murderer's creepy meditation ("In Germany Before the War"). Stripped of rock backbeats or orchestral sweetening, Newman's songs reveal their stark beauty and classic craftsmanship even more keenly. What may be most remarkable, however, is how prescient some of the songs seem now ("Lonely at the Top" predates the rise of OK magazine and a revolving cast of whining superstars) and how timely some of its humour is. "Political Science" may have been written during the Vietnam War, but its clueless narrator ("No one likes us, I don't know why / We may not be perfect but heaven knows we try") sounds a lot like a Bush Jr cabinet member. Since the early 1980s, Newman has focused the lion's share of his attention on soundtrack scores and sly but cuddly buddy songs. Songbook Vol 1 makes one wish Newman would devote more of his energies to writing new songs as topical, vibrant and biting as his old ones. [+]

A judiciously-selected two-CD compendium of Peter Gabriel's finest moments, Hit offers a far more generous windfall than can be found on the only previous Peter Gabriel best-of selection, the 1990 Shaking the Tree. The devil, after all, is in the detail, particularly on the second disc (self-deprecatingly entitled "Miss"), which really traverses the whole gamut of Peter Gabriel's globally-visioned artistry. It includes recent soundtrack work (the haunting "Cloudless" from Long Walk Home: Music from the Rabbit-Proof Fence), material from 2002's sterling Up ("Signal To Noise", featuring a compelling vocal from the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and some ominous string arrangements, really does sound like a thinking man's Massive Attack) and goes right back to that fourth album when marrying the reticence of cold, synthesised new wave with insistent African percussion seemed like a good idea (it was). The first disc-including the MTV smash "Sledgehammer", anti-apartheid war cry "Biko", "Big Time" (interesting how the styles of Gabriel and his former group Genesis seem to converge at this time) and "Games Without Frontiers"-really speaks for itself, although with hindsight it seems the single-buying public-at-large had a particular taste for a certain kind of Peter Gabriel record. Universally excellent throughout, the collection is rendered even more desirable by the inclusion of three previously unreleased tracks: a live rendition of "Downside Up", a shorter version of "Blood of Eden" and "Burn You Up, Burn You Down", latterly included on a video game and initially earmarked for the Up album but jettisoned at the last minute. -Kevin Maidment.

As the Beatles' perpetual dark horse, Harrison rarely got the chance to write and sing more than one or two songs per album. But once the band split up, the former "quiet one" was quick out of the gate with a series of memorable hit singles that seamlessly merged his budding spirituality and an epic, Phil Spector-inspired pop sensibility. This collection, originally released in 1976, combines seven of Harrison's best-known Beatles numbers, including "Something", "If I Needed Someone", "Here Comes the Sun", and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" with a half-dozen early solo hits including "My Sweet Lord", "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)", "You" and "What Is Life". As such, it's a good entry-level Harrison primer. -Scott Schinder.

Summoned to Hamburg, Germany, to write music for a live stage production of Robert Wilson's The Black Rider, musical mastermind Waits took to the task at hand with gusto, assembling an eclectic crew of musicians to become "the pit band [he'd] always dreamed of. " Several years later Waits assembled another "orchestra" in San Francisco to record many of the songs he'd written for the live production. Those tracks are found here, alongside a few rough gems from sessions in Hamburg. You'll find some musical matter familiar to Waits fans: accordions, carnivals, violas, banjos, the devil (a key figure in The Black Rider), a singing saw, bassoons, and trombones. Waits' many voices tell the rather disjointed story with a variety of musical styling, and the assembled whole is pretty much a sum of its parts (but at least they're interesting parts): a touch of Day of the Dead, a whiff of carny, a nod to Brecht, a dash of film noir, and the scent of narcosis (William Burroughs makes an appearance here). Not easy listening, by any means, but a feast for the ears. -Lorry Fleming.