The competition to see who can slather Bob Dylan’s 32nd studio album with the most deranged praise known to man is hotting up, writes Alexis Petridis.

Boney M could turn almost anything into a disco hit but, asks Alexis Petridis, will their surreal songs make sense as a musical?

Thirty years ago, the idea that Abba might be worthy not just of serious consideration, but of a nine-CD, two-DVD box set collecting their every studio recording and video, would have been both bizarre and hilarious, writes Alexis Petridis, ahead of the realease of Abba: The Complete Studio Recordings.

CD OF THE WEEK: 50 Cent’s last album, The Massacre, sounds like the work of someone for whom music is merely a sideline, a distraction from the serious business of perpetuating a violent, ghoulish sideshow, writes Alexis Petridis.

Everything that once made critics snigger at U2 is back on their latest album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, but this time no one is going to be laughing, writes Alexis Petridis.

A Grand Don’t Come for Free is witty, cocky and self-deprecating, and it wins you over at a stroke. Alexis Petridis puts The Streets’s new album in her player for a while.

Until recently, your average record company executive probably reacted to the sound of a cellphone blaring out its ring tone with the same weary resignation as the rest of us. But ring tones now account for 10% of the world’s music market, generating a staggering -billion. So, shouldn’t they have their own chart?

Nearly everyone under the age of 15 appears to have swallowed the official line on Avril Lavigne: that she is an authentic symbol of punk rebellion, an antidote to manufactured pop. Everyone else is perplexed, largely because she could be no more obviously manufactured if she had a barcode taped to her forehead, writes Alexis Petridis.

Another new year and another new Beatles release. This may come as a bit of a shock, but the Beatles split up in 1970. Alexis Petridis on the mighty machine behind the band that won’t go away.