Virtually every song is crafted beautiful with Cave’s lyrics and vocals never being better suited. In many ways its the more subdued Lyre of Orpheus that is the greater achievement, a secular hymnbook, that dreams of love, passion, and miracles. Yet, the rockier, bluesier Abattoir Blues is, if anything as strong, but with a visceral power that Cave and his associates have had since the Birthday party. Growing old with his audience, the songwriting simply gets better and better. One of four Bad Seeds albums of the decade (plus the Grinderman album), by encapsulating all that’s great about Cave’s vision it seems the strongest of them all.

Musically its fine enough, their energetic but economic guitar combo sound augmented with some spaghetti western turns, and an ever-willingness to rock in a way that few indie bands really achieve. Yet singles Brianstorm and Flourescent Adolescent aren’t quite as strong as the debut. Alex Turner would shortly broaden his palate with the Last Shadow Puppets and they remained, and remain in the first division of British alternative bands, but in many ways they’ve become just another band.

Guy Garvey’s down-to-earth Bury persona is part of this, but Garvey has always worn his heart on his sleeve lyrically, and with this album being a tribute to a dead friend, that honesty reached its apex with their fourth album. Always less than content with the short form pop song, their albums are integrated works, which still manage to have the odd radio hit on them – in this case, the song that the BBC chose to soundtrack the Olympics, the euphoric, One Day Like This, possibly the most conventionally structured song of their career.

Yet its Garvey’s world weary vocals, and the ever varied sonic palate that makes this album in particular so resonate with the times. It seems now that Elbow, four albums in, are the honesty and soul of the decade’s British music.

It’s a downbeat album, and I’m not sure it was what the world wanted from Coldplay in record number 3, though the world as ever gave them the benefit of the doubt. It would probably take Viva La Vida, with its renewed optimism, to stop them going into a downward spiral. There’s the troublesome Talk, a riff looking for a song, and only finding one in a sample of Kraftwerk’s Computer Love. Then there’s there most maudlin and barren ballad, the piano led Fix You. Never a guitar act in the same way that Radiohead are, the acoustic guitars and pianos on this album dominate to a somnabulistic effect.

Deliberately put into 2 sides, X and Y, the latter is the more upbeat – and there are some nice melodies, and some pleasing arrangements, but everything is either tentative or tasteful. Album tracks like What If and The Hardest Part see Chris Martin at his most plaintive, and that’s part of the band’s appeal, yet there’s something distant about the album compared with what they’ve done before.

Opening single Speed of Sound sounded beautiful but overproduced and there was some anger from commentators when it was kept from number one by a novelty record, Crazy Frog’s ringtone based version of Axel F. It was a certain irony that a band trying to cope with being modern was beaten to the top by an effortless modernity.

Yet Speed of Sound is more similar to the previous albums anthems than X&Ys acoustic ballads.

At the end of the day, the album remains a solid piece of work, beautiful in parts, but one-paced, and seeming to lack the definition of their best work. Its sales were still remarkable though – and Coldplay would end the decade having released four multi-million selling records.

So I didn’t rush out to get Modern Times when it came out to much acclaim and high sales in 2006. Yet its a remarkable piece of work. Just as Dylan had embraced country in the late 60s, here he chooses a musical tableau that’s virtually pre-rock, a suitably timeless backing to a series of highly emotionally charged songs. Here is the Dylan that he’d open up about in his autobiography Chronicles Vol.1, a musical magpie, taking in various music from different places – blues, rock and roll, country, folk, popular music – and knowing which bits to use and which bits to discard. Dylan as musical curator had come to the fore through his unexpected new career as a radio presenter, yet its what he’s always done.

As one of the main legends of rock music over the decades, he has more reason than most to have ownership of this wide legacy. So even if the musical tropes on Modern Times go back as far as the twenties, thirties and forties, it never once sounds like a nostalgic work. Lyrically its a spiritual work, not as downbeat as the old man’s last testament that Time Out of Mind seemed to be. In fact the more jaunty, less bluesy backing helps the song sing with an unexpected joi de vivre – but that’s been something that Dylan’s always done, alongside his more introspective work.

The songs are elemental, Biblical – with titles like Thunder on the Mountain and the Levee’s Gonna Break – a familiar territory for Dylan, but also for any rock and roll that beats with the heart of its origins. The stunning Workingmans Blues #2 may well be his best song since Hurricane.

This debut is a big, bad antediluvian piece of metal, that I can’t help but love. For someone like me who’d avoided grandiose heavy metal all my life, grunge had required me to open up a little – but grunge was always slightly off-kilter. Here you get the riffs of Rage but without the hip hop sensibility. The music still swings a bit, but the rhythms are pounding, obsessive, loud; and Chris Cornell is a man-for-all-seasons rock shouter.

There’s something off-the-shelf about this album, but somehow it works, everything is predictable as hell, but done so well that the formulaic nature of the record doesn’t matter. In a decade of simulacrums of previous musical genres, this record could well be one of the only genuinely fulfilling metal albums of the decade. Single Cochise in particular is a wonderful anthem, and throughout there’s not a trick missed in making Audioslave exactly what you’d expect.

By the follow-up, Out of Exile, the quality of the songs had dipped to such an extent that it’s hardly worth a listen, but here at least is the Soundgarden album rock fans had always wanted, or the Rage album that traditionalists had hoped for. Perhaps the previous equivalent had been when the Cult delivered their Electric album – though musically the following Sonic Temple is more of a bedfellow.

As hard rock as the granite that Fred Flintstone quarries in the cartoon, Audioslave is a sign of the times. Just around the corner you’d find the more baroque experiments of the Mars Volta or System of A Down, but otherwise, I’d rather listen to this chunk of rock traditionalism than Green Day or the Foo Fighters.

Like every other “big” album of the decade it was too long – over an hour.

In songs like Carrion, they weren’t afraid to try their hand at the anthemic, and this side of their music would come through more and more on following albums, but for once, with The Decline of British Sea Power, a band seemed to have got all its good habits together on the debut.

Seeing them live in 2008, it was the songs from the debut that stood out from the sonic storm, careering riffs, reminiscent of Fripp on Scary Monsters, anthemic choruses, and a certain quirky raggedness. Follow ups Open Season and particularly Do You Like Rock Music? had their moments, but weren’t anywhere near as surprising. Listening to it now its one of the best debuts of the decade, and all the better, for having been such a surprise package.