1. Coldplay: ``X & Y'' (Capitol Records): The English band, which put out two previous albums that were sweet as cotton candy, and just as tiresome, shows what it can do with an album that is less elevator music, more Radiohead. It's rich, deep and takes a lot of listens to penetrate. No wonder it's not all over the radio, but it was also the disc I played most this year.

2. Kate Bush: ``Aerial'' (Columbia): The seven-year wait was worth it for this double disc, which is as experimental and pleasing as anything by Peter Gabriel or David Bowie. The highest praise you can give some singers is to say they can sing the phone book and make it interesting. Bush goes one better, singing the numbers of the mathematical constant pi. How wry.

3. Jason Ricci and New Blood: ``Blood on the Road'' (Rah Fox Records, ): This powerful quartet takes me back to the days when blues rock was a lethal weapon, sharp and brutal. The Rolling Stones once sounded this pure, a long, long time ago.

4. El Pus: ``Hoodlum Rock: Vol. 1'' (Virgin): Rap and rock should be fun, like Eminem if he hadn't bought all his press and taken himself so seriously. The topics of songs by El Pus -- sex, love, slot machines and suburban white guys trying to be ghetto -- are real in this sorry new age, but they are real funny, too.

5. Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté: ``In the Heart of the Moon'' (Nonesuch): You'd never know that this gentle, hypnotic mix of strings and voice is an improvised album with these two great Malian musicians sitting across from each other in a studio and jamming. It sounds like a carefully planned voyage to the mind's inner spaces. It also was nominated for a Grammy under traditional world music album.

6. Eels: ``Blinking Lights and Other Revelations'' (Vagrant): When they made up the category ``alternative,'' this is what they were talking about. An artist taking chances, creating masterpieces with almost no fanfare or mass audience, and no motivation, other than to make great music. This rock opera recalls Bright Eyes without the hype, Green Day with more subtlety.

7. Bettye Lavette: ``I've Got My Own Hell to Raise'' (Epitaph): A great soul singer covers only songs by female writers and makes them her own. Aretha who? This is the kind of hard-hitting soul that put Detroit on the map and kept it there.

8. Various artists, including Iggy Pop, Black Keys, Fiery Furnaces, Spiritualized: ``Sunday Nights, the Songs of Junior Kimbrough'' (Fat Possum): A bunch of younger artists cover the songs of a deceased Mississippi blues shouter whose brief but fiery recording career didn't start until he was 62. A merger of two eras that brings the best of both together.

9. Ben Taylor: ``Another Run Around the Sun,'' (Iris Records): Of course this sounds like the best James Taylor album in decades. It's his son, though, and it's a gentle affair, but takes some cute twists down some uncountry roads his father didn't travel.

10. Kaiser Chiefs: ``Employment'' (Universal Motown): Sometimes sloppy, sometimes anthemic, this is Brit pop hatched out of a pub, not a marketing manager's brain. Kind of like the Kinks of yore.

This is cache, read story here