Celebrating their 30th anniversary this year

This month…

Featuring tributes to curry and fantasy battles involving… rats?! here are all the records our critics loved this year

Black And Blue UMC/POLYDOR

From The Bottom Of An Old Grandfather Clock (reissue, 2004) DEAD OCEANS

It was 1965 with bells on, the year the singles charts got wilder, heavier, druggier. Twelve months of traumas, transgressions and transvestism, experiments and explosions. How 20 revolutionary platters from 1966 revealed "the secrets of space and time". "Intensity was the keynote," says JON SAVAGE.

We might have lost metal’s founding fathers, but the next generation proved that the music lives on