I first heard Butcher Boy’s second album on my wife’s birthday when – at her request, I took the car to a garden centre in Enfield and filled it up with a shopping list of plants that she had requested. I grabbed a handful of previously unheard CDs and filled the CD changer with them. I had high hopes for React Or Die because the sleeve image looked fantastic and it had a great title. I knew before the record even finished that I would have to listen to it again straight away. It consumed me in the way that albums like Aztec Camera’s High Land Hard Rain and Dexys’ Too Ry-Aye had consumed me as a child. I begged The Times (where I was working at the time) to let me make it the lead album review in the following week’s paper. I remember sitting in a Starbucks in Glasgow en route to a Bat For Lashes concert and knowing that I had only given myself two hours to sum up everything I thought about this record. As you’ll see, I was convinced it was going to set a benchmark for literate indiepop just as records by The Smiths and Belle & Sebastian had done before it. I guess all sorts of external factors contribute to a record having that sort of impact – and whilst it didn’t quite happen for React Or Die, I’m still certain that in ten or twenty years time, Butcher Boy’s music will elicit the sort of intense adoration that their musical forbears have come to enjoy.

By the time Oasis cloned it, fattened it up, shoved marching powder up its nose and gave it the full Adidas makeover, the only thing indie music shared with its beleaguered twin was a name. In the mid-90s, with The Smiths and the bands that came in their wake long defunct, a strain of pop music for people who read books and wore duffle coats had suddenly become an endangered species.

Hence, when Belle And Sebastian arrived in 1996, they represented a rearguard action for a marginalized aesthetic. People who complained that their live shows sounded like an unrehearsed school orchestra were missing the point. As weapons go, such unabashed feyness was probably no more effective than those poor Tibetan monks who think that meditation is a more powerful weapon than Chinese guns. But there’s a difference between pledging your allegiance and simply picking the winning team. Thirteen years after The Smiths released This Charming Man, Belle And Sebastian re-emphasised the core values of indiepop. Now, another thirteen years on, here’s an album that will do it all over again.

If React Or Die feels like the result of all that history, that’s no accident. Like Belle And Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, Butcher Boy’s 34 year-old frontman John Blain Hunt gravitated from Ayrshire to Glasgow and spent years observing the city’s music scene as an outsider. He was a published poet before meeting musicians who helped him turn his creations into the songs on 2007’s Profit In Your Poetry debut. But as if to formalize his transition to proper frontman, his group’s second album begins with When I’m Asleep – little more than a single couplet repeated over a fine rain of cello and mandolins.

Beyond the opening-credits sweep of that song, Hunt’s words fill the void where the important stuff between friends and lovers inevitably remains unsaid. You’re Only Crying For Yourself is a case in point, a meeting between two changed souls attempting in the face of circumstances to understand each other. With the halting meter of a Caledonian Jake Thackray. Hunt sings “The face in the photograph would send me home but you won’t.”

If there’s tenderness in the tension he describes, it works the other way too. “We jaw for a month but we’re such kittenish drunks that it makes it worse,” he sings on This Kiss Will Marry Us, before Aioife Magee’s violin swirls like a thermal current beneath him. Here and elsewhere, the pretty precision of Butcher Boy’s arrangements suggests several turntable miles spent alternately listening to French 60s pop dandy Michel Polnareff and, on Clockwork, Charlie Brown pianist Vince Guaraldi. That Hunt grew up on a diet of Peanuts strips seems appropriate given the sentiments of songs like A Better Ghost, where much as the hapless round-headed kid might once have done, he utters, “You’re haunted by a better ghost than me.”

And despite the fact that Sunday Bells is the only tune here that runs fast enough to break into a sweat, every song in React Or Die elicits a thrill beyond speed or volume that – on reflection – is peculiar to pretty much every great record in your collection. The secret ingredient here is the monastic commitment that the most beautiful pop songs divine from those given the job of playing them. By filling up an album with them, Butcher Boy have set a standard against which every other release this year must surely be judged.

When you have spent the official price of $220 per ticket to see the band that soundtracked your youth, is there any other option but to enjoy yourself? Seemingly not. Twenty-two years after The Police dissolved in a mire of acrimony, their first date of this mammoth reunion tour had all but a handful of the 20,000 fans at this ice hockey stadium standing from the very beginning. Were those fans so inclined – say, during the more protracted instrumental sections of Walking In Your Footsteps – they could done the maths on a 21-song set and worked out that they had spent over $10 a song. But then, perhaps it’s crass to put a price tag on an unforgettable evening. It may be a material world, but as one of the evening’s more familiar songs served to remind us, we are spirits in it.

Besides, if you wanted to be crude about it, some songs performed well for the money. With the three huge screens over the stage yet to flicker into life, the jukebox-precise accuracy with which they played Message In A Bottle ferried you straight back to 1979. There was some narrative sense in playing the song ahead of everything else. Five months before the song’s original release, The Police played the nearby Commodore Ballroom only to be booed off stage. Sting must have derived some poetic gratification, then, from having his hundred million bottles returned with such vocal gusto.

At times, the creative tensions which characterised The Police’s nine years together worked to their advantage. Stewart Copeland’s syncopations and fills ensured that Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic stopped short of sounding banal. And as he busied himself, the 56 year-old former schoolteacher out front proceeded to do that baffling thing that he spent so much of The Police’s first incarnation doing – stepping out to the front of the stage and getting the audience to join in with his famous “aaay-o” reggae yodel.

Other songs were harder to join in with on account of the fact that The Police seemed to have forgotten how to play them. Twenty one years ago, the original recording Don’t Stand So Close To Me – in which the former schoolteacher famously rhymed Nabokov with “shake and cough” – troubled the singer so much that The Police re-recorded it as a farewell single. Tonight, that dodgy couplet was the least of its problems. Sounding not so much of off-key as avant-garde, the band seemed so embarrassed by what they had done to it that they steamed straight into the furrow-browed conscience rock of Driven To Tears, to no greater avail.

It was a slough that highlighted a problem unique to a group of The Police’s stature. With virtually no bands in their wake citing their five albums as an influence, they remain a group remembered for the quality of their singles. But good as those singles were, there simply weren’t enough to fill a two hour show. Perhaps by way of compensation, the tanned, muscular frontman mounted the drum riser for When The World Is Running Down and wiggled a pair of buttocks that could crack a walnut with a mere twitch. While thousands of Canadian women sighed contentedly, countless Canadian men in freshly-starched polo shirts nodded sagely to Andy Summers’ bluesy soloing.

With a good tune at their disposal though, you could forgive The Police anything. In the cold light of day, 1983’s Wrapped Around You Finger is wont to make you feel a little like you’re being clubbed to death by an English lecturer wielding a rhyming dictionary. But tonight, it was an unexpected triumph. As a hydraulic podium lifted Copeland to his own little percussion grotto, it served to remind you how peculiarly gloomy many of The Police’s big hits were. Paradoxically, the “feel-good” climax to the show saw several of their darkest songs played in quick succession.

For the duration of Invisible Sun, the sight of Sting in a sleeveless white top gave way to even more distressing scenes. Now that the song had helped solve the troubles in Northern Ireland, monochrome footage of life in Middle East war zones accentuated the febrile, sluggish manner in which they played it. Such is the yearning magic of Roxanne that not even Sting’s determination to set off yet another round of reggae yodelling diminished its magnificence. It was, of course, this song that Alex Turner referenced in Arctic Monkeys’ When The Sun Goes Down.

The uncool truth is that, at their early best, Sting’s songs had enough poetry in their soul and enough soul in their poetry to stand alongside the new vanguard of pop wordsmiths. As a solo artist though, he has struggled to find musicians willing to square up to him and his loftier conceits. In The Police – a band made and broken by musical differences – that was never an issue. Departing the stage after a rapturously received Every Breath You Take, there followed an unprecedented bout of group hugs. One night down; 71 to go. Better keep some hugs in reserve.

Soon after Radiohead released In Rainbows (see post below), my editor was keen to ensure once again that The Times would be first off the blocks with a review of a prominent new album. The means of In Rainbows’ release had made Radiohead more newsworthy than at any other time in their career. By contrast, the reasons for Britney Spears’ newsworthiness were more bound up with her personal circumstances. What appeared to be a tortuous process of mental dissolution was captured and exacerbated by the clicking of flashbulbs that followed her everywhere she went. Somewhere along the way, she had managed to record Blackout – an album whose commercial fortunes were torpedoed when a dead-eyed Britney turned in a faintly sinister performance of its teaser single Gimme More to a worldwide audience at the MTV Awards. A fortnight ahead of release, the album hadn’t been serviced out to journalists. With high-profile records this happens for one of two reasons. As with Radiohead, it can be because the artist has such an intensely loyal fanbase that the presence of reviews prior to the record won’t have any effect on its sales; or it can be because the record company has no confidence in the product. I called Sony BMG and asked them if the record was embargoed. Britney’s press officer didn’t seem to know. Off she went to ask someone. Apparently, there was an embargo on sending out CDs, but if I wanted to, I could come into the office and listen. Any album usually released by an artist of that stature comes with a certain amount of corporate cheerleading, but none of that seemed to apply to Blackout. It was hard not to expect something that sounded every inch the car crash that Britney’s life had become. When your review is the first to run, there’s always a worry that yours is the one that reads like the work of a madman. Six years on, Blackout still sounds to these ears like one of the three or four greatest records of the last decade.

Finally, a good week for Britney Spears? Just as we were getting to think that a lunar eclipse might come sooner, here’s some tentative cause for celebration. In the space of 24 hours, the woman who yields roughly 82,000 results if you Google her name along with the phrase “troubled singer”, has been granted temporary visitation rights to her children and seen her new single Gimme More leap into the British Top Three. Now, if Britney’s record company is to be believed, a good week just got better. Apparently, “unprecedented popular demand” has prompted SonyBMG to bring the release date of her comeback album Blackout brought forward by three weeks.

Cynics might point out that, one way or another, they would have been compelled to do so. MP3s of songs from the album have been circulating among fans over the last few weeks. That they have been moved to do so, does at least, serve reminder of the very thing that is perhaps most easily forgotten among her recent rollcall of infamy. She is first and foremost a pop star. In a life not exactly saturated with joy, she should take a certain amount of pleasure in the fact that Blackout coheres far better than sprawling recent sets by her fellow Mickey Mouse Club alumni Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera. Far from show contrition for a spell of adversity that takes in custody battles, hit-and-run offences, extreme hairdressing, sudden lingerie loss and umbrella-on-pap savagery – she comes out fighting on the utterly wonderful Piece Of Me. “I’m Miss bad media karma/Another day another drama/Guess I can’t see no harm in working and being a mama,” she declaims over an adhesively catchy chorus.

Britney may have grown up in front of MTV, perfecting Madonna’s dance routines, but she isn’t the self-determining control-freak that her heroine turned into. Neither, it should be added, does she need to be. Her recent mishaps have only compounded her status as muse of choice to top-notch writer producers such as Swedish hitmakers Bloodshy & Avant, Timbaland protégé Danja and The Neptunes. On the Pharrell Williams-written Why Should I Be Sad and, indeed, most of what precedes it, Britney is a strangely disembodied presence – her heavily treated voice suspended amid an icy fug of minor chords and brittle synthetic beats. If truth be told, certain songs wouldn’t have sounded too different if her vocal were totally erased. On Get Naked (I Got A Plan) and Radar her voice is a piece that slots tidily into a finely sculpted piece of burnished future-pop. But when the whole works so well, it makes no sense to mind. Perfect Lover and Toy Soldier are quite simply two of the most strangely wonderful tunes to emerge on any reccord this year – exercises in sonic risk-taking that, until this point, have never hitched themselves to a Britney Spears record.

So why now, then? Well, perhaps it was in the spirit of having nothing to lose that someone suggested Britney try her hand at a marching-pace sex fantasy about a soldier which pitched itself somewhere between Prince’s female alter-ago Camille and the sensation of watching Full Metal Jacket as ten Glade Plug-Ins infuse the air with amyl nitrate. Who knows? Furthermore, does this stuff work on any profound level? Well, ever since she appeared in 1999 with Hit Me Baby One More Time, Britney has enjoyed a certain status as metatextual plaything of Late Review guests and chin-stroking post-ironists (no mean feat, this – Kylie and Madonna had to endure years of highbrow snobbery to get to the same point).

When it comes down to it though, the answer is no, not really. A gaggle of schoolchildren exchanging ringtones on the top deck of the bus will just as easily tell you why these songs work. They tick almost every box in the checklist of great pop, period. Whether or not it will be enough to save her career probably depends on what condition she can get herself in to sing them. That she was allowed to go through with last month’s infamously listless MTV Awards appearance shows just how few people in her circle seem to have her welfare at heart. But there’s something fitting about the fact that, while the person slowly disintegrates, the singer carries on singing. After all, Britney Spears learned to be a pop star way before she learned to be an adult. It’s no real surprise that her facility for great pop moments is the very last part of her to shut down.

In September 2007, Radiohead announced that, within 48 hours, In Rainbows would be delivered to the inboxes of fans who could pay whatever they deemed an appropriate amount. There would be no promos serviced out to journalists. Reviewers were subject to the same conditions as anyone else who wanted to hear the record. Chief music correspondents of national broadsheets were effectively engaged in a race with each other, tasked with the job of maximising their employers’ online traffic by supplying the first reviews. Of course, it’s not an ideal way to listen to music, but then if you do this job for enough years, you do develop an early sense of a record’s worth. I’m not just talking about the difference between good music and bad music, but also the difference between the different kinds of “good” music: the records which will proceed to weave their charms into your world and those which bounce off it, leaving you impressed but unmoved.

An example of the latter, in my opinion, is Radiohead’s 2011 King Of Limbs – whilst In Rainbows remains a shining example of the former. It sounded no less exciting at 6.30am on the morning of its release. Dispensed into the darkness of the sleeping world that surrounded me, it felt like I was the only person listening to these songs, like I was privy to an incredible secret. And yet, hundreds and thousands of people around the world, were also enjoying an identical experience. I listened all the way through three times, jotting down whatever observations came to mind. By the time my kids came downstairs, I had half a review written, but the rest would have to wait. Breakfasts had to be made, the school run completed. I dropped them off and continued to the nearest cafe with wi-fi. At 9.55am, I pressed send. I’m relieved to see that the record I still play and love is mostly recognisable to me from these hastily-written first impressions. That doesn’t always happen.

Had there been a nationwide power cut last Monday, you could have lit a town the size of St Albans with the envy that Radiohead instantly elicited among their peers. Take away the glamour of a pop star’s job and that fact is that most of the currently trading names in your record collection are slogging through severe record deals for percentage points that Radiohead left behind a long time ago. And yet, among all the excitement, it’s worth pondering a small but important question. If the music industry collapsed tomorrow, what would most of those bands do with their new-found autonomy? In a world without A&R men and people who are paid to tell you the truth about whether your new stuff sucks, how many musicians would ultimately resist the gravitational pull of their own rectums?

Ever since OK Computer made them big enough to ignore the advice of those around them, Radiohead have somehow beaten down a path between the expectations of their fans and the abyss of absolute freedom. That they’ve done it again with In Rainbows isn’t entirely clear from the first few bars. Even before he sings the lines, “One by one/Comes to us all,” the hand of Thom Yorke, the incorrigible contrarian, is evident in the jackhammering machine beat that kicks off 15 Step. Once you’ve effectively been told to sit up straight and listen, everything is played out around a rhythm that resembles a sectioned patient trying to escape their straitjacket and Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien’s simple, pretty guitar playing. Occasional bursts of shouting children do little to dissipate the presiding air of strangeness. Welcome then, to Radiohead’s favourite default setting in 2007.

At various times, they’ve sounded like a great live band and like hermetic musos prodding around on laptops in the hope that the next noise might offer a new direction. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi is, strangely, neither. Its airless, bunker-bound anti-ambience recalls Kid A and Amnesiac, but the band themselves sound thrillingly alive, thrashing out a melody replicates on “real” instruments the gorgeous Cornish digi-folk of Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James – an album for which Radiohead have all been vocal in their affection.

Much to the ongoing chagrin of a minority who want them to repeat 1995’s The Bends, doggedly experimental rock is just what Radiohead do these days, finding common ground between hitherto ingongruent parts. Hence a song like Bodysnatchers. On it, Greenwood and O’Brien feed a chugging, elementary riff through an amp that barely sounds like it can take it, while Thom Yorke’s mostly indistinct vocals compete to be heard over the hyperactive raga-rock being played out around him.

Their attitude to the medium might be one of uncompromising modernity, but Radiohead’s almost quaint belief in the album as an art form is borne out by their dispute with Apple (the absence of their music on iTunes is down to their refusal to allow the sale of individual tracks). In Rainbows compounds their stance. In time you’ll scoot to your favourites here – the baroque fever-folk of Faust Arp is just, when it all comes down, an endlessly repeatable treat – but taken as a whole, In Rainbows adheres to a loose musical narrative of its own.

The herky-jerky clatter of earlier songs gives way to acoustic guitars, bigger melodies and a musical sense of resolution. Finally, Thom Yorke even finds himself slipping into the vernacular of the pop songs we thought he never even listened to, let alone sang. That’s him on House Of Cards, singing “I don’t wanna be your friend/I just wanna be your lover” like Prince’s shy baby brother, amid swirling strings that simulate the postcoital fug of a perfect Sunday morning. Lest we imagine him guesting on the next Sugababes album, it’s worth pointing out that the next verse begins “Infrastructure will collapse”, but no matter. It’s one of their very best songs.

Ditto, All I Need, which lobs another relatively direct Yorke lyric into sonic waters that appear to meander by the Get Carter soundtrack. Listen once and you’re unsure. Listen twice, knowing that, three minutes in, a plangent pounding piano leads you out into a snowblind crescendo of melodic light and, you’re excited before you even get there. Quite how it all ranks alongside other Radiohead albums – well, let’s be honest, it’s far too early to tell. In time, the excitement of waiting for a new release by one of your favourite bands to land in your inbox will separate In Rainbows from the role it will go on to play in your life.

For what it’s worth, In Rainbows was sent to me at 6.30am. Three hours later, it already appears to have laid down roots in my interior world. The trick, I guess, is to give your fans what they didn’t know they wanted. Radiohead, old hands at this, have been doing it for over a decade now. With In Rainbows, they appear to have done it again.