There's less than two weeks until the winner of the 2006 Mercury Music Prize is revealed. Who will it be? The grubby northerners, the spazzy jazzers or the happy-slapping urban thugs?

Who cares – today marks an important point in our Mercury Music Prize coverage, in that pretty much all the albums we've been looking at so far have been cack, and most of the albums that are yet to come are considerably less cack. Most, mind you – we've still got a couple of stinkers left to kick the life out of, thank God.

Here's the final of our Mercury Music Prize betting odds for the week, for Black Holes And Revelations by Muse…

Muse: Black Holes And Revelations – Everyone thought they knew Muse; the band with the ten-hour widdlywiddly guitar solos and songs about the fall of the Roman Empire sung by a tiny man who sounds like a hyperventilating witch. Despite this – and a dogged determination to never be anything other than grossly unfashionable – Muse have become massive, and on Black Holes And Revelations they've only gone and got the bleeding funk, haven't they? If they carry on like this, we might even reconsider our deep-carved cynicism about them. Is it good? Um, sort of, although a bit of sodding restraint now and again would go amiss, you spiky-haired weirdo. Will it win the Mercury Music Prize? Part of us would imagine that Muse would be a handy outside bet – despite being a giant band, Muse aren't really considered to be all that trendy, and we wouldn't put the Mercury Music Prize panel above pulling a cunning quadruple 'ah you didn't expect us to do that, did you?' bluff. Current Mercury Music Prize betting odds – 16/1

On Tuesday: the Mercury Music Prize betting odds for White Bread Black Beer by Scritti Politi

[story by Stuart Heritage]