Overall Beat the Champ will no doubt prove a hit with die-hard Mountain Goats fans, however as a standalone album it lacks a coherent sound.

The Liverpudlian four-piece are gifted with penning peppy indie-pop, the melodies that lift the likes of ‘Be Your Drug’ and ‘Move To San Francisco’ are spiky and infectious but ultimately stick to a well-worn formula that produces middling results.

There are moments on Coming Up For Air that lay claim to a genuine force, the kind who’ve earned their Chris Martin-endorsed stripes. They’re yet to truly claim their own territory, though, and any attempts to reinvent the wheel fall flat with an almighty thud

Fretboard noodling far outweighs any emotional or intellectual potency, and Heirs continues to leave ASIWYFA stuck between a rock solid live show and a hard-to-place recorded direction.

Not one for anyone who’s not already won over by the pair’s particular charms.

'There's No Leaving Now' in fact resonates like the stark antithesis to Jeffrey Lewis' wry, comical anti-folk. It's dreary as hell.

His sophomore full-length is at times uninspired and leaves an emptiness in the gut.

Let’s Eat Grandma clearly have the potential to merge fantasy and instant fix pop, but this debut is more a showcase of their peculiarities than anything else.

The Dream Walker comes laced with the feeling that, of all the various multimedia forms that make up the Angels & Airwaves project, it’s sadly the music that is the weakest link.

Where things ought to be reduced and given more purpose, they instead stampede into goodness-knows-where. Ambition doesn’t always equal perfection. Rock operas have their place, but this isn’t the pick of the bunch.

For a group whose best moments are when they teeter on just about every edge imaginable, it's just... boring.

Titus Andronicus have always melted together the music of their heroes, but this time it feels completely without inspiration.

Yes, ‘Club Romantech’ is fun, albeit superficially - supercharged by pulsating house that would perhaps be irresistible only under very specific, very inebriated conditions in 2012.

The vocals are rather Thurston, too, like a chain-smoking Scrappy Doo, and structurally each song on The Best Day follows a specifically Thurstony pattern; all shimmery build-ups and thrashing bar chords, and deadpan vocals thudding solemnly along the top of it all.

[The off-trend songs like Alaska, Sawzall and Hawaiian Mazes] feel freer, more exciting and more innovative. But III isn’t that. Instead, for the most part, it feels like Banks-by-numbers.

Kyla La Grange still has a voice you want to listen to, but two albums in, it seems like she’s still searching for the best music to set it to.

The Wilderness, though, is Explosions hitting autopilot when they enter uncharted airspace, rather than exploring the potentially limitless universe beyond.

As loud and aggressive Flats can sound it can't come close to hiding a lack of pretty much everything other than extreme volume and misplaced nothing-better-to-do-than-have-a-go-at-everyone-else small-minded aggression.

There’s enough evidence on Ropewalk that The View’s songwriting senses remain sharp, but the turgid manner in which they’ve served up this group that renders it a disappointment.

It’s hard to overstate how aggravating it is to hear somebody who once stood as the dictionary definition of “less is more” fly so flagrantly in the face of the mantra that made him.

It's simply too mired in experimentation to make for an enjoyable or enlightening experience.

There are occasional flickers of inspiration - see the maximalist rework of ‘Elite’ from Blanck Mass and the minimalist ‘Teenager’ that Robert Smith contributed - but otherwise, you have to hope that everybody involved enjoyed putting Black Stallion together, because it ain’t much fun to listen to.

‘The Streets Where I Belong’ appears to aim for ‘80s FM radio nostalgia, while the title track hints at cod reggae, ‘Forever ‘92’ borrows a smidgen of shoegazey guitars and ‘The Bomb’ a touch of trip hop. But with a lack of immediacy, paper-thin production and no discernible hooks throughout, for anyone still humming ‘Chewing Gum’ or ‘Heartbeat’, it’s a disappointment.

She hasn’t managed to effectively distill her many ideas into something that sounds cohesive After seven years away, that feels like a bit of a let-down.

At this point Mumford & Sons know exactly what they have to do to keep the Spotify streams rolling over, and Delta feels like an exercise in box-ticking, no more, no less.

Unfortunately, this slightly more mainstream vision is consistently obscured, making Innocence Reaches a frustrating listen.

Phoned-in and simplistic, it’s hard to decipher when one track ends and another begins.

It lacks the immediate bombast of either that last LP or 2010’s ‘Come Around Sundown’, but neither is it straight-up boring.