It's just hard to find much of Jeff himself in these amiable, head-nod-friendly, immaculately crafted but ever so slightly sterile tracks.

An album full of highly dramatic and almost cinematic entertainment moments.

It's all good sauce, one supposes, but as Mills wheels out of earshot, tongue and balls dangling in the warm night air, it's hard not to wonder where the thoughtful, sullen kid whose eyes cut like lasers through sink estate bull**it has got to these days.

This, like the last joint 'Stakes Is High', sees the crew making even more stylistic space between themselves and their very own creation of the late eighties, 'the daisy age'.

The Rakes' debut is by turns profoundly unsettling and savagely funny as each song is propelled by a seething sense of purpose.

Black Light is, as it implies, a dark record. It's also a brilliant, shinning beacon of electro-pop sophistication, but it's a dark, dark record all the same.

'100th Window' is every bit the production masterpiece its predecessors are - in places harkening back to, if not quite matching, the collective's glorious debut.

It's hard to deny Papa Roach have a certain knack of crafting big, glossy, annoyingly catchy anthems for the Kerrang TV generation.

It is dense, it is long, it is complicated. It is also a magnificent triumph of artistry over blind anger.

This is the first Muse album to sound - brace yourself, outrageous melodrama fans - ordinary.

Crucially though, what Diddy lacks in eloquence he makes up for in pop sensibility, which here keeps edgier elements the right side of radio friendly.

It has fire in its belly and an admirable abandon and as a whirlwind tour of rock'n'roll decadence it makes, say, Jet look like the fey, foppish tourists they are.

Like their three previous records, Mountain Battles is a record to return to again and again, like an old and dear friend who can still somehow surprise you.

Not content with making a diverse, punchy record brimming with those trademark riffs, Homme has written lyrics that make you think.

Perhaps with a bit more effort converting the jams into actual songs this would have been a worthy jump off as opposed to the album's incandescent highlight. Your forecast then, occasional flashes of brilliance but largely dreary.

But though the music is as good as anything they've ever done, rarely resorting to that downbeat, drunk-in-pub-tells-his-life-story tendency they've too often made their trademark, the lyrics are way below [Aidan] Moffat's usual standard.

He still tinkles the ivories with dazzling skill and his scything comments on breaking-up and the emotionally inept are all too easy to identify with, yet the most enamouring thing is that he manages to do this all without being zany or patronising.

'Wonderland' is magnificent. An album full of cracking tunes, potential singles and a new found lust for life from one of the best bands of the last ten years.

Enchanting, celestially lovely and as effective at lifting you out of yourself for forty-five minutes as an early evening cruise in a space shuttle.

Beware is a 40-odd minute work that ebbs, flows and carries you along perfectly.

This record can't claim such a free-spirited conception as its predecessor, but that's actually to its credit as not a moment rests idle or is flung in on a whim, every track connects like a pool cue to the back of the head in a bit of Friday night pub rough and tumble.

[His] most satisfying collection of material since 1993's "Wild Wood".

Taken as a whole, 'Discovery' is a compelling concoction of styles that continually surprises.

Much more of this and Shakira will surely take over the whole world with her mix of unthreatening pop / rock, lovingly naïve lyrics and cute tummy.

Hot Hot Heat's religious devotion to early eighties new wave is simply embarrassing.

Eventually you’re left longing for a dash of spontaneity or that the band would break into something adventurous.

It is an important leap forward for one of the few American metal bands left who care about the form's emotional evolution.

Unfashionable as they probably are, Pearl Jam have gone some way to regaining both their fire and their relevance with this, a record that takes equally from classic Neil Young stylings as it does raging, polemic punk.