Daft Punk have done their homework, and there's enough here to suggest that, with a bit of debugging, they'll have no problem hitting all the right buttons next time.

With their abilities to self-censure and decide at what's fundamentally good gone seriously awry, the results are more likely to induce a rolling of eyeballs and suppressed sniggers rather than gasps of admiration.

There's a good, possibly even a great, album in here somewhere, but Kid Cudi doesn't get very close to finding it.

Herein lies the beauty of this band: geeky record collectors they may be, but they're quick to impose their feral energy and fierce individuality on proceedings.

An energised and impassioned, justly confident debut.

The most relevant reference points for "Loose" are Gwen Stefani's "Love Angel Music Baby" and Justin Timberlake's "Justified" - producer-defined albums that reinvented their performers as stand-alone solo artists with a wide, hip remit.

Maclean is clearly a scholar of electro/disco and each number is exquisitely arranged and executed, every synth sound modulates just so as it fades, every reference point lovingly rendered and the whole thing is buffed with a contemporary polish that eschews none of the off-kilter humanity that keeps disco delightfully distinct from its explicitly mechanised dancefloor cousins.

Ultimately there's something very 80s about Pink. Something very kitsch and plastic; something very 'Breakfast Club'.

While not much of a departure from the honed formula of 'White Ladder', much of 'A New Day At Midnight' opts to pare down that winning mix of gentle dance beats and piano even further, leaving Gray's gorgeous gutsy vocal to do more of the talking on his melancholy tales of love and loss.

With this eclectic, eccentric approach comes a lack of cohesion and quality control.

It's a record to get lost in, one that constantly surprises with its apparently infinite number of hidden harmonies and wry asides.

In a time when the music is either dominated by commercial personas or the proteges of the new breed of super producers, 'Expansion Team' is an essential shot in the arm for the increasingly stagnant underground.

So carefully paced is this record, weighed and measured for the correct balance of what's put in and what's taken away, that it never offers emotional triggers which bypass cerebral process.

There could be a better band in there than the production lets them be.

With lead single "Yeah!" being a genuine cyber funk masterpiece, and a lot of other perfectly respectable tunes backing it up, "Confessions" isn’t hard to like. But with the overall impression being of nice Usher making another nice album, it’s impossible to get excited about.

These songs don't sound anxious, or troubled, just lacklustre.

That it is a beautifully realised set of textures and sounds certainly helps, as does the fact that its keenly abstract, exploratory bent makes any attempted comparisons with his debut album practically meaningless.

Laetitia Sadier's vocal melodies soar, so that even when you get two hints of classical minimalist Steve Reich in the first two tracks, there are still tunes to hum.

Another masterpiece.

So, while this is a terrific rock record, there's still not much here that our dads didn't nod-out to at Bickershaw.

The Bachelor has more than a whiff of a histrionic West End musical confined to a primary school assembly hall which means it's 10 out of 10 for effort, but for execution...

She has already made pop interesting just as it was declining into irrelevance; now it's time for her to make it great again.

One battering, no-big impression album.

The Fame is a very unusual beast: a sparkling pop album crammed with infectious melodies that you somehow never, ever want to hear again.

There's no getting away from the fact that the goofy guy who used to play drums for Nirvana just made a classic album.

Rockferry works as a very promising calling card.

However maudlin Noah & The Whale begin, then, there's a wonderful narrative here that sees them move from first-love blues, through resentment to healing and finally to acceptance.

In the long, twisted canon of break-up albums, Everett doesn't only miss the mark, but makes arguably the first serious misstep of his career.