The interesting theme doesn't last.

Across forty minutes, this is epic yet compact, a film noir in garish technicolour, an album made up of potential singles.

All told, it's pleasant to actually have a buzz album that lives up to expectations; long after people stop talking about them, this album will still be a surprising and compelling listen.

At 14 tracks long, The Dodos do push the point a little, but it's really a case of once you've lit the touch-paper you live with the explosions till the last spark.

At its best Ego Trippin' is intelligent, sly and full of the easy brilliance which put Snoop on the top of the pile in the first place. At its worst it makes thong-filled DVD "Snoop Dogg's Diary Of A Pimp" look like high art. He truly is his own worst enemy.

This is a lovingly crafted record which has the same misty fug and aura as The Soulsavers and Lanegan indulged in recently.

What Seventh Tree actually does - successfully - is tap into a very English spirit of eccentricity, taking the mellow floatiness of Goldfrapp's earliest work and imbuing it with a dash of Hammer horror and the aroma of country meadows.

Still, if not perfect, there's plenty to like on Discipline, and while none of it is exactly vintage Janet, there's enough here to keep the Jackson name on pop's A-list for a little while longer.

New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War is an insane, obscure and exciting record of the kind that very few artists have the guts or imagination to make anymore.

With Flock, their third album but only the second to get a British release, Ireland's Bell X1 have unearthed the missing musical link - and it's marvellous.

A whole album as hyperactive would be exhausting, of course, but unlike the majority of indie plodders, The Feeling have real range.

Little Death may well resemble stolen kisses behind the bike shed rather than an evening of prolonged love making with the object of your desire, but that is still preferable to a night in with just a box of Kleenex for company.

They muster compelling music that sounds like triumph in the face of adversity, building something beautiful out of the building blocks of sadness and despair.

Amid such hi-octane dancefloor tracks such as this, current single 'Ready For The Floor' is, in context, pedestrian--its uncomfortable resemblance to Russ Abbot's 'Atmosphere' becoming more apparent with every listen.

While 'Make It Go Away (Radiation Song)' lacks the subtle lyrical twist (and a decent tune) of some of the other moments on Detours, it is a sober counterpoint to the image of Crow as all hair, tan and teeth. It also contrasts with the album's stand-out, 'Love Is All There Is,' which brings us back to more familiar Crow country on an album of big themes and surprising depth.

At its heart there is a beautiful record in there for anyone with the time and patience to find it.

At various times on …Love Revolution, Lenny just doesn't cut it as a songwriter, a lead guitarist (don't even go there), a string arranger and, above all, a drummer. But the man can sing and for that much we, and he, should be grateful.

The viscous, darkly choppy, sexily fulsome and ferociously hard-driving blend of post-punk and country noir that distinguished their long-playing debut, "The Repulsion Box" is still evident, but it's matched with a bracing new breadth, dynamic diversity and myriad light/shade variations.

It's rather a genuinely exuberant, joyously infectious and sheerly celebratory affair, its tribal drums, parping keyboards and rippling, brassy guitars offset by sweet vocal harmonies and reverb-laden solos, with Koenig's witty and literate lyrics marking out their crucial difference.

Hey Venus! is conspicuously short and sweet, and as a result among the greatest things they've ever done.

It's good clean fun, entertaining and inoffensive.

If you're not a fan of their weighty retro riffs, Into The Future is not going to sway you; but those who loved their self-titled debut will thrill to the darker, more convincing sounds of former single 'Stormy High' with its Plantish wails and solid Sabbathy riffs.

Any decent covers album should reveal its songs, not dress them up - but by Marshall's standards, Jukebox is an overly polite and frustratingly removed listening experience.

It's almost like neither [Dave Fridmann] nor the band could decide whether they were making an electronic or rock record and in dithering between the two settled on the awkward, frustrating middle ground.

Matinee is quite good; but 50 years on from the birth of rock'n'roll, quite good just isn't really good enough anymore.

It's that time of year when critics are desperate to anoint the first "great" record of the year. Distortion is too tricksy and knowing to be that, but it's a thoroughly entertaining also-ran nonetheless.

It's one of the most exciting debuts by a young female pop artist in ages. If occasionally it veers a wee bit too much towards the cutesy-kooky.

In short, it's the album everyone's been waiting for her to make.