More a record to crush on than fall in love with, but free it from expectations and it'll take a small part of your heart.

This is no groundbreaking piece of art; it's not innovative, it's unashamedly backwards looking, and it rips off the greats to high heaven. It's also bloody awful for a significant amount of its running time. However, when it does work, it's a great thing.

On Why Choose?, they sadly lose a lot of their manic, propulsive momentum.

What we get is an interesting departure from his usual work, but not interesting enough to create the eternal music that he is talented enough to execute.

Some of the characters created here are more fully formed than others.

Easy to enjoy, if not adore.

Chalice Hymnal drifts a lot and while every song is distinguished, too often shorter tracks don’t feel as fully developed as their longer brethren.

Pantha Du Prince describes The Triad as 'about more human ways of interacting... about meeting up and jamming' and, in many ways, it does resemble something close to a jam session where unpolished but great ideas are worked out to be developed more fully later.

Ultimately there are only so many excuses you can make for the fact Here Lies Love isn't an out there masterpiece, merely a somewhat outré easy listening album.

The tracks' durations are, to these ears, not wisely distributed and this is possibly the album's biggest drawback.

If Pop Levi’s intention was to create an ornate pop star persona, then he’s definitely succeeded. However, his songwriting skills leave a lot to be desired.

The result is a pleasant, occasionally beautiful, collection of singles that doesn't take itself as seriously as the buzz surrounding it (so you don't have to either).

Fortino may not have hated the world away, but she possesses a similarly intuitive ability to block everything out so she can operate in her own peculiar vacuum. It’s an admirable quality, but the desperately sad nature of her music makes it a place that’s difficult to visit with any degree of regularity.

The band have hardly been better than on that EP’s opening three song suite and that’s what is so frustrating about I’m Going Away; it’s not a bad album, but the band are capable of so much more; the title of the album is at least apt in that the Friedberger’s don’t sound like they are here for this record, it sounds like they already left and phoned this one in.

A record light on substance but packed to the rafters with melody - there are plenty of cheap thrills to get jiggy with.

The rest is solid if rarely spectacular, with the Crazy Horse rumble making a welcome return to Young's modern day repertoire.

Against such a strong back catalogue, Meat and Bone looks set to go down as an addendum rather than a milestone.

Deliciously downright dirty.

Indeed, the first half of the album is a tale of peaks and troughs, its highpoint being the dreamy 'Hamster Suite' which bears similarities to both Deerhunter and Blonde Redhead in its opulent make up. The second half of Pussy's Dead fares much better.

It's great, but for all Butler's desire to bring this to the now it's best enjoyed by those who are able to take this as a polished trip down memory lane or as a launch pad to jump back into the history of dance music.

The Follower is a decent enough record, and is worthy of your time, but lacks that special something that sets The Field apart in the techno world.

Xenoula simply meanders at times, losing a distinct sense of urgency and focus and washing over the listener like gentle lapping waves leaving little in the way of residue behind. Nevertheless, there are times when Xeno’s music becomes less translucent, harnessing its subtleties to create hauntingly ethereal sounds that do evoke vibrant images of her dual lives.

Pushing her quirks even further and adding new sounds to her toolkit are obviously admirable attempts to deepen her interest. But there needs to be more in the actual material to bring the listener out into the cold with her.

The thing is, Mogis’ ‘Americana’ treatment of Lavender Bridge’s core material all too often saturates each song, soaking though to the core of Hynes’ material and threatening to set in to rot.

A spokesperson for wearied souls, Waxahatchee leaves the rest of us intrigued but far from in love.

Here we have a garage-rock band with lounge-pop leanings. Which is fine - but that’s all.

Let's not pretend that an excellent lead track and a handful of perfectly agreeable additional songs is bad going for an odds'n'sonds EP. Still, in both its strengths and weaknesses, thecontrollorsphere is suggestive of a band in need of some renewal.

Glow, then, is generally a mixed bag, gothic, cinematic and made for large spaces and big stages.

Too much nothing, too much that sort of fits… let’s go with it; not enough time spent on making the musical corners as sharp and interesting as they could be.

Land and Fixed's deliberately obscured pop elements--irrefutable though they are--come across slightly too studied to tempt that kind of empathy. The album hovers between the audacity of no wave at its most impulsive and the poignancy of crossover artists who've openly borrowed from the genre, reaping the benefits of neither extreme.

It is, all at once, accessible as a song, but interesting as a piece of music. But the problem with Let Me Come Home overall is that, as before, there is a bit too much of the former and nowhere near enough of the latter.

While Joyce Manor's fourth record is still a very enjoyable romp through ten expertly written pop-punk songs, the album's plain-view influences, cleaner production and vocal delivery feels like it just slightly misses the mark on being the something truly special the band have threatened their entire careers.

Rap paradise is paved with bad intentions and Key to the Kuffs disappoints by shying away from greatness where we've come to expect nothing less.

After eleven songs, the band’s inability to stretch their sound starts to take its toll.

A record that leaves no seam un-burst in its insatiable quest for mainstream adoration and success.

Ultimately where Jamie Lidell falls down is its lack of originality or sense of emotional honesty.

Fink still seems to be finding the confidence in his voice that when it’s pushed is truly wonderful, but most of time a little dreary and unconscious. That aside, this is a lovely little record for folk fans who like a Seventies scuff.

As a rule the lackadaisical New Order and the greatest hits-centric set they tour with aren’t the stuff of live album legend, and matters aren’t really helped by the fact large chunks of the set have been lopped out in order to make it into a single CD, with the likes of ‘Ceremony’ and ‘Crystal’ receiving the heave.

Newcomers to the band would do just as well to track down The Ugly People vs. The Beautiful People, which gives a more cohesive impression of the version of The Czars that Best of... tries to convey.

Familiars, then, is unsurprisingly, immensely moving.... But Familiars lacks any real musical inventiveness.

With Little Dragon, you get it all under the one roof: a groove-powered producer's band with a little edge, an indie sensibility and a soul singer at its helm, able to turn out a pretty melody on the right side of cloyingly doe-eyed.

In its totality, Back on the Planet works as a decent upgrade from Spacebase, despite its weird results.

Brash and trashy.

Galapagos will definitely keep the party going, though it might not do much more than that.

Taken as a three quarters of an hour lump, the narrowness of her vision is brought into sharp relief, as Keeler-Schaffeler struggles to salvage a bona fide record from admirably restless blogging.

The comparative simplicity of these songs makes this a more of a compelling curiosity piece, rather than the explosively satisfying--potentially classic--albums that both of these bands have in them as separate artists.

Ultimately, Lex Hives sadly conforms to the patchy-at-best trajectory of the band's major label releases, but at least does so while taking a decisive step back in the direction of being the ferocious rock band which The Hives unvaryingly claim to still be, and indeed unquestionably once were.

A band's influences should whisper in your ear, not smack you round the face. That's not to say that there isn't anything new or really of themselves in there, it just takes a little while to figure out what it is.

As one dimensional and unadventurous as it may be, In Between Dreams is stronger than 2003's patchy On And On, instantly accessible and just really quite pleasant.

Mills is simply better (if still at times clumsy) when writing about more personal, spiritual or quasi-philosophical matters. K 2.0 begins very promisingly with the loose psych-rock stomp of ‘Infinite Sun’.... Not everything works that well, especially in the LP’s second half.

Vek has channelled these emotions into an album that sporadically bristles and intoxicates with thrilling rhythms and fierce yet monotonously-delivered lyrics.

Fans of The Music will love 'Welcome To The North' but it is unlikely that detractors will be converted.

PVT still frequently show flashes of promise and brilliance, but soon undercut themselves through the poor balance between vocal and musicianship.

Sometimes you are left wishing that the songs could be left to breathe a little more for themselves.

On its own terms, Ear Pwr is a record that, while occasionally poorly structured and a little draggy, offers a rapturous sundown forestfull of perfectly nice pop nuggets, and perhaps the most unexpectedly 'normal' album of the year; a breakneck jolt and a right-turn for the conventional.

There are delights to be discovered here for fans of Mac DeMarco’s grinning sleaze, the reedy pop of Best Coast and the straight up tunefulness of the UK’s largely overlooked Weird Dreams and it is clear that The Growlers, when not obsessing over gimmicks and borrowed tropes, are perfectly capable of graduating to become a great, insightful pop band.

Not all of the tracks hit their mark, and this is a far cry from the standard of much of E's earlier material. But it is nonetheless a good record.

A Snowflake Fell could have worked as a series of effective B-sides or bonus tracks on the aforementioned album package.

Whether If It Was You or So Jealous serve as your touchstone for what this group should be, Sainthood is unlikely to leave you one hundred per cent satisfied. Which is good--in their own way Tegan and Sara are mavericks; that’s what always saves them in the end.

Somewhere in these two discs there is a very good hour long album laying in wait. In it's current form though, it's merely a decent one in need of editing.

The ten songs which make up Everything Last Winter drift along without saying anything at all.

Asa Breed feels too lightweight to recommend without caution.

White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood is, in essence, a very solid new of Montreal album.

By no means an awful record, but certainly a disappointing one.

Conduit is short, vicious, angry and their most singular album to date but this lean and stripped down approach isn't a total success.

The 2003 Campfire Songs EP - re-released here in both CD and digital format - is at once an intriguing, beguiling and ultimately frustrating record. For a band certainly not averse to a little sonic experimentation, Campfire Songs remains Animal Collective’s most ambitious statement to date.

I Never Learn is by no means a failure--the highs are grand when they come--but it has a tendency towards bombast and shallow self indulgence that sees it edge dangerously close to the fringes of mediocrity.

I can't say if you liked Preteen Weaponry and Rated O then you will like this for sure, because it is a departure. Nonetheless if you were minded to like those two records and if you are after a record that is in pretty much every sense a 'challenging' listen then Absolute II should tick all your boxes.

For a record sold on its modernity, New spends most of the time in the past.

Making Time has some really great tracks, but maybe with a little more time spent on a few less ideas it could perhaps have been a great album.

With Glow & Behold, Yuck have shown they can be more than the grunge gropers Billy Hamilton billed them as and have survived saying goodbye to Blumberg--a situation that could yet see them become an altogether different and far more interesting band. However, it’s hard to shake the feeling we’re not back where we started.

Three of the songs are between seven and ten minutes long and make for laboured listens and sadly, the lack of song variety doesn’t really fit in a volume that’s meant to reflect lightness.

The album serves as a classic case of frontloading and one gets a sense that the first six songs would have made a better standalone EP, buying the band yet more time to craft something a little more interesting.

Despite an abundance of textures Codes and Keys seems somehow sparse, empty calories around a hollow centre.

Overall, Rewind The Film won't be afforded the same reverence as Manic Street Preachers more definitive outings. Nevertheless, in the context of the present, it's the sound of a band growing old gracefully in reminiscent mood yet firmly at ease with their lot.

So swings and roundabouts, then, but for all Bloodsports’ faults, it’s still pretty good.

This album may be out of time, often boring, but is just too competent to lend itself to any fun.

It's a decent enough, darkly-shaded mainstream pop album, but the concept is distracting.

Husky's best songs are carefully paced and uncomplicated; when they attempt to aim for cod-psychedelia they produce some turgid tunes.

The problem is that throughout the record there is the nagging sense that this is ground that contributors have covered previously, either as 13 & God or in their separate guises.

NV’s live shows are a true spectacle, bursting with human drama and storytelling, building an arc that is disappointingly absent here. It is not just the pop songs that have disappeared, but the sense of definition. ... There are moments of hope.

Ultimately, Peaches shows herself developing, late in her career, but unlikely to infiltrate the market she's targeted.

It's no good for serious contemplation, but then I doubt that's what it's intended for – definitely one to keep handy for a sleepy August afternoon.

The details rest comfortably in the background and add only to a sense of ambience, not to a bold artistic statement.

This still feels exactly like the record they had to make, and there are startlingly good stretches to be found, but there’s enough of a disconnect between the songs to make it a slightly jarring experience.

Because of its unusual structure, Holy Ghost rarely manages to play to all of its strengths at once. It’s a bold choice, both interesting and admirable in its way, but it’s hard to get past the fact that it undoubtedly lifts towards its conclusion--building towards an energy it never properly inhabits.

Circuital can't be marked down as a failure; it's just not as good as it could be, or as its best tracks suggest it might have been. A little run of the mill for a band that often hit such massive heights.

None of this is original, nor particularly appealing for anybody disinterested in a by-gone era of music production--still it's enjoyable on a level that no amount of cerebral analysis will ruin.

Despite Mazzy Star sounding as good as they always have, Seasons Of Your Day only goes to show that the rest of the world has finally caught up with them.

Everything about Wonderful Crazy Night is utterly predictable, from its subject matter to its comprising 100% mid-tempo ballads, be they boogie-woogie piano (‘Looking Up’, ‘England and America’) or acoustic guitar lighter than a Peter Kay show (‘I’ve Got 2 Wings’, ‘Tambourine’). But despite this--and perhaps in no small part thanks to T Bone Burnett adding a lovely warm country tinge in the production--none of it grates.

French Kicks cannot rightly be pegged as a one-trick pony but the formulaic organisation of this record emphasises lushness at the sacrifice of any surprises.

There's flashes of Jimmy Eat World brilliance and even a few classics in there, but this is an album that's also prone to a few fillers and cheesy one liners.

If you like 'The Wrong Girl' or 'I'm Not Living In The Real World', you'll find plenty to enjoy here. If you tend to shuffle past the B&S that isn't pure Stuart Murdoch, you'll just find your punnery tolerance levels severely tested.

New Relics feels more like a work in progress, a record that was more satisfying to make than to listen to.

If Li was a Pokémon collector So Sad So Sexy would have caught ‘em all, but alas--this is music; and the truth is Li should really leave the hip-hop influences too Janelle Monae and Lorde.

If in the meantime you've lost your copy of Loveless, you could do far worse than listen to Colour Trip.

Frequently unpleasant, but consistently interesting.

The Secret Migration is a wonderful record, full of exquisite indie-rock epics. But so was the last Mercury Rev record. And the one before that. So what’s changed? Nothing, basically.