You really can’t get het up one way or another about a song like ‘Waste a Moment’, which might as well be called ‘Lead Single’, nor can you muster up anything other than a yawn as ‘Conversation Piece’ stretches out like a cat in front of a fire on a cold winter night.

The slower songs can certainly be felt to add a rounded edge to what would otherwise be an unrelentingly pointy poptastic delivery.

Battle For The Sun feels hazy, lazy and lost--a muggy summer afternoon. Predictable lyrics grate awkwardly like manufactured pop-factory produce, while a ‘nice’ helping of sunshine-synth and sighs paint a chirpy celebration of life and all its hand-clappy beauty. Meh.

The blueprints of a fun time are here; the melodic and rhythmic groundwork is all in place. All we need now is to have Matt and Kim bring this ruckus in person, rather than through the middleman of mp3.

It’s not as focused as it could’ve been, considering the freshness of the songs.

On the surface it’s all nicely put together but almost all these covers lack the passion.

Dead may not improve on Dying’s blueprint, but it is far more than just an interesting experiment. It rigidly follows the band’s self-sabotaging ethic, whilst giving genuinely imaginative versions of songs that were never meant to be remixed.

As a full album, this wafts innocuously past like a gentle Hawaiian breeze--too meek for any real surf, but just strong enough to be mildly of note to those wishing to hit the waves. That’s about the best that can be said of it.

Yes, it sounds like you're now entering Bluejam, but Lynch discovered the place, and instead of quitting cinema to make an album that's being called his debut, it sounds more like he's coming home.

Whole thing sounds like a poppy Bond soundtrack remixed for the clubs, although even her faster songs sound slow.

Although the consistency of last year's Your Future... is not reached, there are some fine moments.

I listen to Milagres but I hear Coldplay.

Dead Confederate have possibly made the best record out of all their contemporaries this year, which surely beckons the question 'How much longer can they be ignored?' Time to pay attention methinks...

It's certainly not a bad second effort; simply they have attempted to downsize the large breast-beating anthems to something a little more crafted and understated, while still retaining their populist nous.

Unfortunately, despite its improvements, the album still suffers from lackadaisical and unfocused songwriting. Sure, this record is quite a bit better than the one originally released, and kudos to the band for taking the time to prove their point.

It’s Bob Dylan’s Christmas gift to you, delivered with warmth from his heart, even if his tongue is in his cheek. Like eggnog, it’s something that will always go down well once a year, even if it is probably just the once.

For all its celebrity tricks and years of pipeline evolution, ‘Auf Der Maur’ still has all the hallmarks of the debut record.

If you got concussed during the first Pearl Jam tour and have only just come out of your coma, boy, have we got a great new sound for you.

There’re dudes out there (Google them) who will try and tell you this album has some relevance, that it represents pop, that it’s important. That it’s good. They’re wrong.

What The Portrait Is Finished… evokes is a sense just like that of its inventive title: an ultimately unsatisfying portrait that fails to capture beauty, even though it's clear that true beauty is there to be captured.

This behemoth double LP is a risk that just hasn’t paid off.

While the rest of the album does falter a little towards the end, as a piece of work overall it's one that they should rightfully be proud of.

Mumps, etc. simultaneously feels like a fresh start and consolidation for the band; it encapsulates what makes them so unique while subtly expanding and pushing forward their sound, and as such must be viewed a real triumph.

It’s not a brilliant record, but if there’s good one thing to be said about 48:13, it's that it sounds like a band coming to terms with who they are and who they’re making music for, tossing pretense aside, and concentrating on being themselves.

Occasionally vague, sometimes incohesive and a little self-indulgent it may be, but ultimately Abnormally Attracted to Sin is an abnormally attractive piece of work, and another fine example of the shining talent that is Tori Amos.

With Beautiful Trauma then, Moore proves that she’s both still relevant, and a vital, confident female voice on the pop circuit who has impressively never really succumbed to the pressures of the overly-sexualised pop machine.

More! as an EP would have packed more punch and avoided the pitfalls of consistency which plague albums of every genre. Nevertheless, it is a good album, and perhaps the only tinge of disappointment is the knowledge that they could have done better.

A disappointingly tepid affair.

Overall, this is a highly schizophrenic collection.

If it’s slightly weaker than its immediate predecessor, that’s only because it’s following the same furrow.

This Is What the Truth Feels Like is half-baked in places and perhaps a little too safe in others, but it’s really, properly genuine, and if she doesn’t leave it a decade next time, Stefani might still be able to make a great pop record. It’s in there, somewhere.

It's neither forward looking nor, overtly retro or especially of the moment--it just is, in the best sense.

Hate them all you like, but Snow Patrol have some great songs and enough money now to forget all about the tripe they’re currently peddling at their massive group of new fans.

Overall, Encore is a worthwhile listen. It obviously suffers from many of the problems that dance music albums generally suffer from but it does well to show off Snake's ear for hooks just as well as his ear for drops.

Ripples is a record which will likely struggle have any relevance, impact or longevity beyond the goodwill of its own gestation. Which really is a shame.

For while the aforementioned songs all have recognisable parts borrowed from their peers, they all also contain moments of genuine beauty, fear and grandness which demands you to fall into hell just as Dante's Devil demanded him to.

Had this been a debut album perhaps it would have been better received, however, the shadow of the successful first album looms heavy here and may just have listeners reaching for the older material rather than the current.

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

Warble Womb is unquestionably lighter than Dead Meadow’s previous psych-stoner releases and the restoration of original drummer Mark Laughlin does not signal a return to their meatier roots.

For whilst Rave Age isn't as bad a set of tunes as the title would have you believe, it is undoubtedly more of the same yet less of a coherent album.

‘Armed Love’ then is The (I)NC’s straight ahead rock record but a superior one at that, one with a great deal of heart and soul, and one that should propel them onto the global stage.

On occasion, it’s actually borderline thrilling but those moments are too few and far between.

Eclipse blacks out nuance of every kind, resulting in a record which achieves its ambitions for sheer, bludgeoning vastness, but falls down on actually engaging the listener in simpler, more relatable ways.

When all's said and done, there are worse things in life than being the fifth-best Pixies album. So I guess we'll just leave it that and say no more.

You can't take it too seriously--if you did you'd find an album riddled with clichés and vulgarities. Just take it as it was intended: 30 minutes of fun from one of the world's most entertaining rock stars.

Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know isn’t quite the gaudy-T-shirted teambuilding horror it threatened to be. But Múm would do well to note that a quiet, solitary hum can be just as stirring as a rousing chorus.

As a work of art, it's sometimes sketchy, always pleasant and gentle, often uplifting, skilled and technically confident. As a statement, it's a bold one.

Whilst at times the melodies feel frail, and it seems to struggle with a slight lack of something musically, at others the album is triumphant, with complex, brilliant pop songs about that age old theme, heartbreak.

The way London transcends genres and creates a blend between hip-hop and post-rock is certainly commendable, but there's nothing here that we haven't heard from TV on the Radio to save this album from sounding just a little bit silly.

Despite its heart of darkness, Paralytic Stalks is a deceptively gentle, rambling record that gains integrity but loses focus via the strong suspicion that it was recorded more for the benefit of Nina Barnes than for us.

There’s not one song on here worth releasing as a single. Only two or three are even remotely listenable.

With that image and, indeed, package, May will no doubt divide opinion and make certain people sick of him just by his very look and reflective genre, but to anyone with time to spend and ears to analyse he will be a speccy hero; a champion of triumphant performance irrespective of that well-practised image.

Oh Land, however, inhabits a tepid middle ground between the two extremes – offering neither gilded Scandi chart-pop (Robyn, Annie) or the artistic mettle of Scandi indie bands, most of whom are able to turn out sublime pop anyway.

It’s a mature, accomplished and surprisingly diverse collection of songs, but life-changing it ain’t.

Brash and trashy.

Black Noise was one of electronic music's recent highlights, and if XI Versions is by no means as essential to anyone's collection as Black Noise, but is a fine addition nonetheless.

It’s a shame, because there were some genuinely good ideas on We Can Create, but Chapman seems to have no real sense of direction for this album, and thus the end result is wholly unfulfilling.

As a whole, then, A New Testament is a fantastic record. It’s almost certainly the most consistent LP that Owens has released in either of his incarnations in terms of the quality of his songs as well as stylistically.

The Drums have had some personnel changes and are possibly re-finding their feet here, but Encyclopedia sees them badly tangled.

There will be those who'll look at the sleeve, read the controversial title and dismiss the record on the assumption that Anton Newcombe has lost his marbles again. However, venture beyond Who Killed Sgt Pepper's disparaging parameters and there's several exquisite gems to be discovered here.

All in all, Amputechture can be compared to watching a Hollywood car chase: impressive, but ultimately a heartless experience.

An album as close to a dictionary-standard definition of the word mediocre as there is likely to be in the whole of 2008.

Despite these forays into a wider world, and the dreamy, vulnerable and hypnotic subtlety of 'Stone', you can't help but think that NYPC have still got one foot firmly anchored in the glowstick glimmer of past glories.

Really guys? Next time, try a bit harder.

With a little more focus and a little less self-doubt, The Chapman Family's second record should easily surpass this still pleasing statement of future intent. Just so long as they don't take too much time recording it.

The shorter production time of this album is perhaps reflected in the lack of variety. Of these ten songs, pretty much all of them are piano-or-guitar-led lamentations that veer conservatively in tone from vaguely melancholy to vaguely upbeat (more of the former than the latter).

While Woomble has a gift for an engaging lyric, the same perhaps cannot be said tune-wise.

Boy & Bear sound more like a personality-free replica of a radio-friendly sub-genre of the folk tradition, and fall way short of convincing us that they're the real deal.

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

It’s easy to admire, but difficult to truly fall in love with.

If Conduit was the warm-up for their come back, then Chapter & Verse sees them break into a full sprint.

The four Californians smother their country-fried rock with more southern tropes than a gravy-sodden biscuit, from the bits of blues and gospel and old timey R&B.

Ultimately Life On the Road can only work as a comedy project, and musical comedy needs to be richer than this to be worth visiting more than once. You need to be Flight of the Conchords to pull that off, and David Brent just isn’t likeable or interesting enough.

Whether they choose in the future to extend their reach into more abstract or formless areas is up to them, but there are signs here that it could be fruitful for them. Nevertheless, as a debut album, Mechanism displays two musicians with a clear facility for evoking visual landscapes and narrative drama.

Quicken The Heart represents Maximo Park settling into a rut, albeit an intermittently attractive one.

Boys And Diamonds is an album that takes two different roads. A journey down one avenue finds Rainbow Arabia exploring the unrefined, bespoke freedom of African rhythms, ad hoc instrumentation and unfiltered self-expression.

This is duvet music, offering vague comfort but impossible to feel any excitement for.

'Surgery' isn't the unlistenable, depression-fest it's lyrical content threatens it to be. Instead, it's heartfelt message combined with the monstrous sound behind it make it one of the most curiously uplifting records of the year.

As a work of pure, confessional artistry it just doesn’t have the frazzled punch of the ‘great’ break-up albums, but if it did, it probably wouldn’t be Coldplay, and that would be a shame.

In spite of Rihanna's best efforts, Unapologetic is more depressing than offensive.

There are enough sturdy ideas in Walk It Off’s first half – just about--to ensure Tapes ‘N Tapes’ good ship stays afloat for a third bout, and it’s definitely a record that’ll reward repeated plays, but with the twilit otherness of "The Loon" largely evaporated here, it’ll need a change of tack to put the wind back in their sails and set the blogosphere to reeling once more.

A Oneida stop-gap rehearsal session is more satisfying than most bands' carefully crafted showcase albums, but this LP doesn't reach the same dizzy heights as their previous run of mind-blowing releases.

Sadly, the album at large is plagued by many of the things which have seeped into Folds' sound over the last ten years: the seriousness, the restraint, and the descent into middle age.

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.

It’s purely incidental material that goes nowhere for a dozen tracks and ends with just as much fuss as it began, i.e. none.

Formula is strictly adhered to, and while pace may differ from one jolly strum-about to the next, the void where there should be a worthwhile tune remains.

The majority of the album is the future of all dinnerparties, the dinnerparty that never ends, a spooling aeon of trite politeness, as your dry android host projects his Facebook photos into your retina for eternity.

The Ascent doesn’t actually feel like a Wiley record. That’s mainly because it’s a struggle to find him amongst the gaggle of voices that spit their way across vapid efforts like the Chip and Ms D collaboration ‘Reload’ and the pedestrian Far East Movement-mauled ‘So Alive’.

There’s everything here that those in the know have come to love and expect from The Veils, but there’s also a window in for the rest of you--especially those not-quite goth, dreamer-types lurking over there, I see you with your Low lyric tattoo and Yeah Yeah Yeahs t-shirt.

The balancing of ironic humour that raised a smile on earlier albums is absent here, which leaves us with almost nowhere to hide.

The rest of this collection floats between funny and worthless, tending much more towards the latter by the EP's close.

That it still ends up being reasonably affecting is testament to the band’s essential likeability, but it’s not enough to escape the feeling that We’ll Live And Die... is a record that’s worryingly lacking in presence or character.

So, far from rehashing in a genre where that danger is always lurking, The Good Life remain reasonably fresh. A few more steps towards something else might be welcome, but for now their poise and position is utterly lovable.

At times the levels of raciness reach Spinal Tap levels of hilarity, as on 'Ooh Ooh Baby's' slinky Glitter Band stomp.

The sad thing is that while nobody expects Kaiser Chiefs to be re-inventing the wheel, we do expect a pretty rock-solid, perfect pop record. Yours Truly, Angry Mob most definitely isn't rock solid or perfect in any sense.

On A Girl Cried Red Frasqueri showcases that she is more than just visceral beats and fierce rhymes. She has written some of her most confessional and personal lyrics to date.

Sleep Mountain lacks both the urgency and unhinged fervour of Arcade Fire and the inventive mischief of the Flaming Lips.

The beats, hooks and overall feel of these tracks is of a welcome high standard, sitting somewhere between the tried and tested aesthetics of yore and slick reinterpretation.