It's not a massive progression from their debut, and it appears that as the rest of the world has finally caught up with them, the duo from space appear to be having problems going forward.

Try not to worry too much about where it comes from, or who else it may or may not sound like. Instead, enjoy a record that is quintessentially British, without pretension and most importantly, a whole lot of fun.

It’s what Bright Eyes coulda done if he put the songs off I’m Wide Awake onto the canvas of Digital Ash.

This is Ash ready for stadiums, standing their ground and treating us to the kind of rock their heroes made.

Sure this album may well sound awesome if you’ve just snorted a metre of charlie or recently breakfasted from a menu of ‘shrooms and LSD, but for sober ears it’s enough to drive anyone to drugs.

A noble, high-headed intelligent record.

If 2003 debut ‘Keep On Your Mean Side’ was a barren sounding album, their new LP is positively spartan.

Set Yourself On Fire could become your favourite record, and Stars should justifiably be many people's favourite band.

Some of the radio-friendly oompa of ‘The Last Broadcast’ has been cut back, and the new record bears more resemblance to their debut ‘Lost Souls’ in its ashen-faced detachment and bloodied-yet-unbowed pride.

It's practically a compulsory purchase.

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.

The only potentially bad thing about Edwards' style is that many of the tracks on the later half of the record tend to all bleed together.... That said, 'Back To Me' demonstrates Edwards' prowess as a top lyricist.

While not quite on a par with the band's self-titled debut album, [it] still stands up quite proudly alongside anything else it's curators have recorded either as The House Of Love or any subsequent solo projects.

Musically, at least, Kings of Leon have matured during their two years on the road and, if you ignore some of the less than elegant lyrics, they have produced an acceptable second album.

The Earth Is Blue is a potent lesson in deceptively simple but exquisitely emotive songwriting, and one that continues to reveal further charms many a listen later.

My album of the year - whatever year it is.

If there’s one thing this collection illustrates it’s that throughout that time they’ve maintained a high level of quality.

This album is just that – an album in the truest sense, a collection of songs that work together as a whole and one that doesn’t rely on a strong single or two to make it work.

The beats seem genuinely fresh and the dextrously speedy rapping is original and scathing in equal measure while the singalong aspect is more than evident.

This is ageless music, and utterly, one hundred per cent essential.

If you love The Icarus Line and Comets On Fire, and wonder what a record exploring the expansive middle ground between the two outfits might sound like, look/listen no further.

A disparate yet cohesive collection of songs.

Do yourself a favour and eschew fashion for something with real substance: Outside Closer is an album of the year, fact.

His talents seemingly know no bounds, and A Healthy Distrust is as close as he’s come to fully realising such a dominating on-stage character on a recorded format.

It's a very good effort, but ultimately it lacks the consistency of true greatness.

I Am A Bird Now is a beautiful, emotive, glorious, and sometimes sinister album that will top many a critic's list come the end-of-year polls, and justifiably so.

Like Oasis' first album, it's definitely going to bring people together, and it will certainly start mass sing-alongs, but something tells me The Others won't be making it to a stadium near you anytime soon.

I have to accept that the band I once loved is now nothing more than a distant memory. Songs such as 'Tangerine' and 'Crash' have long been replaced by the new sound which owes much more to Keane and Coldplay in their melancholic approach.

An album which traverses exhilaration, desire, despair and loss and sees a songwriter finally completely on top of his game.

So they missed the bullseye. But that's no reason to yell "sell out!", or to deride them as poseurs.

‘Emoh’ is revealing at all times, but utterly dignified throughout, and it’s a wonderful solo record.

This is not a classic – each high is paired with a low of similar scale, so whilst ‘Down In A Rabbit Hole’ scales heights previously thought unreachable, ‘Ship In A Bottle’, with baby samples screeching over the top of the most base-level beats, is plain annoying.

It’s the closeness and the honesty which makes ‘I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning’ a thing of awe.

The problem with ‘Push The Button’ is that it’s all so predictable.

Simply another shimmering LP from a truly original band.

For all its reference points, it's a remarkable and original record.

What makes Coachwhips bigger than the rock n'roll n'amphetamines and extreme petting that inevitably gets etched on them is sheer, dirty, bone-corroding, untamed noise.

Frantic and calculatedly assured.

It is a beautiful result that, through the austere and effortlessly enchanting tunes, leaves you feeling the emotion infinitely more than any self-professed ‘emo’ might.

Inevitably, it’s a mixed bunch of tracks taken out of context without the pictures to go with the sounds.

Simply, it’s back to what it was all about in the first place; writing cracking tunes and just being boys in a band.

Although White People doesn’t break any of the barriers ‘So…How’s Your Girl?’ did, it is none the less a graduation.

One big loud glam rock electro-pop explosion of an album.

This is an album that can (and I think will) transcend musical taste and age range... 'Lifeblood' may well live forever as one of the best commercial albums of the bands career.

You won’t hear a more exhilarating, dizzying record for a long time to come.

While the first offering holds a quite tangible anger and general gloom within, 'The Lyre of Orpheus is a much more mellow affair, contemplating existentialism and the like.

While it’s tempting to disregard ‘Never, Never, Land’ as a frantic attempt to usurp its predecessor in the celebrity stakes, the big-name guests this time around are infinitely more suited to the mood.

An unexpectedly outstanding and uplifting experience.

The best British debut since Oasis? Definitely... maybe. But one of the albums of the year? Without doubt.

There’s something horrific about this record; it’s possessed by an indefinable evil that permeates every song.

An inviting, maturing album that still shows enough vitality to still be classed as a good rock album.

Whether thrashing out punk anthems Bikini Kill or turning out dancefloor-ready disco pop as on ‘This Island’, Hanna has always had something to say, and never has her message sounded so clear.

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

The most fitting of testaments -- a flawed, courageous, beautiful and intimately human portrait of the self.

A thoughtful and inventive debut album that is more accomplished and accessible than the first offering by [The Coral].

It’s got something for everyone, providing everyone is at least a little fucked in the head.

It’s an intriguing and refreshing listen.

'Mercury' from 1993 is widely regarded as AMC's finest moment, albeit their flawed masterpiece. This new album is right up there with it, and 1990's 'Everclear', too.

[An] intense and epic album.

There’s no way he sounds 19.

Succinctly, it's a crap record.

Where the two remaining musicians in the band appear to have gone astray, Michael Stipe sounds positively lost, never to be found again.

Tough going and very samey, both in sonics and lyricism. Even if you enjoy the basic template, you may well run out of steam before the end.

The only spoiler is Sam Herlihy’s lack of vocal abilities.

‘Burned Mind’ isn’t music; it’s a vision of a decimated future.

Equal parts heavenly aural relief and blood tripping, screaming noise.

Interpol have produced a soaring, inventive album that, while incorporating the deliciously dark atmosphere of ‘Turn On The Bright Lights’, merely uses it as a base to create more ambitious, warmer soundscapes.

It’s spellbinding.

What really let’s this collection down is not the quality of the songs – everything about their tunes is well considered and slickly executed – but the production.

An album that doesn’t sell us short on the pop hooks of albums past, but one that also delivers a healthy dose of politics to the mix without sounding like a six-legged cliché-riddled embarrassment.

To put into context, it’s a damn sight less disappointing than the new Duran Duran folly, and over time even many of the lesser tracks begin to sink in to the psyche.

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.

If electroclash left you cold... then this is, idealistically, how it should have sounded.

The key to 'So Jealous' is that it's a mall-prancing hit jukebox but with, y'know proper non-bubblegum pop sensibilities.

Encompassing chamber pop melodies, angular art-rock, lavish orchestration and post-punk vocals, its sheer sonic size and ambition goes some way towards justifying the amount of gushing praise that's been heaped upon this album since its September release on Merge last year. The fact that the music is so paradoxically life-affirming and euphoric makes it much easier to write, what now feel like, trite hyperboles.

It’s all over the place, yet perfectly fresh and maligned.

Unlike other would-be indie-dance pretenders, this is properly danceable stuff; fat basses and catchy percussion beats are punctured by intoxicating keyboard motifs.

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

From the very start, The Libertines is the sound of the band at its most muzzled; paralysed by poor production, underdeveloped songs and private lives that have become more sensational and noteworthy than the music.

It has the same majesty and ethereal wonder contained in the best works of the Flaming Lips, Boo Radleys, My Bloody Valentine, Jesus and Mary Chain and Mercury Rev.

One of the highlights of their career.

Although 'Winchester Cathedral' is quite obviously Clinic doing what they do best, it also represents the sound of a band who've clearly broadened their horizons.

Dulli isn’t in Johnny Cash’s league yet -- then again, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits are the only people who are -- but 'She Loves You' marks him out as a fellow traveller.

The balance of unsettleing noise and artistic appreciation wavers perhaps a little too much and, as admirable a band as they are, wrapping your ears around their album unfortunately proves to be a little too much work.

With pluses so few and far between, it’s a struggle to make it through these 11 tracks without feeling nauseous from all the sickly pop filler.

The most sophisicated, deliciously out of step pop album of 2004.

While '...Ghosts' is all very pretty and nice, there isn’t quite enough to get your teeth into.

An album that is both abundant in depth and variety, as well as in terrifying walls of noise and gaping chasms of silence.

A wonderful surprise.

If it's pop thrills a go-go you’re after, you’ve got it.

It’s an album that’s playing it far too safe: melodies rise and fall, soaring and curving with painful predictability.

‘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.

It's the (insert made-up genre here, including the word 'progressive' and/or suffix '-core') album of the year.

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

Listening to 'Blueberry Boat' is a little like careening around an enormous multicoloured funfair - joyous, unpredictable, kaleidoscopic, tacky, and at times scary and sinister, sometimes all in the space of one song. But even if it occasionally makes you sick, it’s a thrilling ride nonetheless.

With the current renaissance of the one-man band genre, it's pleasing to see that we now have a modern-day figurehead worthy of rock’s glorious past.

It starts with impressive gusto but meanders towards the end, drifting into slow, forgettable balladry.

In less capable hands the results could be unsophisticated and cringeworthy - as it is, they team the neon luminosity of Duran Duran with the camp, boyish charm of Dexys Midnight Runners - and are as likeable as either of them.