Big Mess is hardly much more than ten stabs at reclaiming a relevancy that was only marginally theirs to begin with.

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

Taken as a body of work it is certainly more consistent than Hot Fuss.

Rip This is completely ignorable, and not a fun ambient music way.

While Seeing Sounds is a marginal improvement on N*E*R*D’s second album, and a massive leap forward from Pharrell’s damp-squib of a solo record, it doesn’t quite reach the heights of (either version of) their debut, let alone the pick of Pharrell and Chad’s production work for other people.

Frequently unpleasant, but consistently interesting.

A big stinking pile of rubbish.

A top-heavy track-listing does the album's more abstract curios no favours, and some will find it too much to take in in one sitting. But for me, headphones donned and lights extinguished, each submersion is every bit as worthy as the last.

While Head Carrier may right some of the wrongs of Indie Cindy, it still remains a distinctly average affair from a band once considered the best band on the planet. Too often this sounds like a younger band's best impression of Pixies, or worse, a parody of themselves.

There is certainly something interesting about it, but it’s also a bit hard to embrace wholeheartedly.

Questions aside, it sounds badass; dope, even, like any good hip-hop record should.

Despite the Milberg-centric promo materials, The Concretes are clearly not just a solo star plus musicians, but the more singer-songerwiter-esque songs are the strongest here.

A number of plays through and it’s still not clear who, exactly, the band are taking the proverbial out of: themselves, playfully and absolutely intentionally, or us, fans who’ve become conditioned to not expecting the best from a band who, personally, have been a shadow of themselves since that first ‘sequel’ release.

It's the extraordinary ordinariness, sophisticated simplicity, that redeems all this: even when bass drums calmly clatter wall-to-wall like hungover flies in a jar, there's a gentle edge that's mellow and mellifluous, distant yet direct.

The lyrics ring true enough, but not forcefully enough to really resonate with any depth.

Even a past-it Smashing Pumpkins ‘reunion’ with only Corgan remaining is more acceptable than this awful mimickery and that’s not a good place for a band to be.

On the whole City Club is full of the type of synth funk nonsense that should have been left alone in the late Noughties.

With at least half of these songs, there is almost nothing to say, nothing to be baffled by, nothing to argue about, and for that sad, whimpering reason, Pacific Daydream can probably be called Weezer’s worst album.

It's an album peppered by moments of brilliance and not held back by its few brave failures and one that no one can have reasonably expected the talented quartet to have come up with.

The music here is more considered and richly teased out.

So while Blue Lambency Downward may not be punk in body, it’s certainly filled with that same defiant spirit.

Yes these notes may occasionally be pretty, and delicate, but for that kind of money you expect something spectacular and groundbreaking, something either heart-wrenching or extravagantly euphoric. What you really have is a record with all the spirit of Microsoft Excel.

Ultimately though, what saves Big TV from mediocrity isn’t its ambition, but its hooks.

These glimpses of something unexpected are few and far between, much of We Started Nothing tonally muddled into a weird new form of MOR: cool for five minutes amongst the fashionable crowd but unlikely to reach audiences beyond those fascinated with the hot and happening.

The first dip into this new Jacuzzi feels pleasant, since Sucker’s sunny party anthems fizzled out halfway through--but XCX lacks the finesse to turn this into anything beyond a mindless massage.

Overall, Distortland represents the kind of mix and match bag of tricks we've come to expect from The Dandy Warhols and while not quite attaining classic status, is a welcome return for a band who've never been afraid to stick two fingers in the face of adversity.

This EP is a welcome reminder of James’s ability to utilise decidedly avant-garde ideas in a manner that, although acutely alien to our idea of musical normality, is nevertheless engaging and inspiring.

If you’ve got the savvy to work out how some of Reality Check is actually occasionally brilliant, then you should also be able to figure out it’s also absolute shit.