‘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.