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.