A richly ambient affair, it makes for a particularly strong listen via headphones, dread-soaked mist and hopeful shimmers given heightened impact.

Siberia is... essentially a re-make of the Grey Album.

Jiaolong is a living, breathing animal, and all the better for it.

A record for bedroom chilling that has more than enough clout to slot into dance floor sets, it’s a refreshingly vital take on the heavily worked over source material.

Celebrity guest star wobbles aside, Write About Love is a well crafted, very listenable album, one that sees Belle and Sebastian ditch the qualities of their music that were starting to cloy without totally jettisoning the old charm.

Best advice for approaching Worldwide? Stick to moderation. Small doses are a thrill, but consume too much and you’ll find yourself in need of a dark quiet room and a cold wet towel draped across your forehead.

There are some minor criticisms with Underrated Silence, the most obvious being the similarity between most of its ten pieces.

The music is exquisitely played, impeccably arranged and the lyrics are thoughtful and esoteric. The only problem is that it's a bit of a grower.

As second albums go, though, this is exactly what we want to see--a clear a development, a sharpening of powers and a defining of sound. What happens next could be truly spectacular.

There are certainly some succulent dishes on the album ('Xerses' and 'Eats Darkness' for me) but all together I do wonder if someone ordered a bit too much?

A few tracks towards the end of In Guards We Trust will maybe sound better once you’ve fully absorbed the single fodder of the record, but the psychedelic moments of ‘Your Man’ just don’t hit the spot for me as they may for fans of later MGMT noise.

What it really all boils down to is your tolerance for lengthy psyche records, which is what Embyonic undoubtedly is.

Though there’s nothing startlingly new here, this is a consistently engaging record that doesn’t so much successfully straddle metal and post-rock than have both coursing through its veins.

It’s a massive, honest mess, loaded with love. And as such, it might even be called his most definitive album yet.

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

For the most part, it’s suitably overblown, cocksure and blunt, and still goes some way to capturing the genre's eternal, endearing refusal to grow up. For now, that's reason enough to celebrate their return.

It's no contender for end-of-year honours, but so far as pop goes in 2006, this may well be the pinnacle.

A gorgeous, gripping study of English and north American folk music that covers as many of the genre's quirks as it can, without crawling from cliché to catastrophe.

Astro Coast is a welcome reminder of the youthful vigour and playfulness of early Pavement and Weezer, imbibing the Sixties rule-book of good pop without coming off as a bad pastiche.

Tender but bold and with an array of melodies that strike straight at the heart, it has all the ingredients of a classic Swedish pop album.

This band has a ways to go: they can write more substantial, affecting music than this, their songcraft can indubitably be tightened up. But I think maybe it's Man Alive's sheer confidence that makes me feel alright about saying that: this is a band going places.

Middle Class Rut have crafted a solid release that, while unlikely to set the world on fire, nonetheless makes for an impressive debut.

Sometimes it can feel like wading through mucky water, but it’s far from a bad trip; more like a damn fine party that will no doubt find its home in many fields during the summer months.

Psychedelia with a southern soul lean, it’s a seriously heady piece of music.

My Best Friend Is You is, indubitably, rather daring for a mainstream pop album. Yet for all the Butler-begat polish, it's hard to work out whether it really is a mainstream pop album.

[World Music is] a wonder through the traditional folk and more amplified sounds of the planet's history, yet infused with enough of Goat's own character to all glue together.

The album is no Robyn and it doesn't quite match Body Talk (Part 1) in terms of the sheer number of highs.

As left field and innovative as they come, and while that doesn't always make for the easiest of listens, Invocation and Ritual Dance of My Demon Twin should be applauded for daring to tread where many others would whimper at the thought.