Shortwave Nights is a real enigma, and oddly addictive for it.

If you like your pop music intelligent, layered and tinged with drama, this is an album you can’t afford to ignore.

It works, if possibly only because Kevin Barnes is ridiculous enough to believe it works. And that is the genius of Of Montreal.

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

The Beatific Visions is one of the most enthralling, deceiving and delightful albums of recent times.

If you like your heart soaked in red wine, and your records to sigh and sway, come hither.

As the album ends with disco floor fillers by The Ramones and Blondie by way of Yeah Yeah Yeah’s and Franz Ferdinand respectively, you know you have had a fun if not entirely unforgettable experience.

Piramida is undoubtedly the band's most immediate work to date and it might be strange to be writing it, but nearly each and every track would work standing on its own.

The result is a more sober work than the group anticipated--sad, even (their words)--but an unexpectedly lovely one for being just so.

Having explordd hiphop's darker alleyways for years, Gutter Tactics is at once appealing and familiar, yet resists understanding more than anything that springs to mind... or rather, complicates and perhaps even undermines its message.

It’s Frightening is by no means a record which is without merit. I suspect that the production work of Spoon’s Britt Daniel has infused it with more presence than it might otherwise have had. However, that notwithstanding, the album’s lack of anything substantial to get your teeth into proves fatal.

From start to finish, the melodies are sweeter than sugar, the music bright and sparkling, with Rhys' charming falsetto resting on top.

For completists Obscurities is a must. For Magnetic Fields fans it's a worthwhile starting point for Stephin Merritt's other projects. For newcomers, start with 69 Love Songs and come back when you've fallen in love with everything else.

The two sides of the group, both new and old, combine gloriously in Summer, creating a pure pop climax some of the supposed greats of the genre would be proud of.

There’s genuine replay value here, even if the recording of it took about half as long as the convoluted fictional biography (complete with Photoshopped fake album covers) in the liner notes.

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

With Mines, Menomena have shown that they are a trio of reliably progressive, thoughtful musicians.

The result is a pleasant, occasionally beautiful, collection of singles that doesn't take itself as seriously as the buzz surrounding it (so you don't have to either).

The trio continue to demonstrate their chops and their wit over these 41 minutes.

Deeper represents an exquisite documentation of post-punk's darkest hour.

Like the most memorable trips, this one creates some sublime eidetic imagery.

The band ensure they make music, which matches their aesthetic: airy, welcoming story-telling indie folk, which just happens to be painstakingly well considered and recorded. Ultimately though, where all this world building and curatorship comes to fall short is where it matters most: the songs.

The album comes in light lapping waves of melodic song. It doesn’t wash you away, it doesn’t lure you in to your death. It’s a nice album.

Even with these flirtations with violins and brass, Let’s Wrestle are still the band they’ve always been: self-deprecating, scruffy and charming.

It's more than a return to form for SSLYBY--it's potentially their finest hour.

The problem is that throughout the record there is the nagging sense that this is ground that contributors have covered previously, either as 13 & God or in their separate guises.

The record is alive. It has punch, guts, heart, all the things you would hope for really, whilst at the same time maintaining the central potency of what made Ghostpoet so great in the first place: that voice, delivering paeans to lost love and the reality of life like really no-one else can.

It's careful, like well worded advice, and typically careworn, but this ultimately can’t disguise a lack of lyrical spark.