Hate them all you like, but Snow Patrol have some great songs and enough money now to forget all about the tripe they’re currently peddling at their massive group of new fans.

These climactic moments help Belly Of The Lion to ultimately feel more consequential and less of a project for a moonlighting soundtracker. He’ll need some help to recreate it live, but on record David Wingo has shown that he can pull it off on his own.

Landing is a well-made bit of fun, but it’s no more than that.

In the midst of the beautiful descending piano chords of the Twin Peaks referencing ‘Leo Needs a New Pair of Shoes’ a blade of static erupts without warning, coming to life with an extremely high-frequency version of a distress flare’s hiss. Once this has faded the track’s coda becomes the most beautiful section of the album, clean descending string-playing blending with a more frenetic bowing and echoing wolf cries.

The result is intricately experimental in style and form but while there are some glorious successes, as a whole Climb Up feels blunted.

A turn towards pop has alienated some fans of their earlier work, but almost everything here could be released as a single, and that’s an undeniably winning achievement.

By no means is this album a disappointment, rather it’s an attempt to fill a particular niche for a specific audience.

Having greedily sucked the Tapes blog dry of every note I could find without so much as a by your leave to the chap generous enough to share his creations with a bunch of strangers, I waited for Seek Magic's release tingling like a tuning fork and hoping he wouldn't pull a Big Pink on me. He didn't. Seek Magic is probably my favourite album of the year.

There are moments which hint at Casablancas’ underlying skill as a writer on Phrazes, but there’s such a ruinous deployment of disparate ideas that they never form a cogent whole.

In general, the choruses are forgettable, the guitars are woefully exaggerated, and the quirkiness that made Weezer a band to be cherished now seems forced and stale.

All in all, a fine introduction to the compelling Will Johnson, but a peculiar idea, to make a painfully intimate album with two songwriters rather than just one.

Certainly on this album class is more straightforward.

So it’s good, but given the large amount of quality Nirvana concert stuff out there, does Live At Reading really have much by way of USP? Probably, yeah, if only because it's the band's sole full electric gig commercially available.

It’ll no doubt be lapped up by impressionable 14 year old girls the world over, but for a show that has so much more to offer this just smacks of studio exec. cash-in.

Ironically, this package was always going to be one for the completists, but those who’ll actually get the most from Bleach are still the "Nevermind" fans left feeling alienated by the gnarled triumph that was "In Utero."

You can’t say it’s a great album for 2009 when it would have been a merely good one in 1981. But it is good, fitfully very good, and when considered alongside Cremations, this two year old band have build up an undeniably impressive body of work.

Yes, this thing is ridiculously derivative. It won't change lives or rearrange the musical landscape of nations but Kahn was never going to win any awards for originality. It may just raise some roofs and shake some foundations though.

Whether or not it is as defining a release as OK Cowboy even feels somewhat incidental in the end, as Flashmob is easily the most enjoyable, addictive, air-keyboard-inducing electronic record that the year is likely to produce.

Jaumet might have Carl Craig hovering over him but he’s not entirely in his shadow, and Night Music is his own diamond-encrusted carriage, which he rides through the small hours with no risk of ever becoming a pumpkin.

Though there’s a paucity of joy to be found among proceedings, other aspects of You Are The One I Pick (even the title’s a barbed double entendre!) actively compensate.

Whilst Islands displays nuggets of well executed nostalgia, one can’t help but wonder if they have any style that isn’t old, borrowed or depressingly blue.

It’d be rather too easy to sketch this as a record suitable only for chewing off your own tongue to: in fact, just like the Hieronymus Bosch triptych it appears to name-check, Earthly Delights is actually a work far richer in tone, shade and technique than its lurid sheen might suggest.

There’s some interest to be found but for the most part he displays a real lack of daring.

Whether If It Was You or So Jealous serve as your touchstone for what this group should be, Sainthood is unlikely to leave you one hundred per cent satisfied. Which is good--in their own way Tegan and Sara are mavericks; that’s what always saves them in the end.

There’s a lot more going on besides, maybe a touchstone too much at times, but you’d have to have either incredibly specific or incredibly boring taste to not find some gold herein.

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 clever and often highly entertaining album with inbuilt limitations, but if you buy one record this year whose title is possibly a reference to Bumblebee Man from The Simpsons, it should probably be this one.

Broadcast and House have fashioned an artefact that could well work similar magic on future generations of wide-eyed sonic archaeologists.