While Broderick’s prescription is perfectly phrased for its purpose, as a stand-alone collection of music it has accompanying adverse side effects, i.e. it's not really a very enjoyable listen.

A glossy Sixties pop sheen hasn’t just been splattered wholesale over every track but instead nicely integrated resulting in a new and engaging, but hardly incongruous, Rumble Strips noise.

We have an album that displays a band with considerable potential, but which is disappointingly lacking in imagination: compositionally and lyrically.

Fortino may not have hated the world away, but she possesses a similarly intuitive ability to block everything out so she can operate in her own peculiar vacuum. It’s an admirable quality, but the desperately sad nature of her music makes it a place that’s difficult to visit with any degree of regularity.

Upper Air is a decent enough record, but it’s not strong enough to be listened to without recalling other, similar but better records.

It's a nagging feeling that despite the sheer addictiveness of the material, the stonkingly monumental percussion and the band's fledgling yet highly-accomplished abilities, it’s a bit devoid of that certain spark.

Why Oneida need a concept to rock out for two hours is still a bit of a mystery, but it never tires... if only all shameless self-indulgence sounded this good.

It is hard to really know if there is a place for cricket concept albums. Certainly there's a time and a place for them and at the start of an Ashes summer is just that--it's perfect timing from Hannon and Walsh.

This is duvet music, offering vague comfort but impossible to feel any excitement for.

Paradoxically, despite--or perhaps even due to--its directness, Living With A Tiger is a challenging record, only revealing its full depth on repeated visits.

While (the album) tips far more convincingly on the successful end of the scales, there remains the sense of a band playing safer than needs be; a sextet pushing against their limits but never straining outright at them.

Dando fucks Varshons up just enough to stop it being an actively great covers record--in recent terms The Condo Fucks’ mighty "Fuckbook" stomps over it--but not enough to detract from the truth that the thread drawing the successful songs together is the still-beating talent of Evan Dando, non-dickhead version.

So, finally, to Farm, which every bit the equal of "Beyond;" maybe even better.

Octahedron lacks sparkle enough to raise it above previous creative highs--it’s a recommended affair, at times truly scintillating, but it doesn’t quite deliver to the extent where all caution can be tossed to the breeze.

Familiarity breeds contempt, and Spinnerette makes its strongest statements when flobbing a big loogie onto the grave of past endeavours, not when laying out fresh blooms at the side.

Whatever all this means, Dragonslayer is an album to get your teeth into. As on the final chorus, it's: "a bigger kind of kill". You need this.

Beacons Of Ancestorship is pretty much what the avid Tortoise fan would consider par for the course, in that its a veering cascade of inherent surprises that never fails to astound, amaze or disappoint.

All of the time, Will Roan's vocal proves to be the most engaging aspect of Rewild, even at its least explosive.

Travels... is a 33 minute monster without a slither of excess fat, and the best thing Andy Falkous has ever put his name to.

Bibio’s tendency, across the album, to either smooth the edges of his creations into non-threatening abstraction or fail to zone in on his best ideas is frustrating.

It's hard to get excited about music which never gets too excited itself. What good ideas The Phenomenal Handclap Band do have are spread a little thinly on this debut.

What was once pin drop quiet is now grand; one soon adjusts however as the key to all of the songs here is the inner shell, not the protective exterior.

Foreign Born feel like they should have more staying power, even if there’s less flash.

An attempt to relive the RATM era that falls far, far short of the bar. Save your money and go and listen to the real deal instead.

As with any good experiment the failures are almost as important as the successes. The old school reggae and the auto-tuned idiocy are utterly redundant, as pointless as water in whisky. There are four or five properly innovative and exciting tunes here.

Like Tiny Masters, these kids are at that enviable point when all this seems fresh and new. You can almost see the process of discovery burning brightly in their eyes. Skeletons perfectly captures that moment.

Bitte Orca isn't a record that'll reduce many to tears, except perhaps of awe. But when something's so astonishing in every other respect, we can allow for that.

Yes, The Eternal is “Another Sonic Youth Record” but it’s also “Another Good Sonic Youth record”, revealing its finer details gradually, even if there’s no fundamentally new approach, arrangement, or message, in any of the songs.