The record paints The Concretes’ personality in richer detail without giving up one iota of their distinctive spookiness.

It covers too much ground, spreads its inventive energies too thin.

Return to the Sea reins in its eccentricities successfully enough to illustrate that the most understated risks can be the most rewarding.

Envelopes could so easily be a cheap Belle & Sebastian clone or a second-rate Magnetic Fields, but they pull off what nobody remembers to in this line of work anymore: personality.

I'd be surprised if anybody, in any field, drops something this potent in the next nine months.

While a well-concocted snotty attitude may be a decisive factor in any number of great rock albums, Born Again in the USA feels lazy without any particular agenda. It’s good for a laugh and a couple of listens, but ultimately does not resonate.

Ultimately, it's not likely that those who've yet to be Quasi fans will be converted by this album, but it would nonetheless be worth their while to give it a listen.

For the most part, Cannibal Sea differs little from The Long Goodbye: the elements that made that album successful – tight songwriting, precise arrangements and elegant performances – are once again employed with aplomb.

Falling somewhere between a compilation, a beat CD and a producer showcase, this fails to satisfy on any of those levels.

All At Once shares many of the same stylistic preoccupations as War Prayers, but by carefully reworking similar material, it improves on its predecessor.

While it’s not bad per say, it is certainly lacking in spark.

Fab Four Suture is a virtual treasure map, a plane of possibility.

So what’s a band to do that sticks to its guns and produces some of the finest sludgy blues-punk this side of Blue Cheer? Well, for starters, add horns. Call it a gimmick or a last-ditch effort at reinvention, whatever the case, but it works.

Their efforts at stretching boundaries falter because they have inscribed themselves within such narrow aesthetic parameters, hitting a fourth chord feels like a massive achievement.

In the end, there is nothing too paradigm-shifting to be found here, just a nice genre pastiche from two unique talents who won’t disappoint their fans.

Axis of Evol may not be a great album. It remains prey to some of McBean’s obnoxious corner-cutting. But it is his most resolute outing to date, certainly the first record he’s made that can be heard front-to-back, repeatedly, without losing most of its shine.

It’s frustrating to hear them in this context – sounding jaded and uninspired, a slump they haven’t been in since the late ‘80s.

Dead Drunk on the whole could be taken as noise music, noise music with none of the brutality and half the imagination.

How you’ll come down on Etiquette depends, I suppose, on how interested you are in the tales of sad-sack twentysomethings.

The record doesn’t sound much like a free improv session, but it retains the crucial dynamic of starting from zero and seeing where it goes, and there’s enough going on here to make me curious where they’ll go next.

There's something really interesting about the way these two conflicting styles fit together here, a groove for headbangers with flowers in their hair.

Malcolm Middleton’s electric and bass guitars have never sounded so big, and they’re better that way.

It's as if More and Black set out to purposely compose a more "mature" album. By slowing things down they're able to accommodate R&B outings, spoken word stories and artsy offerings, but to be honest, it's not all that much fun.

It's tempting to spend hours excavating metaphors and translating references on a record this complex and interesting, but Destroyer's Rubies also works well as pop.

Each moment of each song is completely unpredictable, to the point where even after multiple listens some of these transitions still seem to come out of nowhere.

This compilation goes for breadth where Konono’s Congotronics went for depth.

Songs like "Walky Talky" and "Bye-Bye-Bye" reference the band's Devo inspiration a bit too explicitly, but overall Polysics show themselves to have for the most part outgrown their influences.

One of the most important anthologies to come along in quite a while.