There is a fascination in listening to Mark Everett, the kind of fascination that goes with picking scabs or blisters, or the strange inspiration from feeling someone somewhere is going through a worse time than you.

The album does seem to tail off a bit towards the end – as nice as Light It Up and Tough are, they both seem disappointingly sedate ways to bring the album to a close compared to the succession of instantly engaging anthems that preceded them. Other than that, though, there’s enough evidence on Real Love that the fire that inspired Gossip is still burning as bright as ever.

This album will prove to be as addictive listening come the end of the year as it is right now.

Minor grumbles aside, however, Two Thousand And Ten Injuries is a deliriously fun listen, one that manages to suck you into its own little world for half an hour.

It won't be to everyone's tastes and it's clear with a name like theirs they won't be appearing on Fearne Cotton's playlist anytime soon, but there's an energy and vitality to Latin that's impossible to deny.

The King Blues are much better when they're angry and making music to riot to.


With Animals might be a predominantly bleak work, but within its crumbling walls of decay, there’s considerable beauty to be found.

Even though this is her ninth album, she still sounds fresh.

Like much of his best work, it’s a slow-burner of an album: at first listen, it sounds a pretty decent radio-friendly record, but it’s only on repeated plays that the full emotional scale which Adams is displaying becomes clear.

Undaunted by the pressures they continue to face, Virginia Wing present a disarming form of resistance to life’s troubles.

A masterfully constructed – and sequenced – collection of songs to get lost in over the coming months.

An album of murky depth, of seductive charms and no end of style.

It's a blistering, at times thoughtful, scattergun grab-bag of magpie musical styles and broken beat rhymes that somehow hangs together with irrepressible energy and invention.

This is some of the most welcoming music Gang Gang Dance have ever pieced together – less diffuse but still rewardingly complex, without any of the clutter that could occasionally overwhelm less patient parties.

Making a value judgement on Amelia is a tricky business, it being as immediate as undiluted Ribena. However, the album knows what it wants to do and pursues this with relentless efficiency.

Filled with the classic Molko goth-nihilism it’s twinged with as much Nirvana as it is Depeche Mode. Familiar yet fresh, a grower indeed, catchier with each listen.

It could be argued that Soul Time! itself is nothing new within the Dap-Kings catalogue, made up as it is of old tunes (Longer And Stronger, for instance, was written to celebrate Jones's 50th birthday in 2006), but these favourite oldies are collected here for the first time, and that's really something.

This is a quietly powerful, and intensely beautiful, record whose contemplations will bed themselves in your mind and hopefully move you towards caring about the issues raised as deeply as she clearly does.

Occasionally there are moments of insignificance amongst the rocking gems and although these fall short of the band’s best tracks here, the contrast is another element that will likely add longevity to the album as a whole.

Yet for the faithful, and even anyone who's heard the name but never the music, this is the same old wonderful stuff from one of our finest songwriters.

It’s a brilliant record, even without the weight of history behind it, and a classic, true heavy metal album from the same band that practically invented much of the genre. Essential for fans of any of the forms of metal. Obviously.

This is a fitting debut for a man who to many needs no introduction.

Unsound is a smile-inducing slab of post-punk awesome.

An album of bona fide radio hits in an ideal world, a fine example of mainstream rock at its most tasteful, music that’s going to be popular and sell a lot but that’s not afraid to subtly defy expectations of what its makers are.

Not as endearingly obviously pop or as chilled out as their debut, The Enemy Chorus takes some getting used to before it unfurls it pleasures.

Wrong Creatures succeeds far more often than it fails. It’s epic, full of attitude and done with a whole heap of style.

Many Blue Nile classics whispered their way to five minutes without outstaying their welcome, and there's plenty here that could have done the same. It's a minor quibble, however, when an album sounds as lovingly crafted, honest and subtly passionate as this.

This is perhaps not the classic Definitely Maybe has become, but with their army of live followers accumulated since Christmas, combined with that ready made clear charisma and cocky confidence--if anyone can revive Manchester, it is the Courteeners.