Instead of bashing critics away with brilliant tunes, they find themselves defining faceless bluster-rock.

Their debut album proper quivers and quakes with the cinematic electronics and emotional abandonment of a soundtrack to Armageddon.

Cashback? Pretty close.

Initially it's strange to hear that instantly identifiable baritone clashing with organic, rough-edged guitars, dirty Hammond organ, and delicate strings rather than the cold electronics of the day job, but it soon reveals itself to be a perfect pairing.

While Saint Etienne will always sound like Saint Etienne, these songs are their sharpest in over a decade.

Romancing is full of brash, exciting music that's as fun as doing The Big Shop with headphones in.

The album as a whole saunters and bounces along.

If the focus on 'I Predict A Graceful Expulsion' is sharp then its scope is overly broad, focusing in on vague sentiments that leave you fond, but never in love.

With 'Here Come The Bombs', frontman Gaz Coombes does a surprisingly adept job of retaining [former band, Supergrass's] oddball pop sensibility, but shaping it into something that's, if not mature, then at least slightly less frivolously young and free.

It's a set of two halves whose hands won't hold.

The band are increasingly clever at turning a melody inside out to evoke those moments of dizzy-making clarity.

He excellently lends Coldplay's 'The Scientist' a terse fragility, but less successful is a sanitised, Sheryl Crow-featuring version of Tom Waits' 'Come On Up To The House'.

'Capricornia' and 'Europe' thicken their debut's effervescent jangle to a rich lustre, and Morris' solo uke classic 'Tallulah' makes sending postcards of sausage-eating Germans sound as romantic as dinner on the Danube.

More problematic than the bad lyrics or air of disengagement is Higgins' involvement. Too much of the album sounds washed out and painfully clean.

Too much of Not Your Kind Of People is pedestrian, anodyne and utterly unremarkable.

It's blissful, soulful proof that although SMD might have stopped chasing the hit parade, they haven't stopped making hits.

Kwes' voice underwhelms throughout, as if he's embarrassed by his own singing, and he ends up underselling the songs into which he's put so much effort.

Time Team is intergalactic, ambient, Rustie-ish drug music set to snare kicks and sturdy hip-hop beats that at its best is deliciously mind-bending.

Mainman Anton Newcombe is now sober, and here has made his best album since 2003's '…And This Is Our Music'.

The Brooklyn-based quintet traverse an unplaceable pop-era on grooves, prog chops and a spellbinding ennui, sounding effortless throughout.

Here is the ultra-Keane album, with tinkling, histrionic, arena-ready piano motifs™, soaring, emotive vocals™ and songs called 'Day Will Come', 'In Your Own Time' and 'Silenced By The Night'.

It's a bolshie, unapologetic barrage of electroshock rock'n'roll that's as snarlingly pissed off as it is inanely entertaining.

Clearly Damon is pleased to be carving a niche in the world of high art, but perhaps 'Dr Dre The Opera: Nuthin' But An ENO Thang' might have served his legend better.

It still defiantly goes against the grain, but also explodes with immediate, attention-grabbing riffs.

This is an impeccable debut: two feet in the past and one open mouth pointing towards a very bright future.

Capped with Dan Devine's vocals – a scream as angry as it is distraught – this is despair with a backbeat, and punk as it should be: courageously self-destructive.

Radio-friendly insipidness.

Focus-grouped, paranoid and please-all.

Much of this record plays like a tribute to '90s miserabilists Red House Painters, all phantom-like reverb over misleadingly comforting folk tropes.

Not just a fan oddity--a fine pleasure.

A striking funereal stomp, considering its bleak subject matter, it really shouldn't be quite as sensationally sexy as it is.

A common thread can be found in CYRK, Cate's second album: the application of a sincere pop-song sensibility, and a yen for the surreal that sidesteps the zany.

Not sure-footed enough in its subversion, its artificiality feels fake rather than carefully plotted.

Something about them is essentially alien--yet, very probably, that is the source of their strange, uncanny power.

The truth is, though, there's just a lack of magic, a lack of something special going on. It's not bad. It's not good.

Things limp from bad to tedious with 'White Noise', a song so passé it just bought its first shares in ITV Digital.

It's a substantial and rewarding work.

This is the side of Jack White III he's happy to show the world right now, and it's absolutely fascinating to behold.

It reasserts Benson's standing as one of America's greatest songwriters.

With the help of 'Cisco fuzz-pop linchpin Mikael Cronin, they've turned out a collection which displays a fondness for vintage '60s psych and the spooky microdot-pop of Thee Oh Sees.

Love gets to indulge his sweet tooth over a whole record. That freedom turns out to be part blessing and part curse, his delicate-as-a-feather jangle and wispy vocals eventually wearing just a little thin.

The Money Store offers a glimpse of sonic dystopia that's utterly convincing.

She's far less successful when she goes into full-on retro pop mode, as on the incredibly cloying 'Put Your Brain In Gear' and 'Runaway', but when she decides to plump for the darker end of the spectrum, she shines.

Labrinth may work wonders in the background, but he's far too anonymous on Electronic Earth to mark his card as much of a solo star.

These drifts of pop cultural flotsam feel eerily dislocated, as if there was little joy in the psychic bloodletting. Strangely compelling, though.

Original it is not--there's little here that couldn't have come straight off a Shara Nelson album--but she does write some fine tunes

A gloopy cheese-feast of sprightly psychedelic pop, served with a dollop of wanton James Brown funk on the side.

It's the longer, wilder but more melodically repetitive screes that dominate the album, throwbacks to Spacemen 3's space freakouts that excite sonically but outstay welcomes like a nasal harmonica player.

What's missing is any emotional contrast to stop all that cleverness from sounding overwhelming.

Swirling synths abound, but remain encased in four-minute micro-epics which sometimes mine the icy ambition of pre-megastardom Simple Minds.

Cancer Bats are not just ripping it. They're tearing it a new one.

It gleams like a skate-park erected in the clouds, and this is your invitation to strap on shin-pads, get up there and carve up some cumulonimbus.

'Nothing To Do' is a real struggle to hate. The fact is, they have an undeniable knack for turning out two-minute garage pop songs with such warm-hearted, wide-eyed brio that shooting them down seems as callous as steamrollering a basket full of kittens.

Tell Tales is spirited and theatrical, if not necessarily memorable enough to pass into local lore.

She steps up the challenge, revelling in the church-like acoustics and delivering a heart-stopping 'Cosmic Love'. 'Dog Days Are Over' is rendered as fresh and powerful as when you first heard it, rather than the supermarket shopping soundtrack it's now become.

While the overall sound is brighter, it's also largely rather weedy, and trading in the once colossal stoner riffs for languid neo-folk doesn't really suit this five-piece all that well.

In the album's quieter segments he proves that his deft touch remains.

In many ways Boys & Girls it is as note-perfect an album as you'll hear all year, yet it's also often perfectly inert.

The result is delirious party music, which, although at times deliciously dumb, is never – as cerebral Addison Groove fan Aphex Twin would attest – stupid.

As bewilderingly little logic as Black Dice's rave collages contain, they're nailing something close to unique.

All in all, this isn't an album you can listlessly slam on to get yourself ready for a night out, but it is a satisfyingly rich project.

It shows range, sure, but it feels so disparate that it's just baffling. Worse, none of these poses and personae actually feel convincing.

This is more entirely predictably absurd bludgeoning death metal silliness from the kings of its kind.

But as a big comeback for these Welsh titans, it's more lost than prophecy...

Its indie innocence would be too much if it wasn't for the darkened, Lynchian hum that hangs over the record

Beautifully recorded strings and piano occasionally break the intimidating, sustained reverie, and the stark, rolling drums of 'Prime' suggest that Wexler could take this somewhere far darker.

In short, there's lo-fi, and then there's this album.

As an honest dispatch from the coal-face, it's glorious indeed.

A+E is Coxon's most thrilling and noisy album since 2000's The Golden D.

If you like your rap homespun, rich, physical and all 'summer-in-NYC '95', it's a dream. But considering he once reinvented the genre, it's disappointingly reactionary.

Every track brims with exuberant life. His first true masterpiece.

A highlight comes in 'Sans Toi', an unassuming love song which proves that, stripped of special guests, it's their songwriting that brought Amadou and Mariam this far.

Mainly a deep pool of blissful, sedentary festival listening.

Although it's smart, it also feels safe compared with the thrilling records Clark has made before.

It feels too affected to be truly effecting.

It's like the best bits of every extreme metal subgenre: a deathly crossover of sludgy, blackened thrash that will put hairs on your chest.

Dismiss his second album, Songs, only at your peril.

A belligerent surge of dub-influenced electro-rock and angst-ridden sloganeering.

Dammit if they're not real handy at no-fi surf-rock jangle ... an unapologetically upbeat 23 minutes.

[An] album stacked with songs of trailblazing angst ('Je Me Perds'), sinister desperation ('Cold') and nut-cracking jams {'Stop Kicking').

There's little warmth other than a palpable meeting of minds of its creators, whose culture of experimental collaboration is only to be lauded.

That this 'art collective,' incubated in south London's makeshift spaces--all sketchy car parks and vibrant experimentation--should turn out a debut as casually brilliant as Other People's Problems is not surprising in itself. But that it should sound so vital, kind of is.

This dream team (two thirds Britney producers Bloodshy & Avant, one third Mark Ronson collaborator Andrew Wyatt) decided to take a step back and make an album 'as a band', rather than as competing knob-twiddlers. And it's worked.

Albarn's best work has cheek, wit and a smart-alecky desire to shake things up. All this reverence doesn't really suit him.

Noctourniquet's greatest strength--or, to hardcore prog-trolls, its unforgivable weakness--lies with its melodies.

Stripped of her day-to-day outfit Vivian Girls' fence of lo-fi fuzz, Katy Goodman's faultless way with Technicolor pop melodies blazes through La Sera's second album.

In the end, MDNA is a ridiculously enjoyable romp, but oddly not for the bits that are supposed to be fun. Instead, it's the psychotic, soul-bearing stuff that provides listeners with some of the most visceral stuff she's ever done.

Foreign Body crawls under the skin and stubbornly lodges itself there.

They're hardly bringing in a new era, but there's definite promise here.

Those wanting clangour and dissonance will be disappointed, but everyone else will be pleasantly surprised.

Even if the Mensa-folk crew feel dumbed down on, there's just enough Mercer magic on Morrow to light up your local drop-in centre.

Sonik Kicks is the sound of Paul Weller growing old the only way he could--not particularly gracefully, but with no small amount of style.

It's a great shame that this album's component parts don't raise the whole above 'nice to know they're still around' status.

There's a certain lack of substance throughout the album which isn't fully covered up by Rose's elegant stoner shimmying.

Ekstasis reminds us that music can mean so much more.

It's as dreamy and atmospheric as you might expect, but the truth is that only a handful of Jónsi's 15 tunes here really work without the context of some CGI tigers.

Amid the smartly rendered pastiche of this debut, Bainbridge references Prince and Janet Jackson, yet turns those joyous sounds unpleasantly arch.

There's occasional crimes of flannel-wet schmaltz but mostly Smart is like an esoteric, London-based Dam-Funk with a fondness for chemically enhanced raving.