Despite Cee Lo's vocal guidance (Brixton Briefcase), you almost black out from the terribleness before coming to and realising you're too good for this soulless nonsense.

It'd be hard not to draw parallels between Calvi and [...] PJ Harvey. Yet while both women ooze an elemental kind of passion, Calvi is unashamedly slicker, especially when compared to Harvey's earlier, grungier work.

Straightaway, what's so appealing about this album is the double-barrel hellfire tactic the four-piece employ on almost every song.

Girls are a band who release their intoxicating mist over time, making this mini-album a bit unsatisfying in quantity rather than quality.

Heralding the return of John Grant after the demise of his former band The Czars left him contemplating suicide, Queen...sees him back on top form and teaming up with labelmates Midlake.

A mind-tweaking knees-up in the second-chance saloon for Fox.

To immerse yourself in 'Violet Cries' is more akin to entering a Ye Olde English fairy tale than some trashy vampire fiction, like discovering a weighty, weathered tome that lies under several thick inches of dust and recounts a distant age.

It sounds very pleasant.

Surf City spend the first third of Kudos hanging out with that same apathetic throng, but then surprise with a handful of genuinely exciting moments.

Ultimately Blake isn't yet the singer-songwriter to pull this album off.

Rolling Blackouts sees them doing what The Go! Team do: flailing and yelping like meth-addicted Energiser bunnies, which, as you may have figured, is not a compliment.

After the ubiquitous presence of '80s-indebted music last year, a follow-up with little stylistic deviation isn't a thrilling proposition: Take Me Over steals a hook from fellow Australians Men At Work, adds ooh-ooh backing vocals and just about gets away with it.

In summary then, better than most if you like that sort of thing.

Thankfully, on The World Is Yours the band sound more engaged than they have in some time.

The Auto-Tune and teenage love stuff don't entirely ruin a surprisingly weighty return.

So there aren't any retreads of 'DARE' or 'Clint Eastwood' but it is a stunning album from start to finish.

Ultimately Deerhoof Vs Evil isn't going to bring about any revolutions by itself. And while the people who love Deerhoof for being Deerhoof will certainly like this, it's no place to start for anyone else.

At least once they had a snappy poetic sensibility and an admirable interest in history. Unfortunately, now they are pure turgid Americana pastiche.

Kiss Each Other Clean is a surprising and majestic triumph.

If you think Jack White's given 73-year-old Wanda Jackson a new lease of life, then think again; she's been kicking up a hot fuss since she ditched that Elvis fella in the mid-'50s.

There are moments when Cloud Nothings sounds like your average punk-pop record, but Baldi is willing to render outside the lines with his own idiosyncratic noodlings and daubs of C86-era colour.

Newcomers might just wonder why these old dudes are ripping off Bloc Party.

The chilly Euro-house stylings may be a mite predictable but Diddy proves a generous curator, laying on blockbuster exhibits and atmospheric slow jamz alike in the greatest cast-of-millions hip-hop joint since, well, Kanye's latest.

Mine Is Yours? You can keep it, thanks.

In the end, Ritual is not a bad album. But neither is it the album it would like to think it is.

Wire have bizarrely remained a cult concern. This ought to change with the release of their 12th record, 11 clever tracks of unrelenting and witty pop.

At other times we're not sure whether we should be laughing or feeling uncomfortable; either way Ventriloquizzing is certainly no dummy's game.

Versatility is the key here: staccato beats with mellifluous melody, rich slow-jams and edgy harmonies - but woven through with Usher's own perspective. A winner.

On the balancing strength of those two songs [Dangerous & Much Too Soon], Michael manages to dodge the bullet enough to be kind of enjoyable. But it's worth remembering that both songs date back to the 1980s.

Jenny 'Rilo Kiley' Lewis, and Jonathan 'Just Recorded Under His Own Name' Rice's brand of folk-indie-pop--jangly guitars, sweetly shared harmonies, echoes of the Deep South--isn't groundbreaking, but probably wasn't supposed to be.

$o$ sounds like the most half-baked efforts of Hadouken!, LMFAO and Eugene Hutz.

Where the intervening years have tempered that haste, this fifth album offers compensation in the form of their sharpest, most precise set to date.

Even on tracks where celestial melody and light shatter the swirling fug of riffs – making Barn Owl sound more like a whacked-out Dead Meadow – the mood within is h-e-a-v-y like a bewitching series of black metal incantations

Shame it's slightly spoiled by the morbid fixations of those same lyrics--which are the only shit thing about this LP, really.

Moral of the story: don't listen to this while operating heavy machinery or people will die.

This album is a tribute to enduring a profoundly underwhelming pop star existence. The banality could be forgiven if it included even one decent hook but alas, no.

The actual music on Blurry Blue Mountain, however, is warm and enveloping.

Remembering, reinventing and emerging with a record as joyful as it is tear-stained, Twin Shadow has crafted something that's understatedly, subtly, almost perfect.

One hopes that with the confidence this record brings, she'll take a more permanent seat at hip-hop's high table. Because when she's at her best, she's the bestest there is.

Whenever Mr Rager sets off on his next adventure we're ready, musical machetes in hand, to follow him into the undergrowth…

It's all flawless in a string-laden soul way, but too clean an effort from a man who, in the past, has been so much more exciting by letting the grit remain.

It's the best thing he's done since his game-changing debut, and heartening evidence to suggest the self-professed Louis Vuitton don is in a good place right now.

This is the album they were born to make. It gives us all the things that punk has never been able to provide: romance, sex, the adventure of the open road and sheer nihilism-banishing energy.

On the evidence of this stunning piece of music, we'd all do well to give a bit more of ourselves over to the machine.

That cat-in-a-swing-coat yowl will still be a divider for many, but it's a snag of human individuality in a smooth, if mixed pack.

After all these years, he's still got it.

That voice, when she exploits the grit of that Barbadian burr to the max, is more unique and richly textured than ever, and that and her crack production team are all the personality.

They may be a one trick pony, but these 2008 recordings show that Stereolab are good at what they do.

For the most part The Constant boils down to a thin chart gruel, too lumpenly pitched between the Carling Academies and the cattle-grid nightclubs to leave a mark.

To be completely honest, it's no revelation – at times the music feels incomplete, like a lonesome Portner is missing his bros – but it's played out beautifully, sunny in disposition and just a little wild around the edge.

It's just that it all feels so pointless and half-arsed that it's impossible to muster more than an apathetic shrug in judgement.

Despite overwhelming evidence to support the notion that he should quit vocal duties forever, he continues to labor under the delusion that his cochlea-shredding falsetto sounds like anything other than Prince with his scrotum in a vice.

Cardiology is monstrously offensive – the latest shit-streak by music's laziest sons.

Just odd enough to escape period-piece pastiche, their deft weaving of different eras and styles makes them akin to a UK version of White Denim, and promises more exciting things from the future.

More worryingly, there's a nagging sense that he's decided to dress it up in grandiose, emotive sentiments simply to camouflage a lack of real emotional investment.

Ultimately, Darkstar's maturation from dubstep's next big things into modern pop classicists continues to intrigue.

We worry on your {Marnie's] behalf about carpal tunnel syndrome, in fact. Until then, permit us to bug out to the controlled chaos.

You feel the need for something other than Bryan's croon, and it isn't there.

Warpaint's is a different darkness, not delighting in splendour or show, but in deftly exploring a bleak internal, romantically bereft landscape.

If there's one thing that this Arizonan four-piece have been masters of since their inception in the early '90s, it's consistently possessing the over-bearing sentimentality of a teenage girl. Their seventh studio album certainly doesn't veer very far from their past emotional sensibilities.

In revisiting the production of her '80s records she paradoxically produces something that sounds timeless.

There's two sides to Nedry. One is given to taking faintly voguish reference points, lopping off the sharp edges and smoothing out the kinks. It's pretty, but weirdly bloodless....The other is less polite....Message to the band: ignore your nicer side in future.

Not a bad record then, but one that's debased by the disappointment of one of the UK's bright hip-hop hopes selling soul rather than surprises.

Richard Paul Ashcroft has assembled that most ruggedly authentic of musical backings, a team of LA session players, and walked them through all of his most anodyne default settings, at a deadeningly flat pace.

He's made one of the best British albums of the year--that's why he should be feted.

Similarities to She And Him abound, but minus Zooey's showtune splendour, the vulnerability in Caitlin's voice chimes as true as the clink of a quarter in an old jukebox.

It's an impressive attempt to drag folk music out of the hayloft and onto the dancefloor and it marks the emergence of a smart, sincere and talented new pop star.

Throw in the tinny synth on 'Fish In The Sky' and this album couldn't get any more late-'70s if it tried. If it was a TV programme, it'd be Starsky & Hutch--a dubious honour to say the least.

It is pleasant, and largely forgettable.

The man who made the 's 'Dare'--can't add enough bells and whistles to stop the tunes from sounding like they've been faxed over from one of Stock & Aitken's duller days at the office.

For two men famed as political firebrands, Robert Wyatt and Israeli anti-Zionist and saxophonist Gilad Atzmon certainly make a beautiful noise together.

Ultimately, too many of these tunes are rehearsal room grooves in search of a hook.

Guilty of knocking underdeveloped material out one minute and trying to be too clever the next, It's What I'm Thinking... is surely the most focused and mature record of his career.

A record of beauty and balance, Swanlights cements Hegarty as the transgender: artsy and challenging enough for the Guardian chin-strokers, but with enough hushed melodic wallop to seduce all-comers.

A brutally romantic record.

It feels like the ravishing opium dream of a Victorian gentleman explorer, trying to recreate the exoticism of a long trip abroad through a prolonged period of narcosis.

Margins though, is mawkish and self-indulgent to the last, a wet weekend of a record, drably trudging through inelegant, wannabe-Mike Leigh vignettes into Smith's failed relationship.

It's only on 'Ghetto Stars' when that ominous whisper comes to the fore, that Mixed Race excites, and a cascade of strings that don't so much make us yearn for past glories as wonder what Tricky thinks he has left to prove.

It's far from bad, but if you're still waiting for a Clinic record as great as the utterly seminal Internal Wrangler, keep waiting, and probably don't hold your breath.

Comparisons to SK will doubtless arise but the production here is sparser, with more focus on intricate oddities.

And so paranoia produces, if not a great album, a respectable transition from love-him-or-hate-him brass-toting berk into a genuine, bonafide pop maverick.

Young ends up smothered by unconvincing soundscapes on all but two acoustic tunes that stand out by virtue of actually not sounding like a hurricane.

For all its occasional lack of bite and drama, Halcyon Digest's tender, transgressive pop proves a fine and focused addition to a uniquely haunting body of work. Cherish it like you would a phantom limb.

No Age will never be legit superstars, but they have a keen and loyal fanbase, something cherishable in a year likely to be paradoxically remembered for forgettable chancers.

Public Strain is an album that invites you in and lets you at least stay for tea.

King Night is sick. Not just in the sense that it's outstandingly good but in the fact that it seems extremely unwell.

Glasser's glowing debut offers more melodic and emotional consummation than almost any of her peers can muster, poised in a genuinely transcendent golden balance between the stern, the spacious and the gaudily sparkling. A very precious Ring indeed.

This is technically the fourth full-length they've released, and it seems AV don't quite reinvent themselves under pressure so much as contort themselves into bigger, better and weirder ways to take everybody's ears on a massive tangent.

Much of this album, with its gritty street-level reportage of booze-alleviated dereliction and crooked politicians, feel so perfect for right now.

It feels like Maximum Balloon is a project that could inflate infinitely. Let's hope it does.

Mixing the exotic sounds of Laibach, Sparks and forgotten camp Euro-disco heroes Army Of Lovers, he's on to a winner even if he feels he's losing the corporate fight.

The Manics' 10th offensive is a more playful beast than that--poignant, joyful and above all really, really loud.

Swans' bleakness is beset with great beauty, black wings to another world.

Marcus Lambkin seems to have a thing for awful names and even worse puns. Luckily for us, as Shit Robot, his ability to craft sublime slices of electro house and muscular techno pop trumps everything else about him.

It's all rather one-paced and sags badly after tenth track 'Lick Up Ya Foot' but, by crikey, the likes of 'Big Tings Redone' and 'Dutty Rut' provide the perfect soundtrack for out-on-the-stoop sunshine boozing.

For a record just 30 minutes long it feels impossibly epic and for all its scuzzy, lo-fi production, it still sounds fully realised. Not to mention fully brilliant.

Though lacking standout tracks, this is an icy masterclass in how synths should sound.

This album, like their previous two, has one moment of utterly triumphant rock Valhalla amidst a bunch of pretty good retro-soaked poses.