Spiky, occasionally over sugary. [14 May 2005, p.67]

Although Leven recites a fair number of hippie clichés (“Make some peace, everyone” implores ‘Seasoned Sun’), it’s her inventive use of an arsenal of rich, vintage synths that rescues Season Sun from cloying sweetness.

Friendly Fires remain knowingly cheesy and in-your-face and their Technicolor live shows will continue to thrill regardless. The worst part of ‘Inflorescent’ is that you won’t hate it; you’ll just forget you’ve even listened to it.

Not a classic, then, but you could just listen to the good ones a lot.

And though the change in volume might be ‘Howl’’s defining characteristic... it’s the shift in attitude that is its finest.

'Tired Of Hanging Around' is one seriously pissed-off, paranoid, twitchy record.

Inside you’ll find very little deviation from the wistful, narrative-led pop they’ve made a career from.

Waterfall sees the shadowy 24-year-old advance the weird, industrial sonics that caught everyone’s attention in the first place into even bolder territory.

in•ter a•li•a is the opposite of being phoned in.

It's guiltily satisfying in a bearded, nodding sort of way, but there's little to grab on to in such an ironic hall of mirrors.

The debut album from Liverpool girl-trio Stealing Sheep strips the style of all Wicker Man cheese and stuffs it full of modern relevance.

‘Serpentina’ is a welcome reintroduction to the artist and a cathartic ode to doing things your own way.

Sonically restless, Madame X doesn’t imitate current pop trends as much as it mangles them into new shapes. A record that grapples with being “just way too much”, ultimately, it refuses to tone things down.

Lost Friends is a set of pile-driving anthems that demands your undivided attention.

Electrelane could do with tightening their concentration spans, but everything else is just fine and dandy thank you. [7 May 2005, p.66]

Their fourth album has none of the witchy class that makes these others so compelling and comes off like a painfully hokey play-act.

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.

Lostprophets have, against the odds, carved something genuinely fresh.

Whereas his 2002 solo debut shot a glance back to Michael Jackson's 'Off The Wall', this is more indebted to 'Smooth Criminal', early '80s Prince and on its ballads, Stevie Wonder. [9 Sep 2006, p.37]

Half-knowing, half-full of anthems and lyrically halfway to hell, Off With Their Heads is musically halfway there. Kaisers have barely missed a beat on the highway to massive-dom, but they’re hardly raising our heart rates.

On 'Octopus' The Bees find their groove and sound blissfully unaware whether anyone else is listening. You should, they've made their best album yet.

They tag-team across the record with a cheery glint, a self-deprecating wink and a boundless charm that's hard not to like.

Definitely a beautiful album but its hopelessness is never-ending, like a friend telling you their relationship troubles for hours and hours.

The 14 tracks--almost entirely instrumental--play out as loose sketches of piano, violin and electronics, making for an ultra-sparse, carefully considered album.

‘Who Cares?’, O’Connor’s fourth album, is a gorgeously measured step forward.

It’s tempting to tell Smith that Murphy wants his shtick back (along with his suit), but the pastiche is often effective, at least.

He’s an impossible person, by all accounts--especially his own--but also an exceptionally expressive songwriter.

The barbed musings on dead scenes (‘Dull Boy’) and vacuous hipsters (the aforementioned ‘Big Toe’) add lyrical bite to an album that, sonically, barely strays from good vibes territory.

Revelations wants to be unlistenable, but it can’t always hide Shamir’s songwriting strengths.

Gibson’s inclination towards expressing thoughtful and emotional contemplation largely balance out the record’s apparent eagerness to simply rave through the pain.

Monuments To An Elegy is essentially a Corgan solo record which shows flashes of his old power, while also straying into some seriously dodgy attempts to update the Pumpkins sound for 2014.

Occasionally... she does hint at her past genius. [2 Sep 2006, p.21]

These songs are the sound of joy, canned and compressed for your aural pleasure.

When Dinowalrus get it right, they do Britrock rather well indeed. From 'Riding Eazy''s shimmering funk to the dance-punk strut of 'The Gift Shop', there's a lot to like--even if on paper it does all appear terribly clichéd.

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

The Oxford band’s second album since their 2014 reformation benefits from a wealth of creativity and experimentation that Bell may well have been suppressing for over 20 years.

This is pure Tricky; sometimes at his near-best, sometimes coasting, but always unique.

Within And Without hangs oppressively, saved only by fleeting moments of clarity like the title track's stabbing outro, or the jump-rope glitter that opens 'Before'.

Not so much leaping between time-signatures as entire time-zones, the gristly riffs and ambient metal meanderings of ‘Sonder’ strive for a kind of stoic, sombre enormity, but they clash badly with Tompkins’ often slick pop vocals.

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.

O’Brien’s personality shines through, and it’s a pleasure to get to know him. It’s tempting to conclude he’s Radiohead’s secret weapon.

A wobbly start, but luckily The Coral are just finding their sea legs.

Lacking as it does the songwriting spark of Ariel Pink, the record lacks cohesion.

Manifest! is back-loaded with the big hitters, so you need faith and tenacity to find the gems.

Toe-curlingly unlistenable. [4 Sep 2004, p.73]

Stultifying moroseness and a constant furrowing of the brow permeate from start to finish. [21 Aug 2004, p.49]

The record veers off along theatrical tangents that recall Muse or ELO as much as Sunset Rubdown but ultimately don’t seem to make sense.

On ‘Born Pink’, BLACKPINK tread familiar thematic territory for pop music, but the imagery – finding solace from heartbreak at the bottom of a bottle (‘The Happiest Girl’), boasting about being the type of girl you take to your “mama house” (‘Typa Girl’) – isn’t particularly novel, though they have effectively applied a personal touch in the past (see Jennie’s ‘Solo’).

At times, there's the sense Tyler's charisma outweighs his content, and as such it's probably up to Earl to deliver the group's first bona fide hip-hop classic.

This is an album of genuine depth, one expressing the nervous conservative shockwaves which charge through party kids once they start to come down.

Life And Times is unchallenging pap. But it's furnished with the odd line of lyrical craftiness and melodies that, on the whole, manage to keep the stabilisers on his career because (as always) they make the seemingly untenable emotions of their writer sound tolerable.

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

For all this uncertainty, the record is incredibly assured.

Three safe, heavyweight singles are backed up by a confusingly hit-and-miss album.

There’s something to be said for creating music exclusively for the club or to be bumped in car stereos in the summer, but with a bland, out-dated musical architecture, The WIZRD doesn’t even offer that. I

‘Shoot For The Stars, Aim For The Moon’ showcases a multi-faceted artist only just discovering his potential. What makes the album truly stand out is that it serves as a testament to the strength, power and knowledge Smoke held in his ambition to go to the very top.

The album was written immediately after Brendon’s recent stint in the Broadway musical ‘Kinky Boots’, and while it’s fair to say he’s always had a flair for theatrics, the experience has injected these tracks with unprecedented levels of sass and drama. Urie is clearly still relishing the role of the sonic bachelor, and it shows. On Pray, it sounds like he’s having a total blast.

Musically, ‘When We Stay Alive’ mirrors the feeling of physical rehabilitation, the sense of claustrophobia unavoidable on the knotty ‘Fold Up’. The second half of the album, though, strips away the fog and the anger, finding blissful moments of clarity and closure that feel like real eureka moments.

It is an elegant and, quite frankly, utterly beautiful record.

It is by all means a stimulating body of work with ample substance, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Less focused on his innate individuality, it’s a John Mayer passion project that toasts to the good old days, when musicians were more inclined to follow instincts and feelings than clicks and likes.

Sustained power and little in the way of variety can make for quick fatigue, but at just 38 minutes long Cope has hooks and energy to spare.

If you like loud choruses, ceaseless energy and the bug-eyed extremities of crunk, look no further. [15 Jan 2005, p.43]

'Kiss...' operates on a level of perversity, honesty and originality that blows most bands out of the water.

It’s Hall & Oates without the casual genius; Boy Crisis without the chutzpah; Junior Boys without the emotional baggage.

The album lacks that bouncy, bratty energy of old, while never really nailing a more grown-up emotional register. Even so, glad that they're still there.

While their love of premeditated spontaneity might be admirable in jazzier quarters, in reality it means that almost every song on their debut is marred by sudden changes in time signature, key and genre.

With pace set to 'perky', the occasionally impressive hooks of (oh yes) 'Summer Fling, Don't Mean A Thing' and (oh no) 'Dumped' merge into a glossy mud from which nothing to rival All The Small Things emerges.

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.

Not ‘dance’ music by any stretch of the imagination, but beautiful all the same.

Bitter Rivals is their toughest and most focused work yet. It’s also their poppiest, which is very much a good thing.

Band moniker-related developments of recent years (see also: Ducktails, Peak Twins) mean this now implies gormless nostalgia, smarmy irony and, in a nutshell, chillwave. Happily, Lowtalker--five songs, 14 minutes--is a bit smarter, and better, than that.

Owens remains a naturally intuitive pop songwriter, and ultimately Chrissybaby Forever is a fresh slice of Californian good vibrations that arrives just in time for summer.

The emotions might not be quite as strong on this record but Sea Of Bees still manages to wrap you up in her words.

Beneath The Eyrie is still arguably their most consistent body of work since their 2004 reformation and certainly their most inventive in 28 years. What a spooky surprise – that this incarnation of Pixies would turn out to be such a dark, dark horse.

Sure, there is some inevitable fan service – the title, after all, is an anagram of ‘Clancy is dead’ – but this album sees one of the most fearless bands of their generation continue to take risks.

Effortlessly weaving elements of his hardcore upbringing in the West Coast DIY scene with more classic and fragile approaches to songwriting, this is an open introduction with all the hallmarks of America’s next unlikely star.

Pretty. Odd. is a victory for artistic ambition over cynical careerism, and we should all rejoice in their decision to follow their instincts as opposed to their instructions and actually do something different.

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

Ultimately Anything In Return suggests a tendency to follow the musical trends du jour rather than defining a true Toro Y Moi sound.

McRae is evidently still wrestling with her ambitions. ‘Think Later’, however, contains enough intrigue to suggest that this is the work of an artist finally honing their identity, dancing and sparkling all the way.

Hippies is an uncomplicated, brilliant LP about what it's like to be young, stoned and having A REALLY GOOD TIME while not coming across like you're a complete tool.

Cranes is strong on ‘Honeymoon’ and ‘Easy’, but there’s also nigh-on-sprightly, post-Jessie Ware trip-pop on ‘I Only’ and ‘Feather Tongue’. It's just not enough, though, to struggle above years of similarly tasteful, slight efforts.

Soft and slipper-shod as it may seem, there's a complex coldness to Sandoval's lyrical persona.

A buoyant record that should widen his audience, up to now largely confined to his Bandcamp page--a trove of gently weird psychedelia.

Fractured techno, torch song balladry, oilsmoke rock'n'roll and soulful synth pop merge sublimely, all rooted in tales of romantic dislocation and repair.

There’s a reason that the London-via-Kendall four-piece, centred around siblings Fiona and Will Burgess, have been attracting such attention. In fact, there are 11 of them on this debut full-length. Much of it’s down to Fiona Burgess’ sad yet sultry vocals and the way they stretch across these dreamy, largely synth-based songs.

‘Pink Friday 2’ feels like a consolidation and refinement of everything Minaj can do – including dropping pop culture references that no other artist would think of.

A hundred miles off, and they might as well be a thousand. [16 Sep 2006, p.37]

Get Awkward is relentless, riotous and raw.

Yet although much of it coasts along on autopilot, it can be outrageously good fun.

Disappointingly, given his previous sterling output, this is a pretty boneless pastiche of the genre.

A 60-minute torrent of positivity, an open-ended love letter to his wife -

Perhaps Oberst finds it tough to bring his brilliant bile to bear upon a synth the way he attacks an acoustic; a shame, as The People's Key is otherwise synthetic perfection.

They may never recapture their ‘Dirt’-era majesty, but AiC’s second act is turning out very nicely indeed.

It'll do for a fleeting one-night stand, but Mechanical Bull isn't the rekindling of a romance that we'd hoped for.

The expansive arrangements feel like unnecessary decoration. But on the billowing ‘You Got Me Time Keeping’ and sweet single 'Sometimes' Black's experiment works, injecting new flamboyance into his introverted songcraft.

Despite its glimpses of greatness, though, this album revisits too many of the rapper’s trademark themes to truly make good on his jubilant pre-release promises.

Sadly, the Norwegians promptly undo much of their good work by interspersing the bombastic rocking with acoustic cobblers like ‘Lovescared’ and the sort of excessive, pompous emoting that even Pearl Jam tend to avoid these days.