This isn’t an album you can dip into; instead dive in and sink to the bottom and let it all gloriously wash over you.

For all their fitful moments of greatness, these albums remain too cluttered with filler to measure up against the best of the band's stuff, though ¡Dos! is a tentative step in the right direction.

It's the unflashy moments that really linger, though, with "Taco Delay's" measured minimalism providing some grounding to an otherwise heady trip.

These songs feel like the bratty little brothers of the likes of ‘Castaway’ and ‘Blood, Sex And Booze’ from 2000’s ‘Warning’, but with more of a snarl and a need for speed.

The shortcomings of Bainbridge’s own vocals, which sometimes lack soul and are rarely memorable.

The AM radio pulse of the title track, the San Franciscan sway of ‘Old Friends’ and the loveliness of ‘Country Queen’, with its sweet acoustic fade into ‘In The Rounds’, is overshadowed by a nagging lack of imagination.

The tunes offer a smooth enough ride, but The Vaselines aren’t really stretching themselves here.

There are ballsy moments--they just happen to be coated in the trio’s signature icy cool.

An album that’s rich musically, thematically and above all, emotionally. Sam Smith has never sounded better because they’ve never been more themselves.

It’s nothing new, but it is fun.

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.

All 13 of the tracks here sound nothing like their much parodied clip. It’s just that sadly, branching out isn’t a good thing for them.

By the mirrorball moment that heralds the lengthy coda to the closing ‘It Girl’, you’re left giddy and breathless, applauding a 20-year veteran who’s finally found his voice.

The sound has clearly dated, and John Cooper Clarke’s guest vocal on ‘Let You Down’ feels phoned in, but uptempo limbshakers ‘You’re So Good For Me’ and ‘Changes’ are as solid as anything they did 20 years ago.


If there’s a problem here, it’s the obvious 2016 one: length.

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

BOATS II is your standard 2013 Southern hip-hop record, complete with ticking beats (‘Extra’), Auto-Tune (‘So We Can Live’) and eye-rollingly explicit lyrics (‘Where U Been?’).

It feels too affected to be truly effecting.

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.

They fare better on the more tuneful, less screechy 'Midnight Hours', but as a whole the album would have benefited from some ruthless editing and extra production spit and polish.

Aitch’s debut draws on local heritage but remains heavily anchored in a forward-thinking rap blueprint. With the ‘cheeky chappy’ mask tucked slightly back (if not fully removed), and a more introspective attitude on show, it’s an even more powerful formula.

‘Vertigo’ is a diaristic tale of scaling mountainous fear, traversing back to her naive youth spent making music in her bedroom – and welcoming a new chapter with newfound courage.

If Little Comets played to their strengths they could burn far brighter.

Some isolated moments make you want to vom a bit--Groove Armada trombone on ‘Many Rivers’--but ‘Love Inc’ neatly reworks a snatch of Lil Louis’ house classic ‘Club Lonely’ into insistent Balearica, and you can’t argue with that.

It might sound like Real Lies are living in the past, but Real Life is fiercely in the present.

‘No Signs Of Weakness’ plays more like a curated playlist of experiments rather than a fully realised body of work: it lacks direction, the momentum sputters, and even some of the more ambitious tracks could’ve used another round of sculpting.

Each tune is utterly lovely in its own right, but--my God--are they depressing. [7 Oct 2006, p.39]

‘Zombie’ has all the swagger and pep of his previous collaborator The Weeknd, while the tempered nature of ‘Cameo’ and ‘Renegade’ allow traditional pop songwriting to coexist with bolshy, bone-crunching settings. These fleeting moments are by far ‘Reborn’s most satisfying, and offer proof that there’s plenty more creative road for Kavinsky to bomb it down in years to come.

Brain-rinsingly psychedelic without needing to tell you about it, they deserve to sit at the table with Current 93 and post-Syd/pre-stadium Pink Floyd.

Mica's choppin' and screwin' attempt at repackaging its intelligence and emotion makes it something fresh that you can feel. Drink up.

Two properly good moments out of five isn’t a great ratio, but at least it’s telling us that The Men’s wagon is still rollin’ steady.

It’s less nightclub, more drunken iPod selection, typical of late-period Tricky: brilliant, frustrating and fatally inconsistent.

'We Are Science' has a spooky cinematic scope with a dubbed-up, electronic gospel feel for our times.

But damn those cruel hormones - Hanson's collective balls have MmmDropped, and the giddy rush of adolescence seeks to mutate Mercury's finest investment into a trio of crack-voiced hulks.

This is an understated gem of a record.

‘Stay Awhile’ and renditions of The Righteous Brothers’ ‘Unchained Melody’ and the Burt Bacharach and Hal David-penned ‘This Girl’s In Love With You’ are stunning in isolation. A whole album of Deschanel’s wholesome, entertaining-the-troops voice and M Ward’s tasteful instrumentation is cloying.

The club bangers lack the oomph of his past singles and the lead-out tracks, ‘Fan’ and ‘Worth It’ are criminally limp. .... Eventually, the vulnerability shines through.

Many of the guests are of the squeaky-clean variety--Ella Eyre and Sinead Harnett will be deemed edgy by almost no one – while two Lianne La Havas-sung numbers tackle bossa nova (‘Needn’t Speak’) and slinky disco (‘Breath’). Still, Rudimental know when to light the fireworks.

It’s the sound of a former trendsetter, settled happily into adulthood, doing his own thing, following his muse, comfortable in his skin. It’s a pleasure to hear.

While it’s heartwarming to see Lauv’s newfound openness, the album is – ironically, given his most persistent theme – missing a little something.

Over the album’s 52 minutes, Megan sprawls out, mining different aspects of her identity and personality at her leisure. It’s exciting when she enters new territory.

'Worlds Apart' reads like a suicide note of a band that's tried to intellectualise its place in the canon of Western music and, in doing so, recognised its own irrelevance. [22 Jan 2005, p.51]

Manages to contain enough surprise turns and twists... to keep you interested. [25 Jun 2005, p.64]

There's little here that's moves on from the kind of trip-hop balladeers that abounded in the late '90s or indeed the singer-songwriters that Sheeran admires such as Damien Rice or James Morrison.

It's managed that rarest of feats, a techno record with a heart.

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

It can indeed be shunted into the drawer marked "I can't believe I used to like this band." [17 Jun 2006, p.39]

'All Rights Reversed', the Chems' collaboration with Klaxons, saves 'We Are The Night' from sounding like it's still stuck in the mid-'90s and with Willy Mason and Midlake cropping up, Tom and Ed have again found just enough cool mates to save them from a general feeling of naffness.

Utilizing beats from prolific producers such as Wheezy and Chi Chi, ‘The Voice of the Heroes’ is technically accomplished but, given Durk and Baby’s sometimes monotonous verses, it’s great only in smaller doses.

Asiatisch, however, is even more pretentious [than two previous EPs], pairing instrumental UK grime with Asian flourishes to explore the relationship between the west and China.

Where the songs were once floaty-light, 'The Enemy Chorus' is anchored in electronic menace and murky krautrock undercurrents that make it throb as much as shimmer. [20 Jan 2007, p.31]

As ever, the all-female pop-punk trio finds its inspiration in the seemingly mundane.

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

Bazaar elevates Wampire alongside those bands, while retaining the skewed oddness that made them so likeable in the first place.

[Joanne is] a leavetaking song of great, simple beauty, more tenderly affecting than anything Gaga’s done before, showcasing the emotive power rather than the force of that great voice. The rest of the album too, rings with urges for us to take care of each other in a cruel world.

In truth, of the eight previously unreleased tracks, one is a not-massively-adventurous reshuffle (the Osaka Sun mix of ‘Lovers In Japan’), another a 48-second long incidental piano piece, another the version of ‘Lost!’ that features Jay-Z on autopilot (ie, still quite amazing) but is on the flip of the single.

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

There aren’t quite enough classic songs here to render their voice vital, but as long as boring bands exist, this kind of piss and vinegar will always be welcome.

Opener ‘Teenage Exorcists’ really would have been an awkward fit on ‘Rave Tapes’, a rare vocal-led effort with the enveloping guitar of shoegaze and REM’s anthemic tenderness. More plausible is the idea that ‘History Day’ and ‘HMP Shaun William Ryder’ were left off the album because they’re basically Mogwai-by-numbers. Of the remixes, Fuck Buttons’ Ben Power, trading as Blanck Mass, triumphs.

At its best (the crunching ‘Hero’ boasts one of Weezer’s greatest ever choruses), ‘Van Weezer’ marries soft metal and melodic geek culture to stupendous, festival-slaying effect. At its most frustrating (‘All The Good Ones’), it makes otherwise marvellous Cuomo songs sound like boy band rock pastiche. And at its absolute worst (‘1 More Hit’, ‘Blue Dream’ – most of the album’s second half, basically) the tokenistic thunder-chord segments, motorbike noises and Iron Maiden riffs distract from great songs.

The main thing 'Sweat' has going for it is the fact that it isn't 'Suit.' [2 Oct 2004, p.63]

Sure, sometimes it verges into the sickly saccharine (‘Through It All’ nicks a piano line from Randy Newman and some Disney strings, and drops a sticky vocal line on top of them, and collab with American folk singer James Taylor ‘Change’ is a dreary cliché) but then there are the moments of pop brilliance.

The turgid ‘Robots From Hell’ aside, they carry it off.

The Vaccines' debut does a wonderful thing--it reminds you that guitar music still works.

'Reformation...' is darker and deadlier--more Cramps than Killers. [10 Feb 2007, p.32]

Stateless is impeccably executed, but also unsettling to the point of off-putting.

Spans a whopping 21 tracks – a length even the world’s greatest artists would struggle to fill without sneaking some sub-par songs in. Which means that lo-fi ballad ‘Julia’ is a little cloying, while the acoustic finger-picking of ‘For Now’ and jazzy guitar strums of ‘Sweatpants’ don’t quite live up to the high standard set elsewhere on the record.

Although this self-titled debut contains shades of their previous bands, it's noticeably more direct, and rockets onwards, simple and straightforward.

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.

Within the first four songs, 5SOS shout out underachievers, college dropouts and kids battling low self-esteem. They do so with winning sincerity, but even that can’t quite make up for the record’s derivative sound.

Complex and slightly schizophrenic, 100% Publishing is a winner, even if the man himself is a PR's nightmare. Long live King Wiley.

This collaboration-heavy eighth album tends to fail when it experiments.

This is an album that delivers both mood and melody, thanks in no small part to Nagano.

It finds Toddla T cementing an identity as a producer--10 years from now, it might be seen as an important stepping stone to greatness.

it's largely a successful experiment, with sumptuous keyboard melodies and live drum breaks replacing the heaped samples of old.

A consistently interesting set that reminds you that Neneh Cherry didn’t just come up with visionaries like The Slits and Massive Attack, but truly became one in her own right.

Dando’s at it again, with a whole album full of mix-and-match covers which comfortably sit just on the right side of bizarre.

The fact is, there's a vitality, a shamelessness, an energy retained throughout here that shows why they mattered so damn much, and why they shouldn't – and couldn't – ever consider doing anything else.

Their introspective, mainly mid-tempo 11th album is a massive foamy middle-finger to retromania, running elegantly from jangly indie to kraut jabs.

On 'Brilliant! Tragic!' all the usual themes crop up – loving Axl Rose, feeling sexy, the Republic of Sealand – but there's something strangely self-conscious about it all, like the way that Argos is trying to drum up, Big Brother-style, ever-stranger ideas, but without quite believing in them.

The subtle, sleepy, silkily textured likes of 'Pity Love' and the spry, sly 'Just To Make Me Feel Good' are a sweet breeze.

When they're fragile, Looper are precious, when they're whimsical they're plain weedy.

While the beginning of the album struggles, you’ll be hard pushed to find a five-song stretch as flawless as the close out tracks on Ross’ 10th studio album.

They've made a sincere, unironic record about how great life can be if you want it to be.

It’s all so methodically planned that even standout radio-wave surfer ‘Take Back The City’ and producer Jacknife Lee struggle to stamp fresh life into this mega-selling formula.

This stinks of trying too hard.

If you’re a fan of the band’s stoner charm and enjoy guessing lyrics to songs as they meander from your speakers, there’s fun to be had here.

Their debut album is 11 whispered R&B songs, all textured, considered and thoughtfully constructed.

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.

The whole album brims with the laidback confidence of someone who knows she's back on top. Britney claims it's her best work yet. She's not wrong.

Interesting but inessential.


Breakfast turns out to be a reasonably hearty meal, definitely sausage and waffles rather than the aural porridge that "alternative hip-hop" summons up.

Minor quibbles aside, however, All I Need is Britain’s pop industry going head-to-head with America’s heaviest hitters, and triumphing.

Still The Boss.

For all there is to grind your teeth and hate about CocoRosie, there's much to love. [8 Oct 2005, p.45]

It's a consistently engaging combination. [18 Feb 2006, p.35]

‘Trip The Mains’, perhaps Webb’s finest composition yet, appears to share its electrifying opening riff with Donna Summer’s disco classic ‘Hot Stuff’, before diving headfirst into a seismic chorus that’d shatter Blondie’s ‘Heart Of Glass’. Elsewhere, the haunting ‘Scream Whole’ begins as a soothing lullaby, before unravelling itself into a doomy slice of noir-pop. This momentum is intermittent though, disappointingly.