Beneath the radio polish lies a wickedly caustic songwriting wit.

Here and there, though, it’s a bit of a grind.

The music here might be gimmick-free, but it's imbued with a dark sense of confidence.

A varied album that lacks any monster riffs like the ones White used to write for The White Stripes, but includes enough intrigue, originality and plain weirdness to delight and, in some places, appal.

The shimmering beauty of 'Tame The Sun' and the My Bloody Valentine atmospherics of 'Bones' serve to elevate the aesthetic that Male Bonding established on their debut Nothing Hurts to greater heights.

Six years in the making, Mew's sixth album is opulence in excelsis, the Danish dream-weavers gathering all the synths and power chords at their disposal to conjure a feast for the ears.

At 73 minutes, it could easily have been boiled down to give it more punch, but you can’t bemoan the celebratory feel of The People In Your Neighbourhood.

Never have Patterson Hood’s five-piece sounded quite so cranky and furiously righteous as they do on this terrific, ear-splitting sprawl of shit-kicking country boogie.

Ultimately though, sensitivity outweighs ’80s cliché.

Sporadically brilliant, perhaps it is The Knife’s Inland Empire--a fearless piece of work with its own logic, one that shears away all safety nets.

When it works it’s potent enough to rival his 2003 breakbeat opus ‘We Want Your Soul’. When it doesn’t, such as on opener ‘Do You!’ and the turgid ‘Best Fish Tacos In Ensenada’ (every bit as lame as its title suggests), it sounds like the kind of crap that gets played early on at Reflex on student night.

His default mode--brisk canters with elements of beefed-up psychedelia and proto-punk--can be a little samey, but deviations occur, see the bludgeoning folk of ‘Dark Road’.

Her 2011 debut 'Hearts' had the drift and shimmer of shoegaze, but Chiaroscuro is sharper, even flirting with techno on the densely layered 'Faith' and handclapping electro on 'Denial' as Lindén tries out all the electronic styles of the 1980s.

Is it an improbably good second album? Looks like it.

The beats on Tongue N’ Cheek are still raw, clamorous and unpredictable, but in a springy, primary-coloured way.

The novelty-obsessed stay-at-homes who made Toro Y Moi the buzz hit of 2009 might react unfavourably to all this accessibility, but by digging deep, Underneath The Pine shows Toro Y Moi setting down roots and, perhaps more swiftly than expected, flourishing.

They stake a firm claim for parity with arguably their most consistent set yet.

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

'Road To Rouen' is the sound of a band at last hitting their stride, finding out who they are and sounding like it's finally making them happy.

Anglocentrically and have eternally teenage garage production values. In other words, a GBV record that sounds like everything GBV fans love about GBV.

There are times when the album feels strangely medicated; the positivity, when heaped upon the listener in brutal doses, makes you feel trapped in one of those American self-help groups.

Synth-heavy disco and boogie, sleek Italo and plenty of New Order course equally through their veins; the duo spin a heavily thumbed vinyl library into something largely fresh, and even coax '70s smoove-rocker Michael McDonald into guesting at the end.

A titanic assault of monstrous proportions. [29 Jan 2005, p.59]

A collection of culinary-themed tracks... that Doom handles in his surrealistic, unflappable flow. [18 Dec 2004, p.51]

By the time you reach the halfway point and prepare for CD2, you realise Opposites is not, as feared, an unedited expanse of rock-band mind splurge, but two albums' worth of well-constructed songs.

There are a couple of duff tracks here, in the shape of ‘Fear Of The Knife’ and the horrible cod-reggae of ‘Bandbreaker’. More broadly, Skaters’ whole shtick can feel about as current as that Hot Hot Heat T-shirt lurking in your bottom drawer.

While it's unlikely that he'll pursue anything as historically precise as this for a solo career, 'Cold Mountain' proves what most of us have long suspected: when The White Stripes end, White will be far from finished.

Anna falls frustratingly short of hitting the back of the net.