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

Somewhere between a funk soul Killers and an Interpol with lyrics that actually make sense. [11 Jun 2005, p.67]

A rather lovely music: all widescreen swell and swoop and sweet, pained harmonies, with a Flaming Lips-style skewed pop undertow. [22 Apr 2006, p.41]

Out Of View, engineered by The Horrors' Josh Hayward, is noisy, irreverent fun.

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.

If you have to buy one painfully esoteric, scrotum-tighteningly hip, show-off album this year, you may want to make it this one.

The two finest soloists from Montreal label Constellation combine here for something far greater than the sum of its parts.

End-time celebrating religious nutbars won’t be finding much eternal hope here, but for everyone else, a perfect soundtrack to the approaching void.

Each track is a treat - a sensible, lo-cholesterol treat, maybe, but still packed with oddly addictive rhymes and beats.

They’ve honed their approach to a point where they can’t really sound like anyone except themselves. Mostly, though, this is the key to the deep likeability of Stuff Like That There.

A dark, beautiful collection. [26 Aug 2006, p.43]

It's sonically peculiar, coolly melodic, relentlessly detailed and, frequently, exhilarating.

Yes, there are jokes and doo-woppy moments of light-heartedness, but this is a soupy, stoned, distressed-sounding album at odds with the Lips’ image as the world’s premier party band.

While there are clichés here that love songs struggle to escape from, I Thought I Was An Alien dumps twee cold and hard, running into pop's warm embrace.

Woolhouse mostly lives up to the dark nature of his moniker, but for brief moments he glimpses light at the end of the tunnel.

They've set themselves up nicely here, already nipping on the heels of fellow slacker extraordinaires Surfer Blood and Yuck.

After a while, the whirling atmospherics give way to the Dandys' dorkier tendencies: the jaunty chuggers, Taylor's dissolute mannerisms, the quirky little twists and tricks.

They build a monumental wall of hardcore noise on 'Egophillia', before taking a wrecking ball to it and screaming wildly into the mess. Elsewhere, there are tight grooves on ‘Disdain’ and ‘Terrible’, and the guttural riffs on 'Starved For’ offer plenty for bleeding gums to gnaw on.

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

It's business as usual on the whole.

The only problem is they always just come up short when trying to make their own version of FTP's 'Pumped Up Kicks'.

A melodic masterpiece of boldly indignant malevolent spite.

The resulting album is a heartfelt set that showcases the 42-year-old singer and pianist’s elegant style.

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

Ghostface calls upon most of the remaining Clan members, switches the formula occasionally and hey presto, yet another minor Wu-Tang classic 20 years on from their debut.

While they mainly hit a balance between shifting symphonics, subtle keys and pyroclastic guitar, sometimes--such as on "Plainclothes," a ballad/disco/punk-funk/noise jigsaw--there's just too much going on.

There are ponderous moments later on, like the uninspired ‘Teenage Disease’, but this is a band who’ve found a second wind.

The good news is that lyrically, Nas is pretty much back on form.