Sure enough Freddy Ruppert's second album as Former Ghosts is as warm, life-affirming and snuggly as a coatless night on the Siberian steppes.

The star’s hubris is no more apparent than in its sheer breadth and lack of quality control. At 25 tracks in total, Scorpion is way too long--even by Drake’s own standards--and simply doesn’t need to be.

When she strains so hard on ‘Alive’ that her voice becomes pretty ragged, it’s thrilling. If you can buy into its concept, Sia’s play-acting is very entertaining indeed.

A mammoth indulgence, an 80-minute justification of his own ill-defined status.

A spiritual follow up to 2003’s ‘Untitled’, ‘Nine’ sees the trio as confident adventurers. Dealing with the ideas of despair, loneliness and longing, the record doesn’t shy away from the shadows but you’re never far from a dash of hope.

Aphrodite is her most unified work in ages.

Moments do [stand alone]--instrumental 'Enrolment' is dark, stark and almost krautrocky, while closer 'Graduation' lilts with beautiful melancholy--yet, devoid of its context, it all feels somewhat banal.

It sounds like a long-overdue coming-of-age. It’s never been easy being a fan of Doherty, but it’s certainly getting more rewarding.

Memphis sextet Magic Kids started out in the midst of the city's celebrated garage-punk scene, but you'd hardly know it on the basis of this airheaded and obsessively nice-ified debut album.

On the one hand it's easy to knock; on the other it's difficult to dismiss. [4 Jun 2005, p.58]

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.

His spectral vocals comfort like new bedsheets, lyrics straddle tranquillity and loss (‘Ghost Of My Old Dog’) and there are enough sun-over-hill-moments (‘Brand New Sun’) that hold their own against his Snowdon-high standards.

Strange Weather, Isn't It? returns as a more disciplined, ziggurat kind of groove odyssey, where the modular sounds are rhombus and the emotional undercurrents darker and more demure.

It's accomplished but occasionally overbearingly earnest and calls to mind the Foos' acoustic alter-ego, bolstered by Sufjan Stevens-ish banjo plucks and, in 'Hard Sun', the kind of play-it-again chorus made for credits rolling over a stunning landscape.

The major swings he takes not only pay off, they highlight his uncompromising spirit.

It's a more honest title, for starters [Astrological Epochs & The Sands Of Time]--with 10 songs that, like the starry-eyed indie pop of Constellations, rather than cosmological in scope, are uniformly short, sweet and were recorded on a laptop.

At best, these are semi-finished rejects from 'The W'...

There's a more commercial edge to the beats, as well as a subversive edge you'd expect from an MC who's cribbed from Eddie Murphy routines.

Ultimately, Maximo Park have bravely taken a chance with this album, trying to experiment with their sound rather than settling for what had previously brought them success. Shame they weren't up to the task.

The magnificence of their live show is lost a little on an album that screams 'organised fun' more than 'spontaneous party', but mostly it's giddy garage rock.

However successful the whole endeavour (¡Dos! and ¡Tré!) might end up being, ¡Uno! can only be judged on its own merits, and those merits are somewhat erratic.

Gone completely is any passing trace of the grubby, US college rock that made them so beloved underground when the real world wasn't taking notice. In its place, is an awful lot of big, blustery ballads.

The abstract hip-hop guru’s fifth full-length offering, in the tradition of wayward cut-and-paste instrumentalism, is one almighty mess.

Though it's pretty easy to be the best band in their self-created genre of 'love metal', if you can ignore the cartoon goth twaddle that comes out of Valo's mouth, you'll find an extremely well-executed pop-metal album underneath.

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.

By going back to the sound of his early work, Scott steps back into the gargantuan shadow of his mentor. Kanye West – particularly the mechanical abrasiveness and fragmented textures of 2014’s ‘Yeezus’ – is not just an inspiration but an apparition that looms over Scott’s identity on this album.

It's a well-assembled album, and the steady trance-like flow of 'The Forest At Night', and the eiderdown of sound on 'Transcend' are absorbing.

Largely, Trick measures up as a solid modern dance record and bears no trace of Bloc Party, proving that a lot can change in nine years.