Kurt’s going for a mirror image of the album here: reimagining some songs (‘Air Bud’ becomes ‘Wedding Budz’), expanding others (‘Snowflakes Extended’), adding reprises and, thankfully, including a brand-new track--the lovely ‘Feel My Pain’.

It’s skillfully realised, but feels like a soundtrack missing a movie.

Shangri La is basically more of the same, and for many of his fans, that’ll be more than enough. It would be a shame, however, if it was enough for Bugg, too.

It’s spunkier than 2008’s ‘Sebastian Grainger & The Mountains’, but still meek in comparison to DFA 1979.

Cupid Deluxe is a shop window for the future sound of pop. But perhaps he should quit trying to be a Prince-like polymath and concentrate on being a nimble-fingered production wizard instead.

I’m A Dreamer is another stellar effort.

She’s as frustratingly twee as a hailstorm of cupcakes. Her second album’s adventures into electronica on the squelchy, sulky ‘Kill My Darling’ and the unsettling ‘Next Summer’ are more remarkable.

The result is a great album that simultaneously wears its bruised heart on its sleeve (the lovelorn should be warned: it’s a real tearjerker at times), and sugars its melancholy with opulent musical arrangements.

Mug Museum, her third full-length, is as wonderfully weird as any of its predecessors. And there’s now sparseness in her music, plus a cool, controlled confidence that showcases her knack for the surreal more than ever.

Opening track ‘Back To Land’ wouldn’t be out of place at an Eric Clapton gig, closer ‘Everybody Knows’ is dreary, and ‘These Shadows’ could be a Mazzy Star throwaway. The rest, however, is gold.

The result is well produced and enjoyable, but it would be nice to see personality and innovation--two things The Prodigy rarely lacked--emerge among the Altern-8 tributes.

When the songs descend into repetitive strummed choruses and tired imagery (“Ain’t it so good to be young in America and watch the world burn”, on ‘If The Moon Rises’) you realise a bit of rock-star pomp could’ve livened things up a little.

They swiftly slump back into portentous jams made for mourning failed crops, made worse by the ye olde farmhand Yoda-isms of Eric Pulido.

Allow Caramel to ooze out and it’ll rock you into an unsettling trance.

She’s reminded us exactly why she’s important: she’s a hyper-intuitive artist with a mongrel sensibility who bows to no one.

The initial feeling that this album is destined to be one of their many jokey, disposable ventures dissipates slightly as Osborne’s near-peerless ability with a brain-alteringly great riff takes hold.

To be clear, the good outweighs the bad here, but Tinie has lost a lot of the charm that, when he turns it on, makes him so appealing.

It’s nothing new, but it is fun.

Vocal-free, Chance Of Rain sees Laurel Halo once more stepping back behind the sounds of her machines, but it’s the depth of those sounds that speaks volumes.

Smoke And Mirrors [is] a dense, torrid quicksand of clattering shoegaze chaos at the heart of this six-track stopgap between Brooklyn duo Widowspeak’s celebrated second album ‘Almanac’ and their soon-come third.

Fortunately the ponytailed Dane has a distinctive voice that’s both tough and vulnerable, and enough personality in the four tunes on her debut EP to stand out from the crowd.

Get marooned with them, while you still can.

Intimate, unpolished and worth getting to know.

It’s a showcase for Pusha’s cold-blooded flow and crammed with memorable lines.

While Negativity is an apt word to describe the impact of the events that inspired Deer Tick’s fifth full-length, it’s not an overwhelmingly dark record.

Every track here follows the same pattern over identical lackadaisical rhythms, her vocals never rising beyond a low-slung murmur with most of the lyrics drawing the same conclusion: she’s bored.

Follow-up No Blues finds the band settling into a more consistent sound.

Good moments include the drama-packed ‘Just Another Night’ and the fun pop of ‘On A Roll’, but neither resembles the formulaic trash cluttering the rest of the record.