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.

Dry The River have made a very good debut album.

Rise Ye Sunken Ships is actually pretty great, but guys, just dial it down a bit yeah?

Open Your Heart is breezier and more tuneful than its predecessor, but this is very relative.

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

Wrecking Ball [is] a triumph.

The album's overall trajectory feels directed by human hands. But just as often elements feel like they've been left to lie where they fall.

Bangarang, a stopgap EP ahead of his debut album later in the year, still fails to confirm whether his unashamed populism is deeply naive or profoundly cynical.

What used to feel like surfing amid the cumulonimbus suddenly feels like snorkling in soup.

If this really is to be Lambchop's final album, it's an undeniably lovely one.

Heroux may yet have an album in him that doesn't basically sound like his favourite '80s music stapled together, but this ain't it.

Large Hadron pop that'll frazzle yer neurons.

Often shocking and consistently, unapologetically direct, every word and note here is positively swollen with meaning.

Insipid marshmallow post-rock that occasionally sniffs in the direction of Yuck or Mogwai, but mostly glowers in a dismally cloying, precious nostalgia.

Personality, his third album, conforms to type, while confounding expectation.

A cut above.

The unfortunate irony is that Sounds From Nowheresville doesn't sound much like a grand rejection of pop music at all. It just sounds a little bereft of ideas, and way too short.

Screws Get Loose is best listened to live in a mucky kitchen at your mate's cool older sister's amazing house party.

Young Magic are even more dizzyingly chaotic [than The Ruby Suns].

The way they've leapfrogged their contemporaries in terms of ambition and scope is terrifying. Sleigh Bells are, once again, in a league of their own.

That troubled kid [Mike Hadreas] never went away. It's just that this time, he's more concerned with reaching towards the light.

Ultimately, from start to finish, you know what you've ordered: proficient, precision-executed blues-rock with few genuine surprises.

The tracks have separate names but they're really just one whole impressive piece, about as far from Sheeran as you can get.

Within all the emotional turmoil, there's a lot for the listener to love.

In what might be the biggest compliment I will pay any band this year, the thing that the album most reminds you of is the medley on 'Abbey Road', in the sense that it's hard to pick out individual 'highlights' in what is an endlessly evolving collage.

This isn't just her finest album, but one of early 2012's best.

It's not as unified as previous records, but with fewer meanders towards the mainstream and more of the electronic adventures of last year's freebie 'Shearwater Is Enron', Animal Joy may herald a bold new incarnation.

For an album that you might think is merely an excuse for a megabucks world tour, it sure does, er, wail.