This is an album with much to love about it, but it falls just short of their real game-changer, West Ryder.

Killer Sounds gets away with its confused billing because Hard-Fi have always known instinctively how to navigate their way around a chorus. That skill set survives here in big, stupid bloody pop songs.

Sadly, such pop bluster is largely missing from this debut album, which is over-long and obsessed with pained R&B choruses--precisely the reasons we all went off American rap in the first place.

It [the first Mariachi El Bronx album] was a beautifully anarchistic move that's now spawned its second (more polished) album under the Mariachi El Bronx alias.

S.C.U.M may still have a way to go before they truly master their references and get a handle on their lofty metaphors, but their debut is a hymn to maturation.

Like most blasts of carefree romance, its charms may not endure--'Spun', for example, is so saccharine that it's in danger of making your teeth itch--but often in this life, the sweetest things aren't built to last forever.

From the bouncy 'Same Mistake' (this album's 'Is This Love?'), to the darkly nostalgic ballad to years past, 'Misspent Youth', it's a comeback as irrationally happy-inducing as its title suggests.

It's masochistically delightful.

He's a white man crafting beats behind street-level odes to marking out territory from the likes of Detroit's Guilty Simpson and Marv Won, plus others, and he draws on a cornucopia of cultures to do so. Latin, Middle Eastern, African and, worst of all for Starkey, freaky German (NOT THEM!) Moog music rears up on a seductive record that reveals itself in layers.

This real-life fairytale is made up of myriad difficult home truths but Marling's hejira, her flight to freedom, makes for absolutely compelling listening. Oh, and there's a happy, redemptive ending to boot.

There's just an unavoidable sense here of a band who aren't quite sure what their purpose is anymore.

In short Tha Carter IV flops not because it's straight-up bad, but because it's boring.

As it is, and considering the upheaval following Adam Kessler's departure, it's best to look at Portamento as a marker of the potential brilliance that album three could bring.

The lyrics, too, reek of a lack of inspiration.

The very fact long-time collaborator Rick Rubin is at the helm is proof enough that while the production is mostly immaculate, I'm With You is an exercise in how a multi-million selling rock behemoth plays it safe.

Taken as a whole, it's some of Nick Thorburn, Ryan Kattner and Joe Plummer's finest work to date.

A stonking collection of slick honky-tonk pop, the belting Stadium Nashville of 'Together You And I' shows Taylor Swift a thing or three, while 'Shine Like The Sun' and 'The Sacrifice' are pure Mumfords meets Miley Cyrus.

Enough talk about reinventions, this is more of an evolution. On A Different Kind Of Fix, Bombay Bicycle Club have, quite simply, found themselves.

The results are lush, psychedelic, often funky and always immaculately produced. But compared to, say, Cosmogramma, it sounds unadventurous and polite, as if Alias has grasped the sound of Fly-Lo et al rather than the spirit.

These ideas of acceptance, hope and personal reflection make The Rip Tide an accomplished, restrained record, which sees Condon forgetting his travels, and forging his own native sound.

Tassili, too, sounds neither glossily packaged for western audiences, nor too easy to please.

It's a bit like The Slits at Notting Hill Carnival. Add in lush single "Why Have We To Wait" (a cover of a track by '60s pop group The Pussycats) and it's pretty perfect.

CSS may care deeply about every song (though it often doesn't sound like it), but for the listener, a lot of the charm has worn off.

Eschewing the slacker blueprint he practically invented for off-kilter pop tracks, Malkmus has shown that he's not defined by his past.

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.

Route One... is an enlightening joy because it trips all over the place, from darkness to bright to fast to slow to synthetic to organic and back again, and that's not because of any one person's influence.

It finds Toddla T cementing an identity as a producer--10 years from now, it might be seen as an important stepping stone to greatness.

There are so many distinct yet intertwined influences peppered throughout Slave Ambient it would be remarkably easy to lose the thread altogether. Yet somewhere in the haze it all just kind of… fits.