Hopefully, listeners who have had their tastes whetted by Cat's Eyes and the cult Italian Beat At Cinecitta compilations will fall in love with this entrancing and gorgeously out-of-step album.

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.

Nobody's pretending this lot balance on the razor-sharp blade of the cutting edge. Even so, their orchestral whimsy presses the 'lovely, bordering on twee' button.

Convalescent, and luminescent.

A new, added tunefulness makes this a much-welcome Exile In Nihilist-ville.

Colour Of The Trap isn't quite a perfect debut, but by stepping out from the shadows, Miles Kane has come away smelling of roses.

Forget their poor punctuation: this debut LP is awash with bittersweet romance and deadpan derision.

As well as the miasma of Lush and MBV, the likes of 'Heedless' have a skewed Breeders-ish growl that keeps lines satisfyingly defined amid the sun-bleached, soft-focus beauty.

Smother is deeply sad and lonely, but still a barbed invitation to intimacy; like Coleridge's albatross, an extraordinarily elegant, stunning, (near)-perfect portrait of how terribly bad decisions can turn out.

Okkervil River comes into its own when he forces some particularly oblique and unique strategies into practice.

Eye Contact is a piercing glimpse into an imagined Utopia of infinite possibility, as if they've focused their years of digital psychedelic jamming into a single beam, and fired it beyond a horizon peered at in vain by their peers.

For now, though, she's no better than one of Cowell's ventriloquist dummies.

As an instrumental album it's vaguely impressive, but overall it's incomplete and lacks the pop touch to transform things from cerebral to listenable.

The album lacks that bouncy, bratty energy of old, while never really nailing a more grown-up emotional register. Even so, glad that they're still there.

This a forward-thinking, original British album that has captivated a new generation of music fans, not simply by rehashing the old, but by giving the young something that belongs to them and taunting them to do better.

He calls love and life as it really is: occasionally sweet, rarely trouble-free and often so suicidally routine we could all become the man he speaks of on 'Ballad Of The Bastard'.

Sadly, a lack of focus in melody and structure means it's not quite as atmospheric as Mick seems to think.

Their head-fuckable tunes warp and distort everything into a kaleidoscopic pulp.

He barely has to try and, to be honest, here it shows.

Smith Westerns might not play barre chords, but they're properly good songwriters – smart kids with mean tunes, sharp minds and great record collections.

Hot Sauce Committee Part Two is undoubtedly a good record. It's just that in the Beasties' case, merely being good doesn't seem, well, y'know, good enough.

The fact that these titans of the US underground have collectively hoovered enough drugs and booze (and clocked enough jail time) to make Pete Doherty sit up and wonder makes their sheer longevity something to be marvelled at.

They peddle the same sort of fake-rustic rootsiness that seems to be colonising our era: all these flatpack off-the-peg dreams of Ruritania that iPad-stashing mid-lifes have taken up as a counterpoint to their rabid technophilia.

Assembled by the album's main beat-peddling prodigy, Lex Luger, they showcase a masterclass in reductionism; juggernauts of hulking, bruising, brick-to-skull intensity.

Do Whatever...sounds less like inhibitions being shed, less like sex with a tree trunk after a hallucinatory, three-day Haribo bender than their other stuff - and that's kind of a shame, too.

With two songs playing out at over nine minutes long, one feels that a decent edit would change things from somnambulant to plain dreamy.

Shocker! The long-awaited (it says here) follow-up to a sublimely average debut is another half-arsed muppet show executed with the charisma of a terminally ill sloth.

No prizes for guessing who's been reading Guy Debord then, but it's these touches as well as his reverb-laden sound that makes him vaguely modern, unlike some folk artists who'd be happier pretending the 20th century never even happened.