Virtually every song sounds like a leave-taking, though the overall mood is reflective and restrained, in places almost easy-going.

This album's every percussive aspect has been honed to impart the maximum amount of pleasure.

The Pet Shop Boys' best album in over a decade, sitting neatly between their previous career highpoints of Very and Behaviour.

Lyrically absurd, musically turbo-fuelled.

Surprisingly, the album's blend of Mitteleuropean melody and American eccentricity is diverting enough to overcome any misgivings.

There's more fear and loathing on Ben Drew's first album than in a year's worth of Daily Mail headlines.

Fast Man/Raider Man is sluggish country rock.

This is glorious, 21st-century Technicolor po.

When they're not apeing War-era U2 ('Crystal Ball') they're apeing Achtung Baby-era U2 ('Is It Any Wonder?'). Otherwise they plod along, piano clip-clopping under all the electronic fuss, in thrall to their own pseudo-profundity.

Inspirational stuff.

They are very good at making sleepy, hapless trip-pop sprayed with whimsy.

Largely extraordinary... They write ornate and soaring conversational love songs, full of heart, bittersweet observation and unashamed street-level Englishness.

The end result sounds much like the Red Hot Chili Peppers produced by Massive Attack.

Despite its complexity, every twist and turn of The Drift is absolutely compelling.

It's Never Been Like That reunites the quartet with the kind of jubilant, foot-pumping power-pop that, at best, is informed by the brevity of new wave and the breeziness particular to pre-punk West Coast rock.

Eschewing the Incredible String Band nostalgia of Espers et al for a more complex hybrid somewhere between the Kinks at their most relaxed and the Band at their most committed, Vetiver have made a record that's as summery as a field full of butterflies.

[A] vital, dolorous treasure.

As with the conceptual aspect, knowing the peculiar provenance of the noises on The Rose Has Teeth is actually supplemental to one's enjoyment of this suite... which stands alone as an enthralling aural experience.

There's hardly any doodling or misfiring to undermine the sheer vastness of Stadium Arcadium.

It's a bravura performance on both men's part.... A thrilling return to form.

Big, bold, cleverly-executed, thoroughly hollow stuff.

The tumescent, endlessly inventive songs are seldom less than exquisitely performed.

Predictably, it's not among the quintet's finest hours.

Lovely.

Where fellow Aussie pasticheurs the Vines get more depressing the more they manage to sound like Nirvana, listening to Wolfmother's hilarious attempt to board the long-departed cock-rock bandwagon - singing 'She's a woman, you know what I mean!' as if they have never seen a woman, let alone touched one - is actually quite fun.

Although they are more focused on Ten Silver Drops, they also sound more reined-in and less idiosyncratic.

The Hardest Way... is twice as good as any album about the price of celebrity has a right to be.

The problem is that these songs are mostly too corny to have much drama restored to them. This is not folk music as mystery or romance or danger but as communal singalong.