She might not quite have made it through the wilderness just yet, but she's chosen the most glittering road to resurrection she could find, and it's one she walks with no small smattering of style.

Like scoffing a King sized Mars Bar, the instant gratification and sugar rush is soon superseded with nausea, whining and guilt.

This album is just a purer distillation, a more joyous exaggeration of the smaller, more tasteful thrills offered by every posturing indie rock band out there.

If there's a main criticism of this record then it's the fact that it's not entirely cohesive.

Aside from track sequencing issues... and dodgy indie geezers, 'The Outsider' is a great album and well worth the wait.

More than anything else, 'Cripple Crow' is an album that it sounds like it was born amidst a fun, exuberant creative process.

Alas, it's not as consistently satisfying as 'Born To Run' or 'Born In The USA', and Springsteen's voice, always gravely at the best of times, has taken on an increasingly wizened air that sometimes renders it frustratingly impenetrable.

'Come With Us' sounds immediately familiar, but this is often problematic, redolent of prior work by both themselves and others.

There's a decidedly reigned-in grandeur to the orchestrally-focused Silent League. The strings and things are never allowed to get overly carried away in their stratospherics, the slide guitar and saw are supplied in delicate veins rather than employed in over-styled extravagance.

If you're bored of 'Danger! High Voltage' like us, there's plenty to plunder, though ultimately you'll be filing this album away in your "don't play anymore" library after Echobelly and before Electric Soft Parade.

This could be Modest Mouse's finest hour were it not a little long - the nuances are occasionally rather swamped by the effort of listening to the hour-long record through.

'Earthquake Glue' once again posits Pollard as purveyor of stupidly breezy tunes.

An ultra sleek and, it has to be said, generally impressive, 80s-inspired party record.

Summer Sun is a compelling, enthralling and gorgeous album that gets better with each listen.

Anyone expecting a return to the spiky garage rock of 'I Should Coco' may again be disappointed by Gaz & co's refusal to whole heartedly revisit the three-chord bluster of their debut, but with 'Life On Other Planets' Supergrass have come closer than ever to the psychedelic pop-punk masterpiece of their dreams.

Minor aesthetic gripes aside though, ‘Winchester Cathedral’ is how you and I want Clinic to be.

They have a habit of getting it very right and very wrong.

Far from flawless it may be, but this is a fundamentally fabulous experience.

'Love Is Here' actually manages to deliver on all that early promise and, more than any of the singles that preceded it, completely conjures up the giant-hearted beauty they're capable of live.

Too much of 'Geogaddi' just rests on the Boards' well established tricks.

It's not all pleasant.... However, there are some total gems, as you'd expect.

It's inevitable having enjoyed their partnership for so long, that you occasionally feel the lack of Moffat's brutal honesty, but Middleton grows more interesting with each solo release.

The overall mood (so spot-on is the title that the whole thing feels like a big chilled-out dance doughnut with stardust for sugar, heh heh) saves it, along with the occasional staggering moment of beauty.

A beguiling marriage of the electronic and the organic that, while perhaps short on tunes per se, bristles with engagement.

[A] weird, angry, frustrating album.

The Birmingham band's finest hour yet.

This is a record stuffed with fun and joy and magic for all the family.

No, it's probably not going to remap the musical landscape this time, and, arguably, it doesn't sound as ahead of its time as, say, 'Computerworld' did. BUT! 'Tour de France Soundtracks' also sounds joyously, shamelessly like no-one else at all.