Take the pop from Guns ‘N Roses, take the pomp from Van Halen and take the piss out of uber-serious nu-metal and you’ve got one of the most inventive metal outfits in recent history.

It’s easy to get over-eager about a decent album that appears after some significantly less magnificent efforts, and perhaps that’s precisely what I’ve just done. But I don’t especially care. What I hear throughout this release, and what I’m latching so strongly onto, is my own imagined version of what a Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds record should be like.

Never, Never, Land exposes Lavelle and File as, surprisingly, excellent songwriters with an ear for a good chorus and a knack to fitting performers and material together.

The meandering songs coalesce into an uninspired mass, burying the few good moments within it.

Brett Anderson has always been the weakest link, so pointing out weak rhymes and the frequent unconvincing moments (she’s upstaged by the background vocals on the highlight “It’s So Hard”) seems cruel.

This band is so exciting it’s almost unbearable.

A lot of these songs blur together and become indistinguishable.

Leo proves himself emotionally enervating throughout, so it’s really a shame that Shake the Sheets isn’t half so sonically invigorating.

Theirs is an unwelcome indie lyricism that lives in a vacuum, devoid of guttural expression and left to vacant, bumper-worthy slogans.

Beans has yet to learn, however, that we’re paying the price of admission to hear him wrap his tongue around the mic, not screw around with his drum machine.

The baggy beats and techno touches that occasionally made their eponymous debut seem slightly forced and naïve are stripped away, O’Brien’s production giving the band a more expensive, professional sound, just as massive and frenetic as the wilful teenage strafing they used to create, but with infinitely more control.

From a Basement on the Hill is a far better album than it has any right to be, with its bizarre sequencing and improbable ambitions.

Listening to these four discs, you can really picture an entire nation of college students and twenty-somethings promoting their own gigs, designing their radio station playlists and folding their own record sleeves while staying up late to watch 120 Minutes.

Its unity keeps it solid, but it also keeps Dents and Shells free of surprises.

Burn Piano Island, Burn was something approaching a masterpiece and Crimes doesn’t live up to its lofty standard.

Watch out for this guy’s next album, because I can guarantee it will contain a Top 40 hit. Go ahead and listen to him now so as to impress your friends later.

If you’re a fan of the genre, don’t bother with Dangerous Dreams unless you’ve absolutely exhausted your current dance records.

A more straightforwardly uplifting listen.

File under: very bad ideas.

Far, far better than it has any right to be, an album that sounds like a natural progression of the band’s career and one that, if they’d made it instead of San Francisco, might just have held them together for a bit longer.

When (and I mean, when) he raps, he's barely conscious.

Camper's new work is not only as strong as ever, but also more relevant than ever before.

Falls a few yards short of essential listening.

There’s a bit too much flab on No Cities Left for it to be the truly great album it aspires to be.

The parallels with The Prodigy’s similarly dreadful Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned abound, but the difference here is where The Prodigy’s album was just offensively bad at every corner, here Norman Cook seems to be striving to make the most mediocre album humanly possible.

The good news is things pick up, eventually. The bad news is the album ends just as it starts getting interesting.

A semi-bizarre and semi-wonderful example of twisted, melted country-blues-psyche-pop oddballness.

The problem, of course, is that Shatner knows he’s Shatner now. And so does everyone else. It’s the joke that stops being funny after you hear the premise.

The Grind Date is as notable for what it lacks--skits, filler, bullshit--than for what it has.

Power is one more entry into an increasingly strong catalogue of widely varied danceable punk rock and should do little to disappoint fans.

Their musical gifts haven’t left them... and their overwrought yet empathetic lyrics signify that their bandwagon jumping is misguided rather than crass.

While traditional rock fans may have a difficult time swallowing Cake’s meticulously produced, pop-obsessed, genre-bending concoction, fans of Moby, Beck and The Flaming Lips might make for easy converts.

The problems on the album don’t stem from creativity or intellect, but from execution.

It's crisper and clearer, but simultaneously thicker and murkier than before. The album isn't just dense, it's bloated—in the very best sense of the word.

What results is an achingly brutal intensity given to each broken phrase, scream and sigh.

Precious, effete and insubstantial.

It all sounds nice enough to start with, but as you hear it more and more you love it more and more, the simple charms showing themselves to be more and more complicated but no less delightful.

After hearing the crap people have said about this album I’m bummed that people are so quick to reject what doesn’t fit their immediate logic. It’s ironic that folks would get off on shredding an album that’s about trying to be kind and honest at the same time.

Feels like Interpol-by-numbers.

Unfortunately, while Kweli’s message is spot-on, his delivery of that message is highly flawed.

There isn’t a single mis-step on Last Exit.

Kill the instrumentals and one or two filler tracks and you've got one of the best EPs of the year.

With such a subdued and steady tone, I Dreamed We Fell Apart sometimes suffers from an overdose of languidness.

Fortunately, the good songs outnumber the bad; unfortunately, the veteran Costello has made the rookie mistaking of frontloading the disc.

This is the type of album impressionable teenagers fall in love with, crammed with melody and variety and thrill.

It acts as a perfect counterpart to Rejoicing in the Hands, featuring the same elements that made its successor such a valued release, while incorporating enough new ideas to make it much more than Rejoicing in the Hands: Part Deux.

Outta Sight/Outta Mind is not an album that you can discuss in measured tones whilst tending to your beard. It is an album that will only cause mass hysteria and blood clots and burst forth Kundalini from the base of your spine like some auto-massage chair plugged into the wrong transformer while you holler “wheeeeaaauurgh!!” and finally slump down into a wet pile of exhaustion.

What makes Trust Not Those In Whom Without Some Touch Of Madness a career highlight for Zedek is how she avoids misery while continuing to confront emotional storminess.

It is music that sits at the crossroads of Neil Young and Captain Beefheart, a reverence for its rustic background balanced by a playful desire to fuck shit up.

Sweat’s the obvious keeper for those looking for the follow-up to Nellyville.

Were Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned released in 1999 when everyone else was releasing their mediocre post-big beat follow-up album, though it would still be unlistenable, it would also be excusable.

Sadly, Suit, is exactly what it purports to be: the business-side of a duo of albums. And, in the world of pop, there’s nothing worse than sounding like business as usual.

Significantly altering the sound that won him critical praise and sold a quarter of a million albums takes some nerve. And that's what Showtime is about: Dizzee's newfound confidence.

The streamlined zoom and precision of So Jealous makes their previous work seem tentative by comparison.

It’s hard to imagine many other bands talented enough to even poorly imitate this.

Might not be enough to convince disbelievers, but to fans, it’s a gratifying addition to an already impressive repertoire.

The material lacks the gauzy groove of Gotham!, replaced by techno-savvy beats and a synthetic sheen so soulless it C3PO’s all of the group’s human swagger.

More than anything else, Past, Present and Future is a record that is important because it denotes progress and the promise of far greater things.

There seem to be enough ideas, stories, counter-melodies and references here for three albums worth of material - if for that reason alone, Hobo Sapiens ought to be one of the avant-pop templates for years to come.

Rubber Factory is not as consistent an offering as Thickfreakness.... But make no mistake, the strengths here more than amend for the weaknesses.

Too many of the ideas seem incomplete, like sketches waiting to be fleshed out.

What it ultimately comes down to is style versus substance. Once Midnight Movies matches the latter with the former, the results should be nothing short of stunning.

There’s a distinct lack of personality, meaning that LL Cool J’s eleventh long player is merely good, and his reputation (and bank balance) will be neither tarnished nor expanded.

The Libertines don’t even try for a good album; they sound like four blokes lucky to be jamming in the same room again, and their joy in each other’s company redeems the enterprise.

To me, Medulla is an experiment in transforming the primal power of the human voice into a 21st century context. It's an amazing effort, and it's one of the best albums of the year.

The change is typically drastic, but given the uncharacteristically long period spent in the studio this time around, the sum of worthwhile material is far less impressive.

As accomplished as Radian's sound is, Juxtaposition has trouble conveying new ideas throughout the album.

Though lacking in innovation, the final GBV album will please any longtime fan that prefers “Game of Pricks” to “Chicken Blows”. Pollard’s songwriting finally feels consistent, fully realized and commanding.

The mood for both is, in a word, joyous.

A band as talented and enjoyable as Clinic should be allowed to distill and advance their sound without getting tarred with the brush of stagnancy.

A record lacking in a substantial amount of soul, grit and sensuality.

Nothing has really changed at all.

Disparate though its individual elements may seem (and they certainly are), the sum of the parts is remarkably cohesive.

Where Jerusalem was all reaction, humanely riddled with helplessness and incomprehension, The Revolution Starts...Now is the well-honed response, a focused act of civil disobedience.

The Dirty South is relatively toothless in comparison to Decoration Day and the breakthrough Southern Rock Opera, rarely even building up that predictably satisfying head of steam.

The rest of More Adventurous is mostly what you would have expected from Rilo Kiley before the album's bracing beginning, only now it carries the stench of promise unfulfilled.

Sadly this isn’t the same 213 who dropped the legendary demo and this isn’t the 213 album people have been waiting for.

Perhaps All City’s most pleasing triumph, for fans of Northern State’s earlier stuff, is that the colloquial character of the Hesta and co.’s voices is in no way diluted by the more polished music accompanying it.

This is no cynical cash-in; every new track adds gestalt to an album which in its original incarnation was pretty damn great to begin with.

While Blue Album doesn’t break any moulds, match their best records from the mid 90s or (quite) end their career on a triumphant high, it will almost certainly find favour with old fans because it’s an undeniably good record, certainly their best since The Middle Of Nowhere and possibly even since In Sides.

Unfortunately, even when they attempt to paint a serious social commentary, they can’t seem to suppress their sophomoric potty humor.

Allow me to offer some parting advice: just because a record expresses emotion doesn’t make it bad.

It is, to be frank, one of the most remarkable and forward-looking rock albums that you will hear all year, and testament to Lanegan’s ability to take desolate lyrics and fashion beautiful, redemptive tunes around them.

His new album isn’t quite as good as Disposable Arts, but it’s similarly engaging--he is both confident and insecure, and this incongruity defines his music.

An uneven record that came out a few years too late.

Sounds like a retreat.

There’s an obvious self-assurance on AWOBMOLG that’s been increasingly evident on his recent EP releases; a sense of things coming together and evolving into a sound that seems unhurried, unprompted and, best of all, natural.

Beginning with third track, "Lupus", a certain lifelessness starts to creep into The Equatorial Stars.

Its airily liquid, peculiarly French dance-pop is crafted to be almost entirely unmemorable at first, but upon familiarity grow into a wonderfully subtle, hook-laden album of continent-hopping (sub)urban pop which makes an ideological virtue of its superficiality.

A good and often great debut.

A veritable debutante ball of sad little songs.

Uninhibited and hushed in all the right places, it’s safe to say that Comets on Fire have hit their stride.

Kittie's most fully-realised and, for non-metalheads, approachable album yet.

Where the Donnas offer confident exhortations and definitive declarations, Kiss And Tell is dribbling with foggy contemplation and emotional explanation.

Although at times M83 evoke Jean-Michel Jarre or Air, this is far from being an album of Franco-synth by numbers; it is the layered, hypertextual futurism of My Bloody Valentine and Brian Eno which seeps through the electronic Gallic gauze as the most palpable influences.

The Kings of Convenience don’t stray too far from their basic formula of guitars, upright bass, twinkling piano, viola, cello and soft percussion in the background. It’s consistent and it works.

With more concern for melody and rhythm than partisan politics, they use modern technology and an open mind to nimbly skip between the opposing camps of black 70s Disco and white 70s AM Radio, but in their songwriting methods The Sisters embrace the now mythic open arms party spirit of the early dance movement.

[It's] not just emo, but the purest, most virulent strain of the stuff.