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.