It sounds like a Sabbath album, from the tortuous lyrics to the eight-minute track lengths. But something about it feels wrong.

It is not a bad record--Danger Mouse doesn’t make those--but it does feel safe and predictable rather than fresh and exciting.

Tracks such as "Epilogue to a Marriage" here, serve as a reminder that there's always room for the real thing, and you'll know it when it hits you.

It's nothing that Best Coast and the Magic Numbers don't do better.

If his follow-up doesn't evince quite the same exuberance, it still twinkles with a well-travelled exoticism.

It's actually a more interesting artifact than the Mitchell one. Having said that, it is also hobbled by a paucity of good songs and a slightly splashy production. Solomon rides the turbulence like a whale.

It's derivative and is a near hybrid of Mew, the Postal Service, M83 and Empire of the Sun, but it's perfectly likeable without ever inspiring outright love.

R.E.M's 15th album could trade places with almost any of the previous 14.

Squelchy synths, down-and-dirty basslines, and vocodered vocals stay just the right side of Jamiroquai.

Like the late Johnny Cash, Jones has reinterpreted the venerable songs in a bare, bluesy style. Unlike Cash, he never quite makes them his own.

By Ben Gibbard's own admission "a much less guitar-centric" record than usual, it is therefore, if only by default, the closest thing yet to a follow-up to Give Up by Gibbard's other concern, the Postal Service, although it's more about pretty pianos than effervescent synths.

[Tales from Terra Firm] ought to be the one that separates the Oxford quartet from the indie-folk bandwagon and kicks them a few steps up the ladder to being Mumfords-sized.

It's almost boring: yet another excellent British Sea Power album.

Historic reunion of the piano and vibes duo-masters starts unpromisingly on a hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-mallet version of "Eleanor Rigby", but recovers with gorgeous treatments of Weill's "My Ship" and Jobim's "Once I Loved".

Sounds like Kraftwerk's Autobahn driven by a tractor. Forget Krautrock, and say hello to Yokelrock.

It is a glossy thing that entwines her Californian folky yin around his Southern gothic yang.

At times, listening to The Civil Wars is like wading through a swamp of still-raw emotion. It is an album that is more haunted than haunting.

Coming from a band who blatantly don't want to be a band any more, Angles is inevitably disjointed. But it's not disastrous.

A skittering collage of vocal drum'n'bass, garage, and funky house that parties, in the best way, like it's July 1999.

After an average third LP and a four-year hiatus, the art-rockers are once again all kinds of excellent.

It remains the case that this kind of thing only has something to say about distance travelled, no more.

The Glaswegian band's chosen style this time around, namely dark vintage synth pop (early Human League) and scratchy, spindly post-punk (Wire, the Cure), matches the mood and subject matter perfectly.

Gruff’s gorgeous voice helps humanise Feltrinelli. Never more so than on “Hoops With Fidel”, which, rather than demonising him and Castro, conveys the ideal of international revolution as a beautiful thing. As beautiful, in fact, as this album.

This is a belting return to form by the best vocal artist in jazz.

Its main virtue: brevity. Most songs are sub-2 minutes, and the entire album is over in 20.

Its chances are boosted by Ian Broudie's bright, bold production, but, apart from one obligatory Beatlesy ballad, it's full of route-one glam-rock stompers with not a single interesting or original twist and lazy stuff-that-rhymes lyrics.

However much you think it a tired formula, this lot shake it awake with their relentless charm.

Should you be struck by a nostalgic mood yourself, Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da is a Madness album like they used to make 'em.