More important on first contact, anyway, is the feel of the music, which grooves. Really good.

The none-more-Nietzschean, grandiose-apocalyptic mood continues through the utterly splendid Olympic theme "Survival", with its über-ELO arrangement, and "Animals", with its sound effects of an angry, riotous mob.

The results have a tendency to make you look at the ceiling.

Their music which, as it happens, is a thrilling mix of raw vocal harmonies, rattling homemade guitars and handclaps.

This critic cannot in all honesty say, with a clear conscience, that their second album is absolutely terrible. Because it plain isn't.

There's an excess of bog-standard radio-friendly pop-rock, and a couple of wet weepies à la "Don't Speak".

Uno! starts promisingly, but it's soon obvious that the Clash of "Tommy Gun" is still their template.

It shows a musical maturity way beyond its creator's years.

A cool, edgy soundtrack for the summer, should it ever arrive.

There's not a duff track or dull moment in this 75 minutes of studio material.

The rest of Kiss is like opening a tweenager's diary (titles include "Tonight I'm Getting Over You") and setting it to synthy, house beats, but nothing has the crossover appeal of that debut single.

These are tipsy juke-joint stompers with feeling in their heart as well as dust in their grooves.

This is a production in search of an album, a massive empty shell, a big expensive nothing.

It's a blast.

Another sweet viper's bite of post-Freudian dyspepsia from the singersongwriter who loves to mistrust.

The world adored the xx's Mercury Prize-winning debut album xx. Coexist is, if anything, an even finer piece of work.

In every sense, Theatre Is Evil sounds like a million dollars.

King Lear probably sounded like this after a couple of days on the heath.

Love This Giant is a skewed and funky instant classic.

If Elysium has a weakness, it is the absolute absence of thumping disco-pop monsters. Once you accept that, and surrender to the tranquil beauty of Chris Lowe's synth textures, you quickly realise that Neil Tennant is on top lyrical form.

There's an undercurrent of sentimentalism running through Come of Age....But originality is hard to come by.

14 songs of keening, romantic acoustic music of great seriousness and lightness of being.

A chastened affair: instrumentally pared-back, vocally wan and full of unremarkable Brill-Building-meets-Belle-and-Sebastian ditties.

Sun is an album of polished electronic pop that mostly struggles to distinguish itself from the current slew of female singers.

Simultaneously the most and the least pop record of the autumn.

Casual bystanders might wish for more memorable songs or some advancement of the form.

Contact is shamelessly allusive, never remotely challenging and characterised by a get-to-the-chorus immediacy.

When these three Liverpool lasses let their freak-folk flag fly their abandon is contagious. Their voices are great, which helps, but it's the unexpected instrumentation that really seals the deal.