An engagingly outre delight.

After a while, the sticky, repetitive swirls work their hypnotic magic: they're like The Bomb Squad mired in depression rather than revolution.

With his new Brotherhood, he's finally found the ideal vehicle to indulge his taste for "Cosmic California Music".

Patti Smith's latest album, her best in a while, is held together by a spine of pieces themed around exploration.

There's a drive and urgency about Maximo Park's The National Health that perfectly matches frontman Paul Smith's dominant lyrical theme, of taking arms against a sea of troubles in order to forge a better life for yourself.

This is such an improvement on 2010's enervated One Life Stand that one can only conclude their various sabbatical projects have rejuvenated their creative juices.

It's been a long time coming, and all the more welcome for it.

The character of the base music here is overwhelming: complex, ebullient and life-affirming, and in yoking this intricate dance music to his sophisticated New Yorker sensibility, Simon created a transatlantic bridge that neither pandered to nor patronised either culture.

Though drab and overlong, it has a certain rugged, whiskery charm, which doesn't extend to the concluding "God Save the Queen", a stodge too far.

The confessional, autobiographical elements that are its strongest aspect also serve as its Achilles' heel: the whole enterprise depends on how fascinated the listener is with Rowland's psyche.

[TWGMTR] is pitifully thin stuff, with far too many nostalgic hankerings.

[More of their] unchanging plastic punk aesthetic.

There's a simplicity about these previously unreleased demos that's utterly beguiling, the spare settings allowing the sweeter side of George Harrison's character to shine unencumbered by studio blandishments.

The homogeneity of the album's arrangements effectively denudes the individual songs of their emotional power.

An album, that restores to R&B some of the adult concerns that powered the genre through its '70s golden era.

A comeback shouldn't sound this much like treading water.

Here, the abrupt shifts between ballad placidity and animated angst underscore the theme of changing course.

The eight tracks of Valtari, which, while pleasant, are somewhat underwhelming examples of the band's formula.

There's no surprises here.

It might have been hoped that the album itself were more impressive.

It's all very laidback and earnest, but the endless lo-cal homilies ultimately grate.

Thankfully, he's well advised: the material is carefully chosen to exploit his abilities.

There's a bruised strength to Spx's voice, and her melodies have the stark, fatalistic tone of chain-gang moans.

Pleasantly undemanding for a few tracks, the album just seems to evaporate away halfway through, as if even its creators couldn't retain interest in it, either.

The melancholy mood pervades throughout, into the itchy, insect flurries of Penderecki's Polymorphia, for 48 strings, and Greenwood's 48 Responses To Polymorphia.

This 1991 album is the best of three reissues of their work – also available are their debut, Isn't Anything, and a 2CD compilation of outtakes and EPs.

Waterhouse's own voice is slightly under-recorded, but the musical settings--the understated Telecaster twang, the honking horns, the rumbling tom-toms--always churn with the right degree of roadhouse charm.

What's happened is a slight scaling-down of Ditto's approach, so as not to burst the hems of the more restrained arrangements. It's actually worked to her advantage.