The result is a woozily involving mood piece that encompasses everything from the shimmering heat of daytime ('Lifesized Stuffed Animal', where music box chimes rub up against disoriented square wave bass) to the dead of night, caught in the lairy drunken lurch of 'Kitties'.

For such a self-avowed perfectionist, and judged against the admittedly high standards of his magnum opus, it comes up a little short.

The result is that you're having fun--on tracks like the stellar title-track and the popping candy overload of 'Let Me Show You Love' you can't help it--but increasingly it feels hollow... almost kitsch, and deep down you know that you, and the band, can really do better.

There are some genuinely fun, compelling moments of music, some striking lyrics, and the smattering of modern electronic dance sounds definitely livens things up. But at an hour long, it feels too convoluted: lacking in cohesion and, ultimately, too devoid of specific intent.

Throughout Valentina, and especially on 'End Credits', the Wedding Present's new streamlined and sinewy delivery certainly has something of The Fall to it.

It's hardly that nearly everything else completely clones itself song for song, but you can almost pick any song and get the same feeling from it, making it a little hard for individual moments to stand out. But they're there.

There's very little to be found within From The Very Depths to warrant repeat plays, and it's safe to say when the dusk mercifully settles on Venom (or on 2015, for that matter), this clumsy attempt at modern metal will not be remembered.

It needed to be a Blackstar, not a The Next Day Part 2. Instead we're left with a lightweight affair that reminds us all that John Carpenter is far from infallible.

Advaitic Songs doesn't feature one of the lengthy, insistent, sense-dissolving tracks they usually supply. Instead the tracks feel restrained and poetic, but not always very substantial. A pity, but at the same time, Advaitic Songs does reward multiple listens. It's a subtle and meaningful album.

While sonically the music does not possess the 'hard' edge of neighbouring Tuareg rock groups, there is a great fluidity in which the desert groove unfolds over spiralling guitar riffs and propulsive rhythms.

It'll be comforting to know that Plaid certainly haven't 'lost it', that said they haven't strayed far enough outside their comfort zone in order to do so.

More of the same, then, but a productive kind of dead-end, clichés run hard into the ground.

For all its conceptual flaws, Asiatisch is both a pleasurable and an intelligent take on sinogrime--proof that its initial wave of productions was brief not for lack of potential.

Unfortunately, therein lies the biggest problem with Joanne: for every time that Gaga seemingly breaks free of her shackles and embraces something more “real,” she quickly scuttles back into her comfort zone and hides behind glistening production. This probably isn’t quite the sound of the real Stefani Germanotta, but if you squint hard enough there’s a semblance of a real person in amongst the pop haze.

Iradelphic, which has evolved out of Clark's live shows, marks a change and may be a little surprising to longstanding fans of the man – it's less ethereal, more compact and cohesive than the electronic experiments of Clarence Park.

While the album is by no means a disappointment, one can't help but long for the return of a less inhibited Krug, free of – albeit self-imposed – limitations.

Miles away from the poppy happy clappy smiley lovey dovey vibes of Twenty One or epic choruses of Serotonin, Radlands displays a new direction and confidence.

Dark Hearts marks an astute shift away from the energy of the clubs, focusing instead on hazy synth pop. Languid ballads run through the album and their production feats, led by the work of Stefan Storm, are best enjoyed on headphones.

This resultant collage, produced by all this cutting and pasting of personal experience and observational wisdom, is a wonderful snapshot in time of the thoughts behind one of the most unique voices in British rap.

Perhaps its on-the-hoof, anomalous nature is the source of a sense that High Hopes, though good, doesn't feel either like a set of surprising others sides or quite as cohesive or great as the title of 'new Springsteen album' (as opposed to say 'iTunes bonus tracks', or 'B-side collection', which might have been more fitting categories) might demand.

The instrumentation, forms, and concepts are familiar: “pure” country, as it were. Lyrically speaking, love, companionship, and family (‘Mama’) represent persistent threads; even more so, though, the passing of time seems to be Parton’s chief concern.

A debut so exquisitely tooled I cannot find a thing wrong with it.

So what you have is an album that's very recognisably Ed; the Steve Gullick photography, the tipsy melancholy and romance, the ballads... but without the need for too many frills it sounds complete, nine gorgeous songs that sit beautifully together.

So in short Welcome to Mikrosector 50 is rather excellent, with the only real dud on the album being the slightly tedious 70s porno-funk of 'Quadraskank Interlude'.

This Is What I Do leaves you spoiled for choice. Ruined, in fact.

Rather than concentrating on a single, memorable event, it takes the best bits to offer an idealised representation of the Howlin Rain live experience that's very much the aural equivalent of a Cameron Crowe movie.

This brand of brooding synth instrumental has been so long entangled with narratives, it’s perhaps the ultimate test to make it work without without any framing context; to inject enough substance into the music for it to carry itself. Jean-Michel Jarre managed it, Tangerine Dream (sometimes) managed it, and with The Capsule so have Necro Deathmort.

Home Time is an album by a songwriter whose distinctive style has more than a little of the music hall. Hayman is a modern storyteller whose curiosity means he just cannot stop uncovering material.

Goddess doesn’t stick to one style, and though there are echoes of Gibbons, Del Rey and Sade, the album’s coherence comes from its themes and overall mood and not by remaining within a single niche.

With their fifth album, Artificial Sweeteners, Fujiya & Miyagi once again mine opposite ends of the lyrical spectrum whilst delivering their most musically satisfying collection to date.

This is a revealing, thrilling album by an artist who took a very particular experience and used it to create a beautiful project.

Ultimately, Hexadic is more compelling as a concept than a piece of music, and few folks are likely to follow Chasny deep into the record's blistering hot core more than a couple times.

Lifetime of Love is a strange album, where songs with differing emotional foundations, sonic palettes, aural pace and textural aesthetics mesh into a cohesive whole. As Moon Diagrams, Archuleta has created a world where introspection, catharsis and redemption can envelop you and become something porous, to be inhaled and lived in.

Hot Cakes [is] proof if it were needed that there's plenty of life in the old dog yet - and that dog still don't give a f***.

It's to the remixers' own credit--and perhaps, also, to the homogenous nature of the source material--that TKOL RMX 1234567 does a fine job of highlighting each producer's own idiosyncracies.

Breakthrough is an eclectic and challenging record that features more than a few sublime moments of heady bong-haze depth.

In places, when compared to their earlier works, it sometimes feels like songs don’t get the space to grow and unfold. Other than that, this is a sublime and beguiling record, and a milestone in the evolution of a unique creative voice.

It ain't no Raw Power. But once you get your head around the fact that it rightfully doesn't even attempt to imitate its antecedent, and really is more a belated sequel to Pop and Williamson's 1977 album Kill City, then this is, in places, a pretty damn good rock & roll record.

Listeners willing to put in the hours to engage with Saltland on their level will find reams to love about their debut , a record so carefully considered that making a song and dance about it all feels a little garish.

Leave No Trace favours synths over horns – in fact, it's not until about ten minutes in that we get our first taste of brass - and whilst the sound is still impressively full-bodied, without the continuous stream of interwoven saxophone and trumpet solos that made its predecessor such a joyous affair it feels pretty empty in comparison.

It’s an album that needs the thick-skin its title connotes to listen--you won’t emerge from it feeling joyous, but you will emerge seeing a truth that will deeply unsettle.

Lydon's ever-inspiring love of de-dub postulates continually throughout the album – it's such a perfect return.

Another eleven baseless mehs that belong nowhere else than on a blog that no one reads.

It's quite brilliant and perfectly flawed: the sort of album you don't mind getting run over whilst listening to.

Ultimately it's the breaking of a cycle that leads to change and, on this record of both progression and recollection, Esben And The Witch suggest that they haven't yet quite achieved that.

With only ten tracks, half of which are under three minutes long, Personal Computer feels just a few bits short of a byte and you may well find yourself moving straight onto Unknown Mortal Orchestra's back catalogue just to get some closure.

There's a dryness that inhabits this music; and listening to to these future-past musical reliquaries (especially the fragile--and aptly named - end track, 'Death Of The Ego') you wonder whether it could all crumble away if subjected to the slightest breeze. Regardless; there is also a sense of an extraordinary concentration at work.

This is a deliberate Difficult Listen, an Atrocity Exhibition, an Intense Humming Of Evil. If you've always been a Stewart-skeptic, there's a good chance you'll dismiss this as Super Hans conjuring a powerful sense of dread; if not, it's likely to genuinely unsettle.

Thomas White sings, oddly enough, too well, lacking the fragility of Nick Drake, the androgyny of Stuart Murdoch, not to mention Jim Morrison's virility.... Idiots! is an excellent journey through the more poppy instincts of Electric Soft Parade.

Even if Have Fun With God occasionally meanders or strips its source material back a little too far, its value lies in the way it extends the course of Dream River (which itself sounds like a continuation of Callahan's 2011 magnum opus, Apocalypse)

After such an imposing start, the rest of My Love Is A Bulldozer was bound to struggle to keep the standards up, but even with this in mind, it's a confusing and muddled album.

Lioness: Hidden Treasures is an appropriately muted set, with Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi producing an honourable and moving tribute to the Amy Winehouse.

Theoretically there’s enough variety here to take Bolan’s songs in the many and varied directions they deserve. The results, however, are mixed enough to ensure that debates about Bolan’s place in the canon of greatness will continue.

The engagement with dance music and half-improvised feel lends it an irresistible forward momentum, something that picks up pace throughout the album to exhilarating effect; the album's second half in particular creates a disconcerting sensation of constant acceleration, until it finally collapses into its closing throes and falls away.

There was a time when Primal Scream were considered essential, an acclaimed element of the indie rock landscape, and more than anything, Chaosmosis simply confirms that those days remain firmly in the past.

It's clear that this band has focused too much on referencing and too little on songwriting.

For everything else there's Coldplay: reliable, built to move, and able to run on hot air alone.

Mind Trap is a triumph of feelings over ideas, of making sounds bigger and more mobile than the spaces (or heads) that contain them.

Retro styling contextualises Love and Devotion and, crucially, the album's story is delivered with an emotional heft that many current producers aspiring to hypermodernity would do well to note.

One immediately clear difference between Two Way Mirror and previous Crystal Antlers work is the fact the band, led by vocalist and bass player Jonny Bell, have improved immeasurably as musicians.

A mixed bag then but one that will doubtless prove that one person's high will be another one's low.

It's all too hammy, too rich to absorb.

There’s just enough time to get lost in thought before you’re jolted back to the beginning again. Only ‘Long Assemblage’ has any ambitions to break out from the sketches, a five-minute exposition that dares to create anything like a narrative arc, carried along by some intrepid hi-hats. Otherwise it’s soft and languorous and thoughtful, and occasionally a little bit sinister.

Expectations hits a lot more than it misses. Bebe Rexha is no ordinary singer. She’s a chameleon who can switch vocals, blend with any sound, and find rhythm with any tempo. She is an artist that can make other genres pop.

Crush Songs certainly has the consistency of intention to draw in new listeners, but for those who love the pace and grittiness of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the end result might leave them crushing hard for the band's next record and the indefatigable side of Karen O.

It's not really until tremolo laden third track, 'Love High' that the band starts to feel familiar. But once we've gotten into familiar territory, it's clear that what's at fault is not the songs, but the recording and mixing.

Okay, so it won't be most people's cup of tea, but Gauntlet Hair is a brave and defiantly individual effort.

It may not be the Rapture many were expecting this year, but this triumphant return to form is pretty glorious nonetheless.

One play is enough to confirm that defining moments refuse to peak through the murk.

Much of Glow is tasteful to the point of bland inoffensiveness, the sort of thing that'd suit a branch of All Bar One at half nine on a Friday night.

His vocals never really gel with the music--he mutters and spouts over the top, as ever sounding like he’s having some difficulty keeping jaw attached to his skull while sucking on a gobstopper.

If this is her last record then she hasn’t gone out on her finest note, but that’s certainly not to undermine the album. Maya Arulpragasam’s body of work remains an important reminder of the exciting prospects of cultural exchange and the immigrant experience. Taken in that light, AIM is a fitting addition to her oeuvre.

Keely's is a singular mind that luxuriates in its own logic, but on Original Machines it luxuriates a little too much. Cheeringly, though, there are superb moments and doodles, the pace of which makes for an inventively utilitarian listen.

If only perhaps, the allusions were more developed: the sound doesn’t quite manage to create or replicate the enveloping atmosphere of its influences, perhaps because the mood shifts between melancholia and languidly upbeat between tracks, and is overall driven by melodies that feel ordinary and familiar. It makes for nice listening, but by no stretch is it challenging itself, the genre or the audience.

Despite the many hugely talented performers involved, Dr Dee is less philosopher's stone, and more curate's egg: a handful of fine songs where Albarn plays to his existing strengths, but mired in a sea of over-reaching folly. And ultimately, both Dee and Albarn deserve better.

For all the talk of madness, it would seem more than ever that Sebastien Tellier knows exactly what he's doing.

Overseen by Sune Rose Wagner of The Raveonettes, all the songs are so instant that it makes the album something of an onslaught on the senses - multiple listens will be needed for clear favourites to reveal themselves in a slow strip tease.

The past, present and future collide in a sublime celebration of technology, history and humanity, in all its flawed and triumphant glory, filtered through one man's attempts to understand and explain his small but significant place in the interconnected, universal whole.

On the album's first half, everything sounds correct but lacks any intoxicating, addictive spark.... [Yet] when its mood alters, somewhere around the metal wasteland of 'Lagoon Leisure', and things start getting sinister, then Regional Surrealism becomes (finally) exciting. The record transforms into a deeply disconcerting experience, all eerie shadows and claustrophobic spaces.

Continuing Hard Candy's pattern of awful try-hard title and 'show the young uns you've still got it' bangers, it's disappointing in its lack of ambition.

Where debut EP Summertime! and the über-hyped eponymous first album's songs had an oddly melancholic joyfulness that captured a number of imaginations back in early 2010, here there's a quiet switch to an oddly uplifting melancholy. On the best songs, that is – too many just sound gloomy and dull.

The Saga Continues is lacklustre. At times it ventures into sellout territory. It’s not a terrible album (maybe I’ll add a few tracks to my ‘Chill’ playlist) but it never breaks new ground and it never touches the magic of 36 Chambers. Instead, it settles in a slightly anaemic midpoint between nostalgia and commercial compromise.

The Big Dream is vaguely interesting, but not very interesting.

Pixies have played it straight and stayed in their lane, their once vital weirdness cast into the laundry basket like a vampire costume post Halloween. Head Carrier is 80% classic Pixies. But it turns out the missing 20% is as fundamental as oxygen is to air.

By compartmentalising Emika as it does, DVA leaves a nagging sense that she's still selling herself a little short.

They've always been a subtle unit, resisting obvious moments of catharsis in favour of subtle dynamics, but here they manage the trick that Khanate mastered so effectively and create a tension that derives as much from the fear of silence as it does from the threat of noise.

Honey, when it works at least, is the sound of piecing together the night before: a love letter to not making it home, to the Tequila salt still stuck to your hand, to hands brushing under the cover of the smoke machine. Unfortunately, half of the time, it says precisely nothing and if that unquestionable potential is to be realised, Kathleen Brien has to make a choice.

It sounds ominously worth, but on listening the level of fun is obvious too. Layer upon layer, spoken word singing weaves around carefully crafted atmospheric drum patterns and rudimentary grooves, sounding unpremeditated--spontaneously surreal.

Grinderman 2 RMX provides an enjoyable enough distraction but ultimately this is a collection of material that would have worked better as an EP rather than an album.

Yuck aren't actually terrible, but their second album--and first since the departure of frontman Daniel Blumberg--is just eminently forgettable.

A musical punch-up from start to finish, Goldblade choose their targets well as one blow is delivered after another. You might want to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in.

So, this is not an incredible album. But in the context TLC’s legacy- as a goodbye tour to end one of the biggest girl groups of our time--there is still something touching here.

One of the first things that jumps out at the listener, and it's something which persists throughout, is the disconnectedness between Smith and Elena Poulou in the control room, arsing about with daft voices and keyboard squiggles respectively, and the big lads at the back.

The demand for our awe at an accomplished--yet unfinished--triumph is confusing. The feeling each song inspires is indeed that of a religious service, one in which the endless standing up and sitting down leaves one a little exasperated. And fatigued.

On the whole, though, these songs are at their best when grounded in low region trickery: rumbles, clipping sounds, droplets, shudders, judders and all manner of absorbed low freak-uency eeriness, as exhilaratingly creepy as anything offered up by trip-hop's most skilled practitioners.

On its own merits, it's a decent enough record with some interesting tracks on it, even if they sometimes sound like nicely turned B-sides rather than top drawer material.

This excellent record on Manchester's Bird label isn't some generic late adopter's attempt to take on the Moon Wiring Club, rather a genuinely unhinged, unique and deliciously weird pop album.

No amount of street cred can make up for this mostly middling, only intermittently marvellous record.