In practice and the long term of most, they're hysterically fun, but perhaps easier to admire in the abstract than really adore, unless you're a 17-year-old girl or bored at a festival.

Although Blood Lust remains their crowning achievement to date, Mind Control's highlights shine just as true.

It's not quite its own thing yet still, but it's the sign of a band gelling well, with Crain's collaborators Dan Quinlivan and Rob Frye happily in the same sphere while aiming beyond it.

Shades of The Herbaliser's Something Wicked This Way Comes abound, and the sensation that there's some kind of malevolent presence woven through the eight songs that make up Sold Out never fully escapes you.

The Remainderer slots into a lineage of interim records that bridge different eras of The Fall, like the sprawling ‘Chiselers’ single, which telegraphed a darkening of mood in the mid-90s, or the Fall Versus 2003 EP, which signalled the band’s reinvigoration after career-low Are You Are Missing Winner?

Tonally and generically, the album is not so much a continent as a small country. But it's a beautiful country, warm and vibrant.

The Body and Thou's collaboration, though at times coalescing into a perfect rumble (See: 'Lurking Free'), with its reverberations capable of rattling chest cavities (See: the pretentiously titled 'Beyond The Realms Of Dreams, That Fleeting Shade Under The Corpus Of Vanity'), lacks the desired cohesion from beginning to end to impart the feeling of a complete album.

This isn't a record you dismiss on one spin and parts require some work from the listener, but given proper attention Theatre Is Evil unfolds into something multilayered and quite lovely.

Savoy Motel’s eponymously titled debut has a lot going for it, full of interesting ideas, some of which come to fruition and some that could do with some development still. The next one might just be great.

Thematic and tonal dexterity accounted for, The New Sound is undeniably an entertaining body of work which highlights Greep’s strengths as a singular songwriter and performer. However, there are instances (the bizarre final minute of ‘Walk Up’) where Greep throws too many ideas at one song, resulting in misaligned structures.

Taken on their individual merits there's nothing particularly 'wrong' with the 11 songs that form DFA 1979's long-awaited second album, but altogether there's few standout moments and the tight, self-imposed confines of DFA 1979's sound shackles them to the floor.

Their fifteenth album Nonetheless doesn’t measure up to the friskier mid-’10 releases Electric and Super – the melodies are often wan and Neil Tennant’s delivery is uncharacteristically stilted – but the Boys are old friends. They amuse and move us. Their foibles are familiar.

As ever with Yorke's solo work, it's at its best when the loveable tyke is going with the flow instead of deliberately trying to sabotage his own ear for melody, or trying to bugger up a voice that should just make peace with the fact it's quite pretty.

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.

If nothing else it's a fascinating document: a snapshot of a band slowly breaking out of the prison of their own aesthetic and bravely denying the tragedies that have marked their progress to define them any further.

Though Plant and Jones kept their ears to the ground with what was happening on the musical landscape, some of the efforts on the album have dated horribly.... But there are documents of true greatness contained here.

It's the slickest, spaciest project he's released since Honest (which was always underrated), and sits far left of the trap rigor mortis of the self-titled record.

Quarters! is also the band's most accessible album to date.... This in an album that caters to the listeners' self-indulgence rather than arresting their attention, which is a shame. But is what you've really been seeking all these years is Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain on wax, look no further.

Cannell’s music thrives most when she takes the airy, washed-out sound of her bass recorder and mixes it with the twinkling, prickly textures and harmonies of a twelve-string harp to make mysterious palettes. .... Much of the music on The Rituals starts to feel monotonous. Most of Cannell’s melodies slope upward, made of ascending slurs that recede into a pillowy bed, yielding little variation. But with closer ‘A Lost Nightingale’, her ideas coalesce into a sombre yet optimistic meditation.

There’s a passionate, earnest vibe that spills out to fill any cracks in quality, a window into Lavelle’s soul that somehow opens wider whenever someone else takes the microphone.

Shulamith is by all means not a bad album, providing just enough thrills and spills to warrant repeated plays. But by expanding and deepening their sound palette, Poliça lose out on some of the original charm that helped make them unique.

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.

Regardless of whether you share the Manic's collective outlook on life, and if you're not forty plus you might not, you can only take Rewind The Film for exactly what it is: a band who know where they want to be and are comfortable with that. And, interestingly enough, this is maybe the closest we'll ever get to really knowing them.

Devoid of the light and shade that had highlighted the many musical facets of the band, Led Zeppelin's seventh studio album remains a difficult album to take in a single sitting. For sure, it contains some incredible individual moments.... [Pod] A piano led instrumental dominated by the under-rated John Paul Jones and complete with some of Jimmy Page's most understated guitar playing, this is beautifully reflective music sharply at odds with what's contained on the parent album and worthy of investigation.

Here the instruments muddle together foggily and somewhat awkwardly. Fortunately, the songs themselves are strong enough to be of great comfort to those who felt lost twenty years ago and found some degree of solace in Troublegum.

The High Frontier is a vibrant and thoughtful album that avoids the trap of naff that this genre can so easily fall into. If I have one gripe, it’s that it sometimes sounds too much like music made 200 light years out from Earth on a journey without any specific destination, neither capturing the thrill of first ignition or the discovery of exotic new worlds.

Whilst the album sounds confident and assured, its lyrical themes are built around questions, without ever proposing answers.

It’s simultaneously a gratifying and frustrating listen. A lot of the homespun charm of ‘Pretty Girl’ has been jettisoned. The synths have clearly been given an upgrade. The drums sound expensive. There are musicians here who can play, and are probably on union pay scale. But no amount of major label gloss or ill-advised interposing guitar licks can disguise Clairo’s irresistible melodic gift, and strangely haunting/haunted voice.