It’s an evanescent experience, for whilst you’re awestruck by the sonics beneath the electronic sheen, you can’t remember anything much about them after they’ve evaporated at the end.

If there is such a thing as music with a hairy chest, this is it.

There's a real richness here, and raw venom beneath any fey first impressions, as gentle finger-picking bursts into free-jazz fuzztone guitar blasts and bloodied lyrics.

NYPC's restrained disco needs to rip it up and get wilder, cos this down‘n’dirty posse is actually cleaner than a Boots cosmetics counter.

It’s a fun mess, and although heavily indebted to 60s psyche folk and acid rock, Astronomy For Dogs has a verve and colour that saves it from derivative pastiche.

Overall, The Sun feels like three men taking things at their own leisurely pace but without wasting a second.

For what both of Guillermo Scott Herren's alter-egos are concerned with is sound's texture rather than its structure, rendered here through the soft caressing of acoustic instruments instead of circuit board torture.

Their debut has a great deal of shadowy appeal: there are lyrics about ghosts and secrets, set to drowsy washes of guitar.

Whatever the permutations, Amiina's fragile magic can't fail to beguile.

It’s not just the recurrent meditations on mortality that makes Ma Fleur even more heart-rendingly beautiful than 2002’s Everyday, it’s also how The Cinematic Orchestra’s new album actually feels.

Excellent Italian Greyhound is vintage Shellac: stark, razorous and blackly comic, lurching into whatever time signature happens to possess drummer Tod Trainer.

While their sound might have progressed in an even more bizarre – if sadly less atmospheric – direction, it's still surprising, full of invention and totally unique.

As fun and full-on as it gets right now.

He’s an acquired taste, perhaps, but a distinctive and extraordinarily talented songwriter.

The influences may be antediluvian but the spirit is timeless.

As exciting as it is original-sounding.

The result is less cohesive than Vespertine or Medulla but the fun’s in the exuberance, the jolting between musical styles.

Having eschewed the over-earnest knob-twiddling of erstwhile producer Steve Albini, Verity Susman’s vocals and Mia Clarke’s guitars now sound crisp and urgent, and when the envelope gets pushed... the band’s detached cool melts into a pleasing joi de vivre.

Despite flashes of unexpected vigour, Everybody is ultimately more variation-on-a-theme than it is wheel reinvention.

Coming in 2007 it sounds oddly fresh, but nothing here’s as full-on as their early stuff or as lovely as Feel The Pain.

Even the most melancholy moments... have airy jazz arrangements that let them breathe.

Turner’s sharp narrative ear is still tuned to the revealing banalities of everyday life, the whole band admirably responsive to emotional nuance.

More incoherent than Dntel’s superb debut Life Is Full Of Possibilities.

This is not a bunch of old blokes looking to recapture their youth; rather, Grinderman sounds like a freshly hewn and rudely vigorous chunk of leftfield rock.

What seemed fresh and charming on 2005's Noah's Ark sounds like an interminable racket this time round.

The lyrics are often sublime, of course, but there are big, stupid choruses too.

There’s gold here but you need to dig deep.

This is one of those rare albums that makes you wonder how you ever got by without it.