The first four tracks of new album The Big To-Do are a solid continuation of the Truckers’ recent winning streak....But just as it seems clear we’ve got another rough-edged diamond on our hands, the album begins to wander at its mid-point.

This is a far from perfect album, but at its peak it’s highly mature, seasoned music. Exhaustion clearly seems to be beneficial to McRae’s unique sound.

Peepers is every bit as good, talented musicians reworking the rulebook with hearts and minds at play.

Sweet 7 doesn’t sell the Sugababes as individuals or as a brand.

Liquid Love is undoubtedly impressive, well-honed and slickly produced, and it’s shot through with a glowing joie de vivre. But it’s too smoothed and tidied.

Only behind such a distracting smokescreen could Damon Albarn get away with conducting a project as sprawling, daring, innovative, surprising, muddled and magnificent as Plastic Beach: not just one of the best records of 2010, but a release to stand alongside the greatest Albarn’s ever been involved with and a new benchmark for collaborative music as a whole.

Sisterworld is perhaps their masterpiece, showcasing as it does all strands of the Liars sound so far.

Mercer's gently off-beam pop songs are lit up colourfully by the duo's choice of arrangements.

The Winter of Mixed Drinks is more polished, more polite than the band’s earlier offerings, but it’s reassuring to note that the band’s scruffy-hearted charm still lies just below the surface.

Sure enough, complicated, esoteric and, yes, really quite bonkers, it turns out to be. By the same token, Tomorrow, In a Year is also a work of vaulting ambition whose ‘seriousness’ is written on its metaphorical sleeve and whose sense of gravity and ascetic rigour give Scott Walker’s Tilt or The Drift a run for their artily uncompromising money.

The band have taken Bruce Springsteen's influence, twisted and distorted it and made a quite remarkable album that lives up both to its rebellious, riotous ambition and its rich musical heritage.

Essentially, jj have offered a more rounded, somewhat slicker version of what came before, and to the vast majority of listeners the comforting embrace it offers will be welcomed.

The fact that the climax comprises the closest thing to a substantial recording on the album is an indictment of a release that one suspects would not have made the stores had the Hendrix estate not wished to offer a bone to new label Sony following the end of their distribution deal with Universal.

It's an album that largely triumphs with a black snake moan and the revitalised, tempestuous twin snarl of Peter Hayes and Robert Levon Been.

Both in words and music, this album works by letting anger and warmth share a platform. In this respect, listeners already au fait with this splendid band should find plenty of cheer.

With Are the Roaring Night they delve deeper into the glittering soundscapes that have become synonymous with their sound; sacrificing something of the warmth that marked their previous work, they nonetheless emerge with a thoroughly impressive, coherent whole.

This is a transatlantic musical campaign whose virtuosity, verve and sheer eccentric heart make it hard to resist.

It all clicks into gear by the end, and it perhaps bodes well that they appear to have worked out how to finish things on a high.

It’s a stunning, genre-transcending record that should appeal as much to fans of the esoteric, fuzzbox-psychedelia unearthed by Andy Votel and the Finders Keepers label as it will those fond of dubstep, the spliff-frazzled paranoia of trip hop, J Dilla’s vision of cerebral, emotionally rich hip hop, the head-in-the-clouds acid folk of Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex and dust-blown, voodoo-tweaked blues.

Although this statement sounds very much from the heart, and many of these songs make you smile while other make you sour, it’s a shame that this album’s playfulness very often comes across as pretentiousness.

Big Echo is an immediate, inviting listen. It’s not breaking any boundaries of inspired expression, but for what it is it’s a fine set indeed.

It’s all quite understated and beautifully played, and any shortcomings in the material are more than made up for by Drever’s peerless singing.

The pair can knock out enormous, memorable hooks from limited resources, the instrumental make-up stripped-bare in the extreme, just drums and guitar. But scarcity of equipment never once hinders their considerable ambition and inventiveness.

Barnett's blue-sky dreaming is actually a pretty accurate description of Hidden – heavily beat-driven, almost entirely absent of guitars, and laced with large amounts of elaborately arranged woodwind and brass. Does it work? Largely, yes.

The resultant pieces feel so alive that you can almost sense the pressure of Frahm’s fingers alighting on each key as these solemn improvisations begin to weave their magic.

The result of this is that many songs here, like Elbow's Mirrorball, are fairly modern, and Gabriel rarely dips into the obvious rock canon (Heroes aside). And the sparseness of the arrangements around the singer’s tender vocals makes this a thing of beauty.

Black Light, their sixth album, finds them enlarging their repertoire to relax into wider influences. In the absence of a frontman they are aging well.

Fight Softly is, while not a game-changer, certainly a level-raiser. It glistens with pop immediacy, rollicks with breathtaking percussive interpositions, and clatters to a beat entirely of its own construct.