Everything is that much thicker, more weathered, generously exaggerated and significantly less innocent. It pays increasing attention to composition and classy song structures and yet more to pulling them apart and lassoing passing listeners with the strands.

It's not just that 'Love Sex Magic' is the highlight, it's Fantasy Ride's only saving grace.

While it'd be ridiculously premature to cast The Horrors as the future of anything, this is a bold and often brilliant step in that direction.

Gallows are the sound of this country's rising fury. And people in power need to listen, because if it spills over, there'll be trouble.

Maccabees have not just merely avoided a sophomore goring with Wall Of Arms' bar-raising pop. They have got the crowd firmly back on their side in doing so.

With their abilities to self-censure and decide at what's fundamentally good gone seriously awry, the results are more likely to induce a rolling of eyeballs and suppressed sniggers rather than gasps of admiration.

A proper, fully formed record rather than a side-project doodle, Colonia is where artistic integrity meets pop conviction in a curious, deranged yet compelling sing-along.

In a time where we could have fairly expected another state-of-the-world sermon, Dylan's thankfully stopped the overdone end-is-nigh bell-ringing that's characterised his late-period, allowing the ghosts of romances past and present to permeate Together Through Life.

The truth is most of this new record is karaoke, too--it's just that, like their fans, the band are so desperate to mean something that they have the gall to call it 'new'.

Much of the album bathes radio-friendly funk-rock in a kind of Balearic after-glow--it conjures that feeling of bittersweet triumph many will have felt as last night becomes this morning, the conquering of a dark that is now needed if sleep and recovery from such an act is to be possible.

Ultimately though, the credit for the triumph of Yes is Tennant & Lowe's. While Xenomania bring a confidence and focus, the big choruses and nagging melodies are present throughout.

On Dark Days/Light Years, their ninth album, The Furries consolidate their best ideas--electro leanings, hypnotic motorik excursions, catchy, hook-driven riffs and layers of vocal melodies.

Sounds Of The Universe also happens to throb with sonic originality and dark, complex humanity, and is a fine addition to one of the richest, most intriguing back catalogues in pop.

Robbed of any arch qualities they might previously have hinted at, Art Brut are shown up as cuddly pop-comedians happy to tell the same joke over and over, devoid of any real insight and normal to the extent that you half-expect Argos to launch into a diatribe against aeroplane food.

That's the thing about Asleep In The Bread Aisle, it's all about promising potential, rather than the delivery of it.

My Maudlin Career offers soul and sophistication in abundance.

The main criticism of bands built on laptops is that they lack soul but while Telepathe's 'processes' may be intrinsically stylized, tracks like these and the thriving, exhilarating 'Devil's Trident' still carry moments of genuine romance, innocence and drama.

She's softened the edges just enough for you to find a way in and it pretty much liberates the whole record. The transformation overall is nothing short of terrific.

It would be thrilling to hear a Silversun Pickups record which finally shakes off all their influences and creates something entirely their own. Swoon isn't quite that record, but it takes them closer to that goal, and is a seductive, intricate thing of beauty in itself.

Maclean is clearly a scholar of electro/disco and each number is exquisitely arranged and executed, every synth sound modulates just so as it fades, every reference point lovingly rendered and the whole thing is buffed with a contemporary polish that eschews none of the off-kilter humanity that keeps disco delightfully distinct from its explicitly mechanised dancefloor cousins.

Dos offers proof that, while less may indeed be more, Wooden Shjips give you more of less.

While her second album is frequently more drama than action, over the long haul, the magical world she creates is one worth being immersed it.

Jewellery then is not quite the set of glittering pop gems its title implies but boasts a handful of rough diamonds nonetheless, fidgety and uncompromising though all the more enjoyable for it.

It gradually reveals itself as a lithe and texturally consummate work.

This may be a much welcomed return for Lady Sovereign from the wilderness, but in the case of Jigsaw, it would seem that she's missing a few pieces to make this comeback a complete success.

A check-your-pants rollercoaster, Tentacles isn't a critique of the times by any stretch of the imagination but it captures the feeling, the mood and the sheer abject terror.

If all that this still-decent album does is pique interest in what Dananananaykroyd are like live, then it will have done its job because that is where the magic lies.