Yes, and it's just as frustrating, too, and fiddly and awkward and self-conscious and self-important and neurotic and panicky, and as often ugly as it is beautiful, and as often pompous or irrelevant as it is profound. Just as you've come to expect.

Old loves Liquid Liquid, ESG and A Certain Ratio haven’t been abandoned and their percussionist still works overtime, but the spirits of Prince, Kraftwerk (both on the wryly self-referential "Dear Can"), Chic and even ABC (on the politicised "Shit Scheisse Merde Pt 1") make cameo appearances.

It is a qualified success, at times brilliant, at others rather vague and off target.

Great fun to record, no doubt, and probably great live, but an annoying conceit on record.

Song after song, this is hardly an album that boasts of its riches but, in a determinedly low-key fashion, the music asserts itself in honest textures captured in naked performance.

An incredibly accomplished record, a true testament to the band’s imagination, intellectual curiosity and outrageous musical talent.... Unfortunately, “Frances The Mute” is also awful.

Playful yet touching at (almost) every turn, Write About Love may not shake any musical foundations but it certainly proves that Belle and Sebastian still can't be pigeon-holed.

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.

"Fundamental" is the sound of the Pet Shop Boys reborn, and mindful of the important role they fill in the pop family.

Sir Paul is largely on top form.

There are moments when The Concretes ape Mazzy Star a little too closely for comfort on this album, but overplaying a talent for languorous, delicious fuzz pop is hardly the most horrific of crimes.

Eno and Byrne's twist, however, is the optimism and hope that breathes through every minute of what is not another boundary-demolishing collaboration, but a delicately crafted work that could only have been recorded after dispensing with the rules.

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.

The sheer scope of 'Latin', however, is what rescues it from feeling like a box-ticking completion of a mission--as 'P.I.G.S.' races off into the distance after its lull, there's the feeling that there might still be more to see, more work to be done.

Ignore The Ignorant looks for escape into the US indie underground, "Last Year's Snow", "Cheat On Me" and "Nothing" sulkier than The Cribs we've come to know, reluctantly 'pop' dismissals rather than worried cures for a mainstream malaise The Cribs apparently regard as terminal.

The Defamation Of Strickland Banks is an unlikely, remarkably successful stab at launching the first major new male star of the decade.

We've heard it all before, we know the punchline, we've bought into the joke, but still we want the delivery again and again.

It might not turn out to be his biggest album, but 808s & Heartbreak could well be his masterpiece.

Few records will be made this year with such love and devotion, and you'll be able to tell it too. It's delicious.

It's not a perfect record, but "The Cure" does achieve something quite remarkable and unexpected. It leaves you looking forward to their next one.

New frontiers for rock aren't exactly broached, but then that was hardly the point.

Busting out of car speakers on hot London streets this summer, 'Ego War' is gonna make you think that, finally, we've got a Brit band worth adoring.

An impressively rounded, engagingly inventive record that ranges across British blues / R&B, Mod pop, psychedelia and American country rock.

While 'Make It Go Away (Radiation Song)' lacks the subtle lyrical twist (and a decent tune) of some of the other moments on Detours, it is a sober counterpoint to the image of Crow as all hair, tan and teeth. It also contrasts with the album's stand-out, 'Love Is All There Is,' which brings us back to more familiar Crow country on an album of big themes and surprising depth.

Quite honestly, he's never sounded so alive and free - or, more importantly, human.

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.

Like listening to DJ Shadow after vast amounts of Angel Dust, 'Out Of Nowhere' is a sonic Hall Of Mirrors that bulges and bristles with restless inventiveness and illustrates an impressive attention to detail.

This is 'All Killer No Filler' with bells on and 'Does This Look Infected?' will rightly have the Blink 'boys' quaking in their trainers.