They’re a zesty bunch are Architecture In Helsinki, and never more so than on Places Like This.

Kala is an intoxicating junk-culture travelogue, a genre-humping mash-up of Bollywood rumbles, shrieking guitars and machine-gun rhymes.

Ahead of their Electric Picnic date, the LA rockers ditch their mainstream sheen on their fourth album.

Kweli's collaborative work has set the bar so high that his solo efforts routinely fail to meet these exalted expectations.

Melody takes precedence on Roots And Echoes, and this makes it stronger and tighter than The Coral’s previous releases.

What the world needs now is love, sweet love. Instead we get a new Korn album. Oh well.

Bat For Lashes' debut, Fur And Gold, is an album that delivers the listener from any form of humdrum existence into a deeper realm of dream and dementia.

If there’s a central problem with War Stories, it’s that at times it strays too close to rock orthodoxy and loses the offbeat stylistic flourishes that made Unkle such an exciting proposition to begin with.

Underclass Hero is a perfectly workable North American punk rock album. It’s got melodic suss and a snotty attitude to its credit, but not much else.

The first new material from New York’s finest avant garde trio since last year’s superb Show Your Bones album, Is Is isn’t a new album, unfortunately.

In places <i>An End Has a Start</i> is bleakly compelling; nevertheless, great swathes of the record strain towards a pasty arena-rock future.

The best you can offer is that it’s not a disaster – now do you want to tell Billy or should I?

Probably a track or two short of being a stone-cold classic, Our Love To Admire nonetheless makes for hugely rewarding listening.

Anyone hoping for another "Don’t Dream It’s Over" is going to find Time On Earth a disappointment.

A sparkling return to form for a band regarded by many as the great lost hope of the early ‘90s.

Jason Isbell, formerly of the Drive By Truckers, releases a solid, sad, gritty new album as a solo artist.

It will probably go down as their 'sell-out' record, in that it's their first for a major label.

It would appear that working-class Coventry trio The Enemy are now officially the next big thing.

Velvet Revolver are a formidable collection of important figures from 80’s and 90’s hard rock, and this strong mixture of personalities lends their music a certain charisma, even when it isn’t particularly accomplished.

Not as good as Beyonce.

Please, please, please ignore this album. Uncle Dysfunktional is a wretched experience. Ryder bellows his way through it all, banging on about drugs and low-life in a voice that can barely muster a tune.

Twilight Of The Innocents re-announces the group's commitment to melody and proves they have successfully re-ignited their creative spark.

With their very different moods, the ‘London’ and ‘Dublin Sessions’ respectively nourish two different aspects of spiritual longing: the soul’s yearning for a sense of reverence and awe, and its equal need for spiritual intimacy, comfort and familiarity.

This is a surprisingly enjoyable outing as these things go.

Although the sound of 30 people making music is always going to have an uplifting edge to it, the songs here are less self-consciously happy-clappy than before.

Icky Thump is freighted with moments of frazzled virtuosity yet may prove excessively outre for most palettes.

You can slag them off all you like but it’s impossible to truly dislike their catchy, inoffensive pop-rock.

If Lullabies To Paralyze was a strange forest fairytale dusted with desert blues courtesy of Billy Gibbons, Era Vulgaris finds the band holed up in an abandoned funkhouse in the centre of a shady copse, waiting for some strange sexually-contracted fever to pass.

Ultimately, the greatest achievement of Mark Ronson’s genetically modified Version is to demonstrate the superiority of the organic source material.

Missing, thankfully, are the twee Paulie-isms that often insult our intelligence, making Memory Almost Full that rare thing, a modern-day Paul McCartney you can listen to without wincing.

The mangled electronic hailstorm is unrelenting, but it is also perversely enjoyable and infectious.

The results are too often less-than-inspiring, and our Marilyn’s music has not established the sort of consistency required to atone for this lack of drama.

Truly, this is music for the ringtone generation.

It’s a bold, ambitious statement from a techno producer keen to expand his range watch this space.

This is a maddeningly inconsistent collection, with more misses than hits – though Kelly’s best moments do go some way towards atoning for his flaws.

Never a dull moment then, but a little consistency would go a long way for The Used.

Strange House is actually an intriguingly intelligent debut.

It’s as warm and forgiving and generously tender a collection of songs as you’ll hear all year.

It’s just too ‘nice’.

The shift in subject matter cannot disguise Linkin Park’s acute lack of creativity.

It’s too early to write Maxïmo Park off, or to turf them into the ever-growing pile of indie also-rans. But they’ll need to pull out all the stops to recover their poise after this worrying misstep.

Nothing Bjork does is ever less than provocative... Just don’t expect to it to force you out of your seat.

Despite their disparate origins this is no hotchpotch of leftovers and out-takes.

The Boy With No Name has a handful of absolute crackers, proving that Travis are still capable of penning a tune that wraps its tendrils around your ears and won’t let go until at least four minutes have passed.

Jack the volume up and let Fields suck the air from your lungs.

But so what if The Magic Position ends up creaking slightly under the weight of its own ambition – surely that’s better than settling for the norm?

Imagine an amalgam of The White Album, The Kick Inside and Professor Longhair, all conceived as an off-Broadway extravaganza directed by Julie Taymor.

What’s most remarkable about the record is its incredible level of musical cohesion – it’s like the trio never stopped playing together.

Twelve is a solid enough collection, but one can’t help wondering if it would’ve been better had she made like Fellini and called it 8 1/2.

The record goes some way towards capturing the heaviness of that band’s live performances.

Sensuous showcases a more playful Cornelius than we’ve seen before.

The potency of the admirable sentiments is undermined by the lacklustre execution.

A boisterous and bratty collection of hook-swamped shout-alongs.

A number of tracks here follow a similar, frustrating formula. For three minutes they showcase Reznor’s worst tendencies; the boorish plod of the choruses, the hoarse moan of the vocals. On the remainder of each of these songs Reznor does what he’s good at – i.e. creating delicious layers of chaotic industrial noise.

This essentially middle of road noise bears some relation to their past work but lacks any of the grit or charm that made them such a cool little indie band.

The group have kept their sound surprisingly fresh incorporating some welcome sonic refinements, without making any great creative leap or departure.

It’s bland, boring and just not very good.

It focuses on the epic qualities of Ride and MBV, combined with Wilner’s cosmic pop chops and his predilection for shuffly techno grooves.

This isn’t the place for Timbaland to try any new tricks and what starts off as something quite thrilling rapidly loses its impact over the course of the album’s 19 long tracks.

Reformation Post TLC may lack a tune as monumental as, say, the unforgettable ‘Hip Priest’ from Hex Enduction Hour, but 30 years into his career, Smith is still making music with the kind of vitality and imagination that shame most musicians half his age.

Although the tunes have plenty of vigour and aggression, as with Employment, Britpop veterans will feel more than a little sense of deja vu.

A perfectly functional album of loud guitars, ain’t life a bitch lyrics and the odd nod to different production styles and techniques.

Despite the big name producer and big time contributors, Gray has somehow achieved the not insignificant feat of delivering an altogether average record.

By eschewing the careworn vulnerability so favoured by many female artists, Veirs allows her remarkable songcraft and ornate use of language to shine.

The clunkers come thick and fast.

Neither tearaway maverick nor irrelevant abdicator, Brett Anderson sounds like a man out of time in a time out of joint. No bad thing, necessarily.

Although combining an assortment of sounds may seem risky, they’ve managed to produce a solid album, fusing jazz, soul, ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll and playful lyrics into a tight 10 tracks.

The most extraordinary aspect of the album is that Murphy has managed to simultaneously make his music both more experimental and more thrillingly danceable.

There are some excellent moments.

Malin has seemingly adopted the persona and sound of his New Jersey counterpart Bruce Springsteen.

At times, Why Bother? is an unlistenable racket.

A record to cool the blood and quicken the pulse.

The record is low on saccharine balladry, high on rhythm protein.

We’re treated to less-interesting takes on the work of Bloc Party and The Libertines, low on hooks and utterly devoid of interesting production quirks.

Who needs love when heartbreak sounds this bloody good?

Pocket Symphony... contains more than its fair share of inspired moments.

So, Funeral was by no means a fluke. The Arcade Fire are unquestionably the real deal. And to prove it they’ve now thrown in another contender for ‘best record of the decade’.

Though hardly the disaster it could have been, then, The Stooges’ return feels unnecessary and, more importantly, undignified.

It’s a little long at 17 tracks, and hard to take in one sitting, but these songs present Americana in such an oddly compelling way that it’s almost impossible to ignore.

Such inconsistency is forgivable on an overreaching debut, less so on a sixth album just 35 minutes in length.

The end result doesn’t vary that much from his usual dense, dark, cinematic ramblings but it’s good to see he’s keeping busy.

The Calling will test your emotions, making you feel glowing and comfortable, then useless and helpless.

Think a more ragged Belle & Sebastian, and you’re not far off.

Despite their reputation as torch-bearers of the new post-rock prog, it lacks the outrageousness of the ‘70s version of the genre and there’s an earnest sameness to these pieces that render much of it tedious beyond belief.

West works because it juxtaposes a sense of vulnerability with a desire not to stay down for long, and is tinged with a sense of realism not always present in her rivals.

Beautiful, but never callow, here is an album to fall slowly in love with.

So once you get over the fact it’s farcically emo, this album turns out to be a decent enough record to get you in the mood for the Saturday night indie disco.

A quantum leap in thought and execution from 2004 debut, These Were The Earlies.

This is a brilliantly buoyant and wonderfully charming record that’ll suit almost every mood.

The lyrics here are a lacerating mix of blue collar bile and blue language, little Lady Muck simultaneously waging class and crass warfare.

An album as vital and as edgy as anything they’ve ever done.