The album just sounds like the same guitar riffs recycled, with the distortion merging them all into one.

While Nabuma Rubberband may not be the commercial breakthrough that some may have expected, it’s still a largely enjoyable record and, together with fellow Swede Lyyke Li‘s new album, proves once again that nobody does swooningly melancholic pop quite like the Scandanavians.

Throughout Sonik Kicks, it somehow feels as if the Krautrock vibe is a needless intrusion, an unnecessary welding and meshing of styles.

An album of gentle, if sporadically confusing, beauty.

Ultimately this is a solid record, if not necessarily one that will change either the world or people's perceptions of folk.

There are a number of misfires, and no amount of positivity can hide them.

Unless you are in the company of some helpful stimulants, it is ultimately frustrating and chaotic. You can marvel at the wondrous and wacky keyboard sounds one minute, but you'll be shaking your head at some of the strange musical harmonies and directions the next.

The two note piano trick gets slightly overplayed on Practicing Magic, but then it represents the only real misfire rather than a lack of ideas. This is an utterly intriguing and unsettling album.

An album that is wide-eyed in its sincerity, unafraid of sentimentality, for better or worse. The political message is familiar, and will never grow old. The means of expression, however, can become a little too routine.

It’s a solid, if slightly understated, album from one of the many underrated names in underground music. But a lack of variety and a lack of texture that lets this release down.

One thing this record definitely lacks is variety. With a work claiming to hold "the band's most varied songs" it's disappointing and surprising to hear so little diversity.

Lesser Evil is an album that is a bit too cluttered and patchy to stand out as a classic debut.

Even the very best double albums--London Calling, The White Album, Tusk – have their lulls, but this record has too many.

Billed as the spiritual successor to 2017’s Flying Microtonal Banana, sadly a lot of this new record feels like exactly that, the musical equivalent of the yellowy orange filter Hollywood tends to put on films and TV shows to indicate that it’s the Middle East. Yet as flippant as that may sound, there are still some flashes of innovation.

This is an album full of club bangers – anyone who prefers the ballads like Love Me Like You Do and How Long Will I Love You may be disappointed. Fans of decent dance-pop anthems though will be more than satisfied.

Not a bad addition to the Antipodean canon then, and an interesting mix of the macho, the sensitive, the timeless and the "cool right now"--although one suspects that the latter is not something the band have deliberately aspired to.

A record that doesn’t always astound but has a fair few enjoyable moments, and some very effective vocal performances.

Armageddon is a sop to the disaffected fans of FFAF's pomp, and in seeking to recapture their ardour it tries too hard to pander to their needs. And from the few tracks that evidence what could have been, that's a shame.

With Family Portrait Ross From Friends (or Dr Geller as he prefers to be called) confirms enviable production skills that were already displayed on hype-building 12” releases, but is missing some songwriting nous that would have lifted the album up and made it a more consistently engaging listen.

The main issue that dogs this album is weak composition – few of the ideas are outright bad, but they don’t earn their runtime.

Lengthier drawn out psych-jams similar to TOY could be one direction that would be an improvement, as would the addition of a guitar maestro, but without a special ingredient you can’t help but feel The Proper Ornaments will sadly find themselves consigned to granny’s shelf too soon, a fact you desperately don’t want to see happen, such is the potential hinted at throughout.

The album's highlights far outweigh the more average moments, and there are enough signs here that The Like are going to be around for some time to come.

Gathered is very much an album that needs time and attention to allow its strengths be isolated and to surface. Long term Gelb fans will appreciate his continued work rate, the extension of musical themes and hints at his past but overall it may be too slight and unprepossessing for the casual, passing listener.

Overall however, listening to Saltwater you realise that, while the album contains nothing seriously off-putting, you grow tired of Brazos’ style when listening to it.

It's a roots record alright, with a few crumbs of hope amidst the looming sense of armageddon.

Whilst Duppy Writer is an engaging and mostly enjoyable album, it also sometimes feels slightly lightweight, or intentionally minimal and immediate.

It never really breaks free, but The Absence is, in its best bits, an album of real beauty and elegance, and should cause hearts to grow fond of her.

While this different feel to the album leaves some of the pacing feeling a little repetitive, there is no doubt that the talent shines through.