Uncanny Valley is like listening to a latter-day Oasis album: too weakly reminiscent of past achievements to really satisfy.

Elegant and unusual, this is a gem.

Speck’s mimicry is little more than pale homage to a real eccentric, highlighting the gentle sadness and underlying soulfulness of Pink’s music. PDA lacks this, and comes across as frivolous.

A rough and rabid ride.

The ramshackle energy and unpredictability of their live show has been sanded down into something more clinical and precise.

He and the four gents in his Revue are here to remind you there's nothing more thrilling than the primal howl of proto-rock'n'roll, and this, their third album, is their most convincing sermon yet.

BE’] is certainly an improvement on ‘Different Gear...’, but it’s more of a tentative step in the right direction than a great leap forward.

Johns’ 10-track debut solo album is a placid but gutsy amble that pitches him as Bill Callahan dealing with a lazy hangover the morning after a pub crawl with Guy Garvey.

They’ve kept those colours nailed firmly to the mast, and never more so than on ‘No Money Music’, an aptly named track that adopts the aural scare tactics of Suicide’s ‘Frankie Teardrop’.

It’s a bit nuts, but the ominous, shimmering psychedelia of standout tracks ‘Three Frendz’ and ‘Angel Of The North’ elevate the album beyond a quirky, Watership Down-esque curiosity.

Elegant is the way the record confines Diane’s sadness to the past. It doesn’t wallow, it reassesses.

Not only do his [Reid's] noises fail to carry the songs, he often loses the songs altogether. They drift away from him when he should be dominating them. And this album is a missed opportunity.

The result is an eccentric grab-bag of styles and influences, with enough harps on it to keep Joanna Newsom fans happy, and even a retro 4/4 beat dancing in on the aptly named ‘Disco Compilation’.

Ultimately, it’s sketchy and uneven, ridiculous in as many of the wrong ways as the right, but not quite the disaster its tracklisting would suggest.

You may well be charmed by Ghost Outfit’s acidic battery; but there’s so much going on, you may have trouble remembering how their songs go.

The Bardo Story sounds like a collection of rediscovered ’60s and ’70s gems uploaded to YouTube.

This, then, is AOR: Adult Orientated Rap. Luckily, though, Jay-Z still turns out work of impressive authority.

This, for all the fighting talk, has the feel of a lightweight flailing around for another KO.

Try as he might, though, he can’t cover up his odd but undeniable talents.

She’s every bit the equal of Bat For Lashes, Frida Hyvönen or any member of the Wainwright clan.

He sounds small, beaten and subdued beneath the Lemonheads-meets-Diiv slack drawl of the music. The key thing here? Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he also sounds totally believable.

This is a no-flab 20-song cinematic suite in four movements, featuring Hart’s weather-beaten Bowie-like semi-falsetto in all of its majesty.

They expound spiritual philosophies (“I am a hieroglyph of love!”), grasp the rural jig-folk baton from Mumford & Sons and, post-Beirut, remind everyone it’s supposed to be fun.

It is all-consuming and consistently impressive from the off.

A mix of Trent Reznor and Patrick Wolf, he’s both an industrial piledriver and theatrical show-off, making this debut record disorientating, confusing and exciting.

JBM’s electronically tempered woodsman folk is a blissfully eerie, emotional punch to the guts.

History has rarely been so engaging.

He’s made an engrossing, highly original album with disarmingly simple tools.