A slick offering, Rented World is let down by a tendency to veer towards the formulaic, evidenced by closing track, ‘When You Died’, an altogether too tepid acoustic tear-jerker.

It seems Paradinas' real talents lie behind the scenes.

There’s nothing game-changing about The New Classic, just recycled hustlin’ tropes and an ugly, nasal double-time flow overcompensating for mediocre wordplay.

Australia’s Chet Faker has a pretty big hole to dig himself out of on his debut. Singing no faster than 2mph doesn’t help either, but there’s an unexpected range in his schtick that’s disarming.

Thought Forms' side peaks with the driving Sonic Youth riffs of ‘Sound Of Violence’ and the dizzying My Bloody Valentine lurch of ‘For The Moving Stars’.... Having left their label, [Esben And The Witch] are using crowdfunding to record their next album with Steve Albini, for which these raw tracks offer great.

A good seven years out of date, Doom Abuse is pure synth-pop mania, frequently teetering between unadulterated Trent Reznor pop brilliance and impressions of Skrillex driving a monster truck through a Savages gig in a video arcade.

The London four-piece have never had trouble creating pretty atmospheres though; it’s contrasting them with a bolder hook, lyrical or otherwise, where they struggle.

If there’s anything wrong with Brooklyn-via-Kentucky singer-songwriter Dawn Landes’ seamless fifth album, it’s that it’s just too damn nice.

The moments of imperfection that let the album down come on ‘Two Of Us On The Run’ (as basic as acoustic songwriting gets) and ‘Until We Get There’ (just sounds like a Cults offcut), but there’s promise here.

The problem is simply the songs: route-one, four-chord grunge adrenaline hits that have none of the haunting and eerie dissonance that set them apart from bands like Wavves, and the rest of US indie’s surplus of breezy slacker-rockers last time around.

It remains a 1980s Johnny Cash album and it wasn’t until Rick Rubin got hold of him 10 years later that he came in from the cold.

Overall there is a sense that this is the sound of a band brushing their hair and fixing their make-up, trying to convince the world they're OK while secretly crumbling on the inside.

Despite this early start, she oozes a smoky maturity that bodes well for her debut, but unfortunately then shanks it off the fairways by prattling on about Air Max 90s and hanging on the District Line.

Occasionally. the jaunty positivity treads too far into Edward Sharpe territory and all you’re left craving is a healthy slice of cynicism.

It’s unspectacularly solid stuff.

Opening track ‘Petrichor’ is certainly a trial, layering ominously ringing notes with clarinet blasts and coming on like the soundtrack to your worst nightmares, while the rest of the five-track record flits between welcoming and uncomfortable.

Best enjoyed off your face at a festival and forgotten about the next day.

You'll be comfy, you might spot some pretty things on the hard shoulder, but ultimately it doesn't get you anywhere.

Cranes is strong on ‘Honeymoon’ and ‘Easy’, but there’s also nigh-on-sprightly, post-Jessie Ware trip-pop on ‘I Only’ and ‘Feather Tongue’. It's just not enough, though, to struggle above years of similarly tasteful, slight efforts.

Equal parts lo-fi sketch-like song structure and buffed-to-a-shine ’80s soft rock, these 12 songs are evidently personal and, at times, thematically obscure.

Ultimately, Glow will live or die on the strength of its singles. On this evidence, Tensnake seems to be missing that key part of his blueprint.

It’s not an easy listen and moments, notably the faux-soul of ‘Shame’, can grate, but this is a fascinating and rich record.

This isn’t a bad or a lazy album, and Elbow are too good a band to ever be dismissed, yet one can’t help but feel they could push their envelope a bit further.

In the main Dean Wareham is too dreary, too frequently.

Despite the presence of ex-Razorlight man Andy Burrows on drums and extra songwriting oomph, their latest offering feels like another exercise in anonymity.

A release packed with bangers and choppy breaks.

This is glossy Americana, mixing The Avett Brothers with Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros, its piano- and violin-led crescendos emulating old-timey grandeur.

Sadly, the Norwegians promptly undo much of their good work by interspersing the bombastic rocking with acoustic cobblers like ‘Lovescared’ and the sort of excessive, pompous emoting that even Pearl Jam tend to avoid these days.

The only real lump-in-the-throat moment is ‘No One’s Gonna Love You’--although admittedly, said lump is gobstopper-sized for the duration.

For all Hemerlein’s prodigious talents, you can only have your heartstrings tugged for so long before it all gets a bit wearing.

Sadly, Wave 1 is a more disjointed, disorienting listen.

Yes, they write pretty and moving songs, but it’s reasonable to expect more from a band with a history of writing such sophisticated pop.

It’s a brave record, but also a frustrating one. While you’re persuaded by the clarity of Rostron’s vision, it’s hard not to also suspect a shortage of ideas.

Its mixtape nature means it isn’t yet the concise album Keel Her might one day produce, but the breezy likes of ‘Go’, ‘Riot Girl’ and ‘Don’t Look At Me’ are tuneful pop pastiches in the vein of Dum Dum Girls and Ariel Pink.

It's functional, but dispensable.

His taste for sonic jumble can be overwhelming.

As a self-conscious play for stadium-rock ascension, it may prove successful. As a successor to one of the most honest and affecting debuts of recent years, however, it feels a little empty.

What diminishes War Room Stories is the songs themselves, which can feel a little ordinary. Rappak’s vocal is a bit sub-Yannis Philippakis, a monotone half-mumble that doesn’t make the most of his intriguing lyrics.

Former DFA man Tim Goldsworthy has helped them find more sonic sparkle in the production of their second album Dunes, but they nonetheless remain a confused proposition.

Only the appearance of Barbadian teen rap prodigy Haleek Maul, annotating the grimy 'ISIS' with a murky charisma saves Supreme Cuts from slipping completely between the cracks.

While their true believers might not mind the record’s overall lack of variety, for anyone new to the band there’s little on None The Wiser to separate them from the indie-rock chaff.

The nine tracks here turn to the old-school and the classic, making the carols you sung at school into something better suited to a night doing shots of eggnog in Fat Mike’s shed.

It’s all nicely polished, but there’s nothing underneath.

Now they’re safely out of what passes for fashion, their retroisms sound more loving than offensive.

The beat pulses seductively on ‘Staring At The Moon’. ‘Flags & Crosses’ sounds like a nasty Bee Gees. But then it all goes a bit wrong.

All boxes ticked for hip retromaniacs, but certainly not “the next millennium”.

A few more like ‘College’ and ‘Figured It Out’, with their emotional weight and memorable choruses, and they’d be onto something.

Any attempt at bombast is pinned down by singer Liam Palmer’s weary baritone and wry poetry. Intriguingly glum.

It’s smartly done but strangely rootless, roaming far and wide but without a place to call home.

You Were Right pretty much fulfills all the criteria for being a successful radio rock record, apart from the one about having a chorus you can actually remember 12 hours after hearing it.

Welch displays little dancefloor nous. Conversely, these cheerful jumbles of loops and kickdrums aren’t the kind of ambience you can sink into.

Some isolated moments make you want to vom a bit--Groove Armada trombone on ‘Many Rivers’--but ‘Love Inc’ neatly reworks a snatch of Lil Louis’ house classic ‘Club Lonely’ into insistent Balearica, and you can’t argue with that.

An enjoyably kaleidoscopic experience, Better Ghosts pays good homage to its influences but doesn’t strive to do much beyond that.

In between, it’s a wade through thick sonic sludge, but the oncoming doom of ‘Endless Drops’ is bleakly tuneful and ‘He Looks Good In Space’ is soothing.

While it’s stronger than the messy ‘Born This Way’, Artpop feels little more culture-quaking than a good collection of fun, silly, well-crafted pop songs.

Jamaica Plain is inessential stuff.

Rick Rubin’s final Primal Scream-gone-hip-hop remix of ‘A Light That Never Comes’ saves Recharged from disaster, but you might need resuscitating after this lot.

Kurt’s going for a mirror image of the album here: reimagining some songs (‘Air Bud’ becomes ‘Wedding Budz’), expanding others (‘Snowflakes Extended’), adding reprises and, thankfully, including a brand-new track--the lovely ‘Feel My Pain’.

It’s skillfully realised, but feels like a soundtrack missing a movie.

Shangri La is basically more of the same, and for many of his fans, that’ll be more than enough. It would be a shame, however, if it was enough for Bugg, too.

It’s spunkier than 2008’s ‘Sebastian Grainger & The Mountains’, but still meek in comparison to DFA 1979.

Cupid Deluxe is a shop window for the future sound of pop. But perhaps he should quit trying to be a Prince-like polymath and concentrate on being a nimble-fingered production wizard instead.

She’s as frustratingly twee as a hailstorm of cupcakes. Her second album’s adventures into electronica on the squelchy, sulky ‘Kill My Darling’ and the unsettling ‘Next Summer’ are more remarkable.

The result is well produced and enjoyable, but it would be nice to see personality and innovation--two things The Prodigy rarely lacked--emerge among the Altern-8 tributes.

When the songs descend into repetitive strummed choruses and tired imagery (“Ain’t it so good to be young in America and watch the world burn”, on ‘If The Moon Rises’) you realise a bit of rock-star pomp could’ve livened things up a little.

The initial feeling that this album is destined to be one of their many jokey, disposable ventures dissipates slightly as Osborne’s near-peerless ability with a brain-alteringly great riff takes hold.

To be clear, the good outweighs the bad here, but Tinie has lost a lot of the charm that, when he turns it on, makes him so appealing.

Every track here follows the same pattern over identical lackadaisical rhythms, her vocals never rising beyond a low-slung murmur with most of the lyrics drawing the same conclusion: she’s bored.

Good moments include the drama-packed ‘Just Another Night’ and the fun pop of ‘On A Roll’, but neither resembles the formulaic trash cluttering the rest of the record.

Ducktails have been labeled ‘chillwave’ and ‘hypnagogic pop’ due to their naval-gazing appeal. Sadly that appeal is lacking from this release, as is any sense of urgency, leaving Wish Hotel languishing in the middle of nowhere.

Moby has created an album full of saccharine strings, endless loops and narcoleptic synths. The mind boggles.

[Lemmy's] voice is a bit croakier these days, but the band’s riffs are as pummeling and unforgiving as ever.

It's a well-assembled album, and the steady trance-like flow of 'The Forest At Night', and the eiderdown of sound on 'Transcend' are absorbing.

If you’re a fan of the band’s stoner charm and enjoy guessing lyrics to songs as they meander from your speakers, there’s fun to be had here.

BOATS II is your standard 2013 Southern hip-hop record, complete with ticking beats (‘Extra’), Auto-Tune (‘So We Can Live’) and eye-rollingly explicit lyrics (‘Where U Been?’).

It’s not awful, just bland, and lacks the bite that electro-pop records need to be lifted out of the purgatory that is mediocrity.

Drizzy’s candid lyrics about battered egos and insecure relationships were refreshing early on in his career, but the persona is wearing thin as he recalls how rich his melancholy has made.

Two properly good moments out of five isn’t a great ratio, but at least it’s telling us that The Men’s wagon is still rollin’ steady.

He flirts with past glories on the throbbing ‘I Am Dust’, but Splinter never sounds ahead of the curve he created.

It’s fun, but not the comeback it could have been.

Turn it off halfway through and it’s brilliant.

There’s something very ‘mopey American teenager’ about Lightning Bolt.

the promised sense of youth and experimentation rarely surfaces. If anything, Feel Good goes too far the other way, sounding insipid and polished in comparison to The Internet’s debut.

While it doesn’t reach the impossibly high standards of their back catalogue, there’s enough promise to suggest there are good times ahead.

Somewhere beneath the unconvincing sheen of these songs there’s a great band trying to break out. Maybe next time.

If only the rest of the album was as inventive [as 'Spend Some Money'], instead of a derivative box-ticking exercise that features Dizzee going on about his "willy" a lot.

The Calexico-ish 'The Lady Is Risen' shows he can get close to a folky barnstormer, but on closer inspection the barn appears to be a set prop that might blow down in a stiff wind.

There are a few moments of elegant sensuality--like the tumbling, androgynous voices of 'He She'--but by and large it's like one of Jeff Koons' uber-kitsch sculptures: gleaming, opulent, but kinda hard to love.

It's a bit of a mess.

Placebo have been plumbing the same vein for so long, they've slipped into self-parody and come out the other side with their lipstick all smudged.

He's no Marcel Proust, but full credit for producing what's an unusually thoughtful album in contemporary pop music terms. Even if it is a bit morbid.

It'll do for a fleeting one-night stand, but Mechanical Bull isn't the rekindling of a romance that we'd hoped for.

Up there with Cash’s ‘American’ series this is not. But 48-year-old Lanegan is a classy bastard, so he just about gets away with it.

This 10th album lacks such bite [as 1999’s single Flame].

There’s not much sugar to sweeten the pill, meaning Trap Lord is often one-note and depressing.

Nine of the ten songs are named after friends, and they’re samey and indulgent.

There is little, if any, advancement in the band’s sound, which leaves them predictable after three albums mining The Jesus And Mary Chain and Phil Spector’s girl-group production.

If Christopher Nolan ever does one of his gritty makeovers on Twilight, the soundtrack’s as good as sewn up.