These guys are passionate about what they're doing.

The album is absurd, confusing (the random sequencing can be a bitch if you're trying to follow individual plots), hilarious (only Merritt could pen a libretto titled What A Fucking Lovely Day!) and bloody brilliant.

Even if his singing never touches Damon Albarn's, he seems confident in his voice, using his shortcomings to his advantage to burn through 13 tracks inspired by a passion for late-70s Brit punk.

The super-synthetic ethos of the album starts to rub against your skin; the band's retro dance-music collage feels less like innovative referencing and more like flat pastiche, and the simplistic little-girl lyrics add nothing.

These tunes tend to meander and often feel like they should be going somewhere we never get to. But a lot of it is very lovely.

It appears that the recording regime involved in focusing on a series of 7-inch singles rather than a new album has brought back some of the old creative spark.

Their bleakest set of songs ever.

A beautifully tense and thoughtful record.

Case's overzealous self-production means there are layers upon layers to every track, which sometimes works to her detriment.

The professionalism behind these country-lite treatments keeps the band from sounding as relaxed and spontaneous as they apparently do live.

It's obvious Morrison was going for an early-50s throwback vibe, complete with oohing chorus singers and a forthright pedal steel twang, but it comes off more like a western-exotica caricature than the genuine article.

Admittedly, the whiny Martsch-inspired delivery of singer dude Christian Hjelm will be a turnoff for some, but the Figurines' compositional skill shows real promise, and their endearing enthusiasm should win them many fans over here.

Demented, sloppy, brilliant, and above all a great way to spend three-quarters of an hour.

Nine Black Alps are definitely louder and more aggressive than many of their Britrock counterparts, but that's really nothing to boast about.

Miller's compositions are typically well crafted and slightly artier than what you'd hear on, say, a Josh Groban disc, but this isn't too far off that sort of pouty boy bellowing.

Their riff-heavy songs are brashly delivered – favouring attitude over technique – but it's Turner's keenly observed vignettes of bored text-messaging teens that really connect.

While his tortured, guttural delivery comes off as the lunatic ramblings of an abusive boyfriend, the actual lyrical meat of The Last Romance rings with the uncomfortable, ugly truth of facing your hungover self in the mirror the morning after a one-night stand.

Uniformly mediocre.... It leads one to assume he's either lost the ability to discern the padding from the profound or he just didn't give a shit.

While the sheer density of Bejar's writing can be overwhelming, Destroyer's Rubies is, on a musical level, the most 'accessible' disc he's released in years.

The record is rife with brow-raising darts and the mindblowing beats to match, outstripping the last two Dilated records and threatening the alignment of your neck vertebrae in the process.

It didn't take long to turn the novel clank and grind of Kinshasa junkyard techno assault unit Konono No. 1 into an easy-to-use formula with enormous money-making potential.

Live fails to replicate the experience of seeing Eels.

A shockingly good batch of rock, pop and punk tunes.

Occasionally, the band comes close to falling back into old habits, but with their new enthusiasm for sounding nothing like they used to, they've successfully created an album's worth of intelligent music for the Warped crowd.

While Orton has a tendency to mimic her own melodies, she explores jazz structures here in engaging, exciting ways, and the indigent heartland iconography of her lyrics is beautiful without being cloying.

The quality of the compositions is consistent and the album has an overall stylistic coherence that makes the Minus Five sound very much like a real band. Now, if he could only figure out how to make it rock, he'd be onto something.

It's Collett's ability to lyrically and aurally crystallize moments in time that makes this album such a delight.

The writing here is sharp and stunning, but the real difference between this and other Cat Power discs is that The Greatest has room to breathe.