As an exercise in hubris and chutzpah it's a rather fascinating affair.

For those who looked forward to the new genre-leading direction in downbeat dance that would come with the next Massive Attack album... well, let's just say the major challenge you'll face with '100th Window' is deciding whether there is a hidden track or that 'Antistar' is really a 22-minute song with an excessively long silent bit in the middle.

While it's got to be said 'Amerika's Nightmare' certainly has its moments over the space of a complete album the familiar themes and reference points start to feel a shade tired and predictable.

Almost everything about 'Kicking The National Habit' is righteously unfashionable.

Some of this record is excellent and after all this time they can still sound like four teenagers kicking up a racket in a rehearsal room.

'Happiness In Magazines' is likely to make you smile, and may even have you remembering a bygone era when Blur provided the soundtrack.

They still sound as spunky and powerful as they were nearly two decades ago when they kicked off this long-term assault on American culture.

Great album though this is in it's own right, the failing of 'The Endless Not' is that it just sounds like it's happy to play safe. No shocks, no surprises... and , sadly, none of what made TG arguably, together with the Sex Pistols, THEE most important force in the evolution of modern popular music.

Nearly every line contains a shock, a sharp intake of breath. To say this album is worth more as a social document than a musical one is no insult.

This is no whimsical, fey take on folk music, rather a bold, buoyant frug with the skeletons of The Doors, Teardrop Explodes and other likeminded explorers of the stoned side.

Whereas 2001's 'Confield' often felt like a thankless task 'Draft 7.30' is often, by Autechre standards at any rate, a much more welcoming beast.

If 2002's 'High Society' found them honing their nascent pop sense then this effort finds the New York trio sounding almost too cool for their own good.

A lap or two behind many of the albums it seemingly aspires to be (Cat Power, Radiohead, Fiona Apple and Elliott Smith comparisons have been made before and seem almost invited) 'Knives...' still has enough personality and original thought to shield it from accusations of simple derivation.

'Cassadaga' is much less of a draining emotional journey for both chief player and listener alike than Bright Eyes previous work.

There's way too much power balladry, rawk guitar, Steven Tyler and MTV-by-numbers to make a genuinely stand-out record.

There are tunes galore, and ideas that some groups would do someone in for, it’s just a shame he decided to do an approximation of all his favourite bands, and didn’t try something a bit more progressive than 'Rock‘n’Roll'.

When 'A Drug Problem That Never Existed' is at its best, briefest and most brutish, it's a cracking piece of work indeed; daft, dirty and, in many ways, devilish.

It's painstakingly layered and often lush, but sometimes scrubby and miserably sparse.

Only problem is, though, Ladytron still sound too self-consciously detached and robotic for us to view this as a great leap forward.

The trouble is that Jay is stuck in an artistic straitjacket of his own making.

It doesn't strictly feel like a No Doubt album at all.

The sonic palette here is just so relentlessly perfect that, for me, it becomes constricting and cloying.

There's an 80s Anglophilic feel throughout, and like the era they're paying homage to it's all very hit and miss.

Now there was nothing wrong with Stone Temple Pilots, but anyone who’d hoped for Guns‘n’Roses mark II (or III) will be very seriously disappointed. Weiland’s dry, powerful voice cancels out the music, like light cancels out dark, or Owen Wilson cancels out Ben Stiller.

It nods in so many directions that our heads should be spinning, but the gel in the system is a linear production ethic that weaves the threads whilst keeping it refreshingly rough.

This ain’t no classic.

A joyously audacious opening salvo.

It's like a thicker, dirtier Good Charlotte.