Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon and Pugwash’s Thomas Walsh strike another fine balance between cricket’s arcane specifics and its universal metaphors in cucumber-crisp batches of catch-all pastiche-pop.

A fascinating collection of songs from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Though it's far from his worst album, it's his least commercial – with its harsh beats, mangled vocals, and Marilyn Manson samples, it mimics the aesthetics of a DIY mixtape.

However much you think it a tired formula, this lot shake it awake with their relentless charm.

It's a clever, sensitive record.

This is smooth jazz raised to a high art.

Ice on the Dune is a seamless suite of elegiac synthpop, with fairydust-flecked melodies, a perpetually peaking bass end, chord changes that reach into your heart, and fantasising falsetto vocals.

A couple of tunes, including the title track (one of two West Side Story selections, along with "Tonight"), can even sound a little pedestrian, the swing faltering. But, given time, most of it works.

If his follow-up doesn't evince quite the same exuberance, it still twinkles with a well-travelled exoticism.

It's that rare thing: an album that will reward repeated listening by drip-feeding you its secrets.

There is joy in these grooves; the attentive care of studio perfectionists, and the warm embrace of an old friend.

The weird, aquatic-sounding requiems are getting better all the time.

The band return to the slow-and-low, sinister alt-boogie that made their name, with Homme's satisfying dirty badass guitar sound in full effect.

There is nothing not to love about it.

CocoRosie [is] squat, inventively, somewhere between Fever Ray and Joanna Newsom.

In short, if Land of CanAan were a Stevie Wonder album, it would be Hotter than July rather than Innervisions.

The occasional off-kilter touch throws things sufficiently askew to deny listeners any complacency.

It's an album which makes you feel warm.

You won't have heard anything like it before.

A compelling experience.

The majority of A (clever title, in the context of Faltskog's history) consists of dignified, age appropriate ballads.

It happens to be their most cohesive and convincing effort yet.

This often sounds more like a BBC4 documentary than a pop record. And that's no bad thing.

Only the more straightforwardly poppy numbers disappoint, with power-ballad manqué “Crescendo” a particular anomaly.

Post-millennial indie boy-rock has taken a savage beating here. And it may prove the best it’s ever had.

Drawing on anything from Medieval plainsong to free jazz, she creates an extraordinary sensation of light, air, and space.

Most of LTHS consists of thumping soul-pop reminiscent of JoBoxers or high-energy Hives-like garage rock, and even if it errs on the side of sameyness, it's rarely dull.

A skittering collage of vocal drum'n'bass, garage, and funky house that parties, in the best way, like it's July 1999.

Gruff’s gorgeous voice helps humanise Feltrinelli. Never more so than on “Hoops With Fidel”, which, rather than demonising him and Castro, conveys the ideal of international revolution as a beautiful thing. As beautiful, in fact, as this album.

The result wears the weight of its history lightly, with the exception of "The Departed", a solemn tribute to lost Stooges.

It's derivative and is a near hybrid of Mew, the Postal Service, M83 and Empire of the Sun, but it's perfectly likeable without ever inspiring outright love.

It can be plodding and takes a while to get going, but also occasionally reaches soaring, festival-fields-at-dusk heights.

The live stuff is consistently inventive.... Randomness dogs the remixes, but that's standard.

It's close to the best of all music I know.... A second CD of later, unreleased material with some genuine gold among the dross.

Classy pianos, minor chords and brushed drums back her ever-elegant, half-spoken syllables.

Rokia rocks, and it's a fine and bracing thing to hear.

A genuinely empathetic production, then, which does not pull up many trees.

Ghost on Ghost is as dense stylistically as it is lyrically.

This rocks harder and faster than those fellow Tuareg bluesmen, partly due to the noticeable pop influence of another Malian act, Amadou & Mariam.

It's almost boring: yet another excellent British Sea Power album.

"Yes You Do", a 1950s rock'n'roll love song updated for the synth age, is the standout track, but "Bassline" is the most typical.

"What's Wrong with America" is the masterpiece, doo-wop and social protest mixed with God-bothering. Someone book them for a festival, quick.

Comedown Machine is, essentially, The Strokes' 1980s album.

It's testament to his songcraft that it feels all of a piece.

Proper, stop-you-in-your-tracks talent with the occasional song to match.

Just like Levi Stubbs, he can't help himself.

Bloodsports is effortlessly superior to its predecessor A New Morning, and averages out roughly on a level with Head Music (though more consistent in quality).

It may not be as mind blowing as FutureSex. But, frankly, what is?

Give it time and the intensity of the music--the Hagar of the title is Lloyd's great-great grandmother, who was sold into slavery--comes through.

The end result is a tense, powerful and emotive piece of work.

Memphis is a late-night delight.

[Tales from Terra Firm] ought to be the one that separates the Oxford quartet from the indie-folk bandwagon and kicks them a few steps up the ladder to being Mumfords-sized.

The occasional familiar, Carpenters-esque track aside, it makes for an exhilarating musical progression--even as his lyrical style remains unchanged.

It's on close personal terms with magnificence.

If Mala wasn't conceived as Devendra Banhart's Europhile album, it's doing a damn fine impression of one.

Effortlessly mixing traditional instrumentation with samples, this varied yet cohesive album has an angular funkiness and a soulful pop edge.

He sets his bruised but unbowed soul against a stark musical backing and rediscovers the power of keeping it simple. Beautiful.

Some might call it Kylie for hipsters, but it's quite lovely for that.

The result is an album of solid country virtue.

David Bowie's perpetual predicament is that he can't escape David Bowie's past. In that respect, he's just like the rest of us: we can't escape David Bowie's past either. The Next Day leaves you wondering why you'd ever want to.

It induces a heady sense of perpetual forward motion, whether graceful or full pelt. Stunning.

It's a bright, optimistic, emotive world, Heidi's, and well suited to the neutral "roots" pop sound which frames it.

Though some of the good-girl-gone-bad shtick has been sacrificed on the altar of go-for-it jangly pop, she's still as good as it gets when she finally opens her pipes on "Dallas".

As long as you don't ask too much of it, it's good knockabout rowdy fun.

They have now cracked out the synths, ramped up the drum machines, and found their calling in giddy, lovelorn electro-pop.

There are 36 performances, most of them evincing a spumey "aaaargh, Jim-lad" recreational vibe.

This is heartfelt, sweetly sincere and as good an album as BPB has made for some time.

Squelchy synths, down-and-dirty basslines, and vocodered vocals stay just the right side of Jamiroquai.

PTSA may never stare you in the face, but you'd be a fool to turn your back on it. It's carrying a knife.

It is absolutely beautiful.

Everything is great.

For the most part it works well, provided you can live with Dawn's butter-wouldn't-melt ingenue phrasing and tone.

Whether this Blue Note debut featuring Robert Glasper is better than his two albums with Brownswood is moot, but the best tracks--"Trouble", "Heaven on the Ground", "Do You Feel"--are very good indeed.

Redemption by plucked string. Buddy Miller produces analogically.

In spite of the self-conscious effort to create something "beautiful", the songs slowly reveal themselves to be things of real beauty.

If this isn't Foals' pop classic or their art masterpiece, they're having a huge amount of fun squaring that circle.

MBV leaves all other post-rock experimentalists looking like trivial dilettantes. If jet engines could sing, these would be their hymns.

They're back now, all troubles set aside, and the results are good.

From the self-mockingly banal title onwards, it confirms them as that rare thing: a band able to combine grandiosity and groundedness.

Wonderful Glorious alternates between distorted rock and freewheeling country-pop interludes.

The Village largely whispers rather than shouts, and it's all the more powerful for it.

There's a modicum of standard Teenage-Fanclub-meets-Mekons indie jangle. Far more interesting, however, are the dreamy, dazed disco tunes.

There is no shortage of shimmery songcraft here.

Rocky's rhymes are believable when reminiscing about growing up poor.

A genuine classic, in fact.

It's sprawling, overdue and not for everyone, but at least it's not a play-it-safe comeback with the hot producer of the day.

Neville almost levitates through doo-wop, soul and R&B standards.

It marries a downbeat songcraft to an expansive sound courtesy of producers Guy Garvey and Craig Potter.

It's that rare commodity: an album to immerse yourself in and spend time with, both things no one does any more.

Arc is built with daytime radio in mind as much as the indie disco.

There are enough album tracks and B-sides to make the case that what we actually had in 10cc was a British Steely Dan: clever, funny and funky as hell when they wanted to be.

In its own downbeat, understated way, Tinsel and Lights does more for festive good cheer than any number of more traditional Christmas albums that go straight for the razzle-dazzle.

It's deeply engrossing and rings resoundingly with cultural and historical truth.

The orchestra's work is subtle and supportive rather than flashy, allowing free rein to that astonishing voice.

How you respond will depend on how you react to such gubbins being brought to bear on Merritt's A-to-B-and-back melodic sense. No doubting its realness, though.

"I Wanna Talk 2 U", [is] just one highlight of an album which manages to be sonically inventive, dense and complex and melodically accessible.

A surprising (if a little sad) return to form.

Walker is almost unique among his generation in continuing to provide mind-food instead of cosy nostalgia. If you go into Bish Bosch half-wishing he'd belt out a ballad, you leave it with absolutely no regrets.