Aside from a few great moments like the warm and accessible track ‘Beyond That Of Courtesy’, this listen does feel slightly hard to grasp due to its disjointed nature. There are enough ideas in the tank here, but ultimately it's not one to rush out and buy.

It’s as close an approximation of before as they could possibly get - the result of 12 tracks being plopped out of a Black Keys song generator - but, five years down the line, you hope that people will demand more than that.

While Life Among the Savages lacks the absolute highs of Quever’s previous work, it also lacks any lows, except for possibly the abrupt ending which leaves you longing for more.

Excess and saturation can only get a band so far without a knowing wink to match, and at the moment, it’s that mischievous streak of personality that feels slightly absent.

Their formula is tastefully broken up by frantic drums on ‘CRACK METAL’, unsettling synths on ‘HATEFUL’ and the twisted pop of ‘ASHAMED’ that soars with the most memorable chorus on the record. Unfortunately, that chorus is an outlier on an album that can wash past with as much staying power as candyfloss in a puddle.

Overall the album is never really present enough to make an impression, beyond a hazy silhouette in the distance.

It dishes out moments of pure brilliance and moments of pure laziness in equal part, which is possibly the result of Blumberg being left to his own devices a little too much.

It’s immensely enjoyable, but almost leaves a sense of guilt, because of how light-hearted it makes an attitude bordering on misanthropy seem.

The album blossoms when his delivery matches the tone of the music.

A lot of the record shows a lack of streamlining, or a singular focus. If album four sees San Fermin filtering through the bucketloads of promise on show here, there’s something really special on the horizon.

Full-bodied production is at the heart, though takes nothing away from the more laid back moments.

Ultimately, it feels as if she’s still waiting for her words and her sound to match up, but what we’ve got in the meantime is an intriguingly personal record.

At Best Cuckold is so highly polished that it feels a little lacking in the kind of blindsided naivety that comes hand in hand with romance.

There are occasional flashes of brilliance and inspiration here but for the most part it feels disjointed, a victim of 'too many cooks' syndrome and disappointingly conventional for an artist with such a proven track record for forward-thinking music.

Human Ceremony isn’t anywhere near fault-free, but its charm arrives when the trio get ahead of themselves.

Steeped in decade-spanning traditions of pop, rock and folk, it’s an ambitious record marred only by early and apparent nonchalance.

Ultimately, ‘Man Alive!’ feels like the work of an artist in transition: a handful of stunning tracks surrounded by some backfiring experiments. It’s frustrating but there are still gems to be found amid the soul-searching.

In many ways Perpetual Surrender is the average British weather forecast; patchy, dull and cloudy with occasional sunny spells. Room for improvement.

Even though the likes of ‘Dylan And Caitlin’ (a duet with The Anchoress on Dylan Thomas and wife Caitlin Macnamara’s tempestuous marriage) or the poignant nostalgia of ‘In Eternity’--seemingly a sentimental ode to former bandmate Richey Edwards--are thematically complex, they’re coated in unabashedly big hooks. It’s a classic Manics trick and one that still works; across 12 tracks though, you do start to crave the spray-painted antagonists of old to pop up every now and then.

While opener ‘Name For You’ is catchy, and album highlight ‘Rubber Ballz’ is a foot-stomping earworm, Heartworms largely represents a loss of ambition.

Messages from the deepest isolation are most likely to be a SOS or the increasingly deranged words of someone losing touch with their sanity. TFCF somehow manages to be both. Alive with unease. Shorn of every accessory, everything to mask the sharp taste, the familiar duality of Liars is starker than ever.

It’s an album about what happens next rather than looking back. They might be a band in thrall to the 1960s but this is a record that tells us to live in the now.

Sure, these glossy throwbacks to eighties synth-pop, soul and funk may not be as innovative as anything on Temple’s previous albums, but he does them incredibly well, and it'd be a fool who doesn't give them a go.

The issue is that, in conflating deliberation with maturity, ‘Today We’re the Greatest’ ends up feeling a little bit middle-of-the-road.

As If Apart follows the template of his similarly bucolic 2012 solo debut ‘Overgrown Path’, shrouding his loosely constructed songs in a shimmering lo-fi shroud that makes everything sound as if it was recorded on his front porch, which it almost certainly wasn’t.

Severely damaged, sometimes terrifying, and always enjoyable, it’s his most challenging album yet.

The big floor-filling moments are in there, particularly on the gripping one-two of ‘Staring at All This Handle’ and ‘Face to Face with Spoon’, but they feel incongruous in the thick of what is otherwise a woozy comedown of an album that fails to cover a great deal of new ground.

Nick would do better to stick to his signature rippling guitar on the ethereal ‘Infinite Trees’, the quietly sensual ‘Lullaby’, or, best yet, the charming ‘Remembering’, which chugs along with a jolty percussive joy.