Filling the gaps between Prince and !!!, this is for those who spent the last two decades shaking their hips rather than banging their heads.

There are off-centre, post-hardcore workouts and plenty of edgy but polished, pop fusion pieces, which suggest The Futureheads transplanted to 70s West Coast America.

The new album conjures something of Condon’s own imagination, more deftly-etched romantic fiction than dry travelogue, and is all the better for it.

The album’s dark title belies its artful balancing of psych pop’s sweetness with head-down, rock riffing and the emotional power of the blues.

A complex yet controlled fourth album of astonishing beauty and perfect strangeness.

A textbook lesson in sublime but understated country soul.

Don't expect the gumption of Super Furries, instead bask in the mellow psychedelic ramblings of Gruff unplugged.

Even by her own unsettling standards, however, her seventh album is disturbing, a collection of smudged and spectral laments that appear to have been written before the invention of penicillin.

His vivid, scattershot rhymes are clever without being cryptic, and his techno-tinged beats never veer off into tuneless arhythmia.

If there is such a thing as music with a hairy chest, this is it.

This only occasionally matches the breathtaking splendour of last year's …Illinoise! but with its modest price and immodest extras only Scrooge could fail to have his heart warmed.

El-P's uniquely, beautifully harsh vision remains undiluted.

Coming in 2007 it sounds oddly fresh, but nothing here’s as full-on as their early stuff or as lovely as Feel The Pain.

Heartfelt but sometimes overly polite.

The influences may be antediluvian but the spirit is timeless.

Short answer: it’s good.

Their second album continues in a similarly delicious vein, melding wonky electronics, pillow-soft soul and lyrics that manage to weave strange violence into gorgeous soul songs.

Even the most melancholy moments... have airy jazz arrangements that let them breathe.

The production is smoother, but when Sleeping Lessons morphs from an opiate dream to a riffing stomp with such exhilarating economy, or Red Rabbits wraps drunkenly swaying strings around yet another firmament-bound chorus, you can forgive an occasional excess of slickness.

There’s gold here but you need to dig deep.

Five albums in, The Coup have just made their best since their debut.

Together, they’re a marriage made in musical haven.

When Cease To Begin rocks out it's euphoric, but there's a mournfulness shadowing each of these insistent melodies that will have you crying even as you smile.

It’s not just the recurrent meditations on mortality that makes Ma Fleur even more heart-rendingly beautiful than 2002’s Everyday, it’s also how The Cinematic Orchestra’s new album actually feels.

There's a real richness here, and raw venom beneath any fey first impressions, as gentle finger-picking bursts into free-jazz fuzztone guitar blasts and bloodied lyrics.

Frank is an honest, refreshingly personal record which, though very occasionally strays into easy jazz, has Gucci bags of personality.

Now every track is an intensely creative pop gem, like those brilliant pockets scattered throughout previous releases, refined and condensed.

Excellent Italian Greyhound is vintage Shellac: stark, razorous and blackly comic, lurching into whatever time signature happens to possess drummer Tod Trainer.