Given that Sigur Ros seem to be going to increasing lengths with each record to seem less abstract and more human, a collection that unbinds itself from those constraints is, it turns out, a justifiable and often awe-inspiring exercise.

Perhaps with a bit more effort converting the jams into actual songs this would have been a worthy jump off as opposed to the album's incandescent highlight. Your forecast then, occasional flashes of brilliance but largely dreary.

But all too often there's the feeling that, in trying so hard to match the melodrama Ronson and Pallet have draped around him, Waller loses sight of the smaller picture and sounds confused, out of place.

So, while this is a terrific rock record, there's still not much here that our dads didn't nod-out to at Bickershaw.

Although Bombay Bicycle Club can't quite hold a torch to the all-conquering returning Maccabees, they're an armful short of effortless anthems for that, but they prove themselves worthy of operating in their shadow.

Weird enough but familiar enough to spook the status quo without blowing it out of the water, they will, hopefully, continue to make music for a very long time.

Like a slightly under-serving best of, though, we get glimpses of what they've done before, but nothing substantial enough to set a new high-water mark.

It helps to pick the right tune and Dando has good taste, judging Gram Parsons ('I Just Can't Take It Anymore'), Wire ('Fragile') and Townes Van Zandt ('Waiting Around To Die') to be worthy of homage. But that's all this album is, really. Homage.

Frankly it makes our blood run cold with images of Sunday supplement purgatory, Spektor trading soft-focus licks with Katie Meluah from out of suburban glove compartments for decades to come. Thankfully the reality is nowhere near as bad as that.

Where her former act just made sneering grunty fight-punk, Spinnerette have proper tunes, proper lyrics and proper choruses. Marriage to two proven master songwriters has probably helped. But whatever, it's a positive move.

There's a gleefully fluid rock'n'roll dynamic driving this whole record, more evocative of modern-day US psychedelic reprobates The Dandy Warhols or The Brain Jonestown Massacre, rather than students trying to be clever.

In a number of 'mature' developments to their sound they've laid down impeccably produced horns (see bombastic opener 'World War III'), come within millimetres of salacious classic rock in the excellent "Poison Ivy" (watch out for the implied "bitch" in the chorus!) and, on lead single 'Paranoid,' dispensed a chilled-out post-baggy number.

Happily so, as well, as any adherence to the backstory would ruin what's simply the best dumbass party album of the summer.

It's well-built, yes, but almost too well built, many parts sounding like they've been lifted directly from SY's vast back catalogue and slotted into place, like a jigsaw that needed completing, rather than the sprawling documents of noise and confusion this band's name is built upon.

Around the world in 60 minutes, then, Mos embraces both the jet-setting film star lifestyle and a re-found love for the game, making for the Deffest jam since that label gave Jay-Z the keys.

If the "Energy Never Dies", as Black Eyed Peas' acronymically-titled fifth album has us believe, why do they continually sound like the most tired, idea-less group on the block?

What pulls this album back from being anything but revelatory, however, is not only the typical lazy rock the band are purveyors of, especially 'Fire' and 'Fast Fuse,' but also the diabolical lyrical content that's employed throughout West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum.

As they expose the fragility of love and ultimately humanity, and mourn evolution's victims, they pitch themselves somewhere between Neil Young's heart-rending "Needle And The Damage Done" and a hard-bitten Dylan going electric, all the while retracing traditional folk's footsteps with a wonderfully homespun flourish.

What truly counts here is persona and with E casting himself as dog in heat, eager to reach a scratch that he just can't itch, the end result is yet another facet to a continually engaging and truly unique artist.

With such songs as 'Southern Point,' which builds from shuffling, folk-jazz grooves into a squelchy, winding fairytale, breathtaking piano-pop anthem 'Two Weeks' and the towering drama of 'I Live with You,' we join the consensus: this is a record to swoon over.

Aside from the incredible sonics though, Phoenix's real triumph here is successfully contorting the songs into ever more elaborate and unconventional arrangements without losing any of their classy pop impact.

Perhaps the only interesting thing about Manson's latest record is the couple of anomalies hidden within.

It's a well-made, well-polished piece of material. But she ruins it by painting a wacky overcoat over something that was probably fine in the first place.

While Relapse is a slightly more energised record than the listless "Encore" (despite a Dr Dre production that is, for the most part, tired and dated), it's hardly the comeback many hoped for.

there are many who will find this record torrentially annoying....But to many others, Manners will be a welcome zephyr of optimism ushering away the angst of epidemics and impending environmental oblivion.

His solo follow-up, though, is a more personal affair, dissecting the onset of middle-age, physical decrepitude and the end-game of marriage (he split from his wife not long after finishing this).

Back On My B.S. is 50 minutes of largely no-nonsense Busta, fist firmly planted in the mid-'90s. Of course, with that we get the expected ups and downs, but what Busta lacks in album length longevity, he makes up for in force.

Bloated, culturally inconsequential and decidedly average, the net result is a band getting far too high on an over-inflated sense of self-importance to the deafening chimes of cash registers the world over.