Please, please, please ignore this album. Uncle Dysfunktional is a wretched experience. Ryder bellows his way through it all, banging on about drugs and low-life in a voice that can barely muster a tune.

Twilight Of The Innocents re-announces the group's commitment to melody and proves they have successfully re-ignited their creative spark.

With their very different moods, the ‘London’ and ‘Dublin Sessions’ respectively nourish two different aspects of spiritual longing: the soul’s yearning for a sense of reverence and awe, and its equal need for spiritual intimacy, comfort and familiarity.

This is a surprisingly enjoyable outing as these things go.

Although the sound of 30 people making music is always going to have an uplifting edge to it, the songs here are less self-consciously happy-clappy than before.

Icky Thump is freighted with moments of frazzled virtuosity yet may prove excessively outre for most palettes.

You can slag them off all you like but it’s impossible to truly dislike their catchy, inoffensive pop-rock.

If Lullabies To Paralyze was a strange forest fairytale dusted with desert blues courtesy of Billy Gibbons, Era Vulgaris finds the band holed up in an abandoned funkhouse in the centre of a shady copse, waiting for some strange sexually-contracted fever to pass.

Ultimately, the greatest achievement of Mark Ronson’s genetically modified Version is to demonstrate the superiority of the organic source material.

Missing, thankfully, are the twee Paulie-isms that often insult our intelligence, making Memory Almost Full that rare thing, a modern-day Paul McCartney you can listen to without wincing.

The mangled electronic hailstorm is unrelenting, but it is also perversely enjoyable and infectious.

The results are too often less-than-inspiring, and our Marilyn’s music has not established the sort of consistency required to atone for this lack of drama.

Truly, this is music for the ringtone generation.

It’s a bold, ambitious statement from a techno producer keen to expand his range watch this space.

This is a maddeningly inconsistent collection, with more misses than hits – though Kelly’s best moments do go some way towards atoning for his flaws.

Never a dull moment then, but a little consistency would go a long way for The Used.

Strange House is actually an intriguingly intelligent debut.

It’s as warm and forgiving and generously tender a collection of songs as you’ll hear all year.

It’s just too ‘nice’.

The shift in subject matter cannot disguise Linkin Park’s acute lack of creativity.

It’s too early to write Maxïmo Park off, or to turf them into the ever-growing pile of indie also-rans. But they’ll need to pull out all the stops to recover their poise after this worrying misstep.

Nothing Bjork does is ever less than provocative... Just don’t expect to it to force you out of your seat.

Despite their disparate origins this is no hotchpotch of leftovers and out-takes.

The Boy With No Name has a handful of absolute crackers, proving that Travis are still capable of penning a tune that wraps its tendrils around your ears and won’t let go until at least four minutes have passed.

Jack the volume up and let Fields suck the air from your lungs.

But so what if The Magic Position ends up creaking slightly under the weight of its own ambition – surely that’s better than settling for the norm?

Imagine an amalgam of The White Album, The Kick Inside and Professor Longhair, all conceived as an off-Broadway extravaganza directed by Julie Taymor.

What’s most remarkable about the record is its incredible level of musical cohesion – it’s like the trio never stopped playing together.