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

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.

In spirit, their third album takes them back to their origins as an independent group from Glasgow making defiantly direct music in an age of detachment.

It's as close to a perfect Americana album as there's been this year--fans of the California sound from CS&N to the Jayhawks will find much to love.

It's an album about what war does to the aggressor, as much as what it does to the vanquished victim.

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".

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

The sound is a return to the Whigs' finest and the mood is whiskey, cigarettes and damnation.

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

Stuart Staples and his band delivering nine pieces of beautiful bossa-nova noir, daydreamy reverie and existential easy listening.

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

On record, this is a joyous burst of blissed-out world pop.

While the presiding atmosphere is retro, the Avila brothers' production keeps things properly real.

Conor Oberst has always been an artist to inspire, irritate and frustrate, and on what he says will be the final BE album he does these things in equal measure.

The impeccably hip credentials of HN's Roberto Carlos Lange are rather at odds with the wonderfully gloopy Latin-cheese of this Spanish language, old school synth-session's best tracks.

Ten out of 14 tracks are outstanding, especially considering Bugg's only 18.

With its unrelenting positivity, Yes, It's True sounds like the Flaming Lips fronted by Deepak Chopra, and valiantly courts the daytime radio play that will inevitably elude it.

Subjects resulting from such reveries include imperialism, the environment and the more familiar home turf of love and longing. Nobody does it better.

There are no standout songs but that's kind of the point: GTTW washes over you like a cooling stream on a hot day.

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

It sees Golightly staking her claim once again as the Brenda Lee of the Medway scene.

It's on close personal terms with magnificence.

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.

For all its faux-primitive origins, their seventh studio album is every bit as likely to ship platinum as the previous six.

As so often before, the duo’s choice of vocal collaborators is timely and transformative, bringing fresh, unexpected angles to their pieces.

Helpnessness Blues is, like its predecessor, archaic and pastoral to the last.

Very musical, it is, if ever so slightly coffee table.

Gossamer is hard to fault, besides the fact that it's more of the same.