“You’re not from New York City, you’re from Rotherham,” acne-splattered front man Alex Turner jeered at the poseurs by whom he felt himself surrounded.

Skip to the present and both the main Monkey’s demeanour and his skin are considerably less inflamed – and he indulges in samey side projects and has a telly presenter for a girlfriend. You might fear he’s become all he once dismissed as wanky.

True, Turner crawls up his arse a bit on the crappily titled Suck it and See; there are several odes to his vacuous missus that teeter on the edge of hyperbolic bullshit. Alexa Chung is “thunderstorms”? Drizzle more like. Blokes ignore “topless models doing semaphore” whenever she walks by? Bollocks they do. But it’s a great line. And so is the description of the “type of kisses where teeth collide”.

This is proof that the fella can still turn a brilliant phrase, even if he no longer expresses any sentiment more profound than “I wanna rock ‘n’ roll”. Oh, well. He’d be taking the piss out of everyone – himself included – if he still sang about the highs and lows of working class life in South Yorkshire.

What lets down Suck it and See isn’t the vocals, then (Turner’s voice is maturing nicely, by the way), it’s the music. The whole thing smacks of a band in want of a new sound and settling on someone else’s.

Brick by Brick, All My Own Stunts and the lead single Don’t Sit Down ‘Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair are little more than pastiches of the superior Queens of the Stone Age (whose ginger monarch, Josh Homme, co-produced the Monkeys’ previous effort, the disastrous Humbug) – and most of the remaining tracks, particularly Piledriver Waltz and Love is a Laserquest, are heavily indebted to Richard Hawley, Sheffield’s answer to Roy Orbison.

Only Library Pictures sounds like the band of old. The closing tune, That’s Where Your Wrong, seems like it could herald a new direction… until you realise it bears an uncanny sonic resemblance to the Stone Roses’ She Bangs the Drum (which itself was/is hopelessly derivative).

So there you are: swirl it about your gob for a bit – but don’t swallow.

Other Listens

Lady GaGa – Born This Way: a lengthy, balls-bouncing mixture of the brilliant and the bland from the best-dressed representative of the US meat and fisheries industry. Not worthy of the hype, but recommended nevertheless.

Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi – Rome: a lovely and largely instrumental collection of what could be best described as the soundtrack for an urban spaghetti western – with vocal contributions from Jack White and the surprisingly excellent Norah Jones.

Friendly Fires – Pala: the follow-up to a brilliant debut has more muscle but less agility. But there are yearning melodies and jittery guitar-funk amid the slamming, neon beats – and Live Those Dreams Tonight is contender for single of the year.

Sexy sexy tummies

Our stomachs are as hard as a blacksmith’s anvil; our buttocks are solid oak and are biceps are like steel-belted barrels full of rocks. The editor once spatchcocked a chicken on his thighs. And he didn’t use a cleaver; he simply glared muscularly. In short, we’re each built like Thor, the Norse god of thunder – only more ripped.

At the time of writing, the spring sun is blazing, and that’s all the excuse we writers need to rip off our singlets and sit in a beer garden bare-chested and glistening (having oiled each other down first thing this morning).

All we need now are new tunes to which we can flex our exquisitely carved man-tits while we catch some rays.

What better than the eponymous release from Jonny, the collaborative project of Norman Blake, singer-guitarist of the divine Teenage Fanclub, and Euros Childs, former Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci front-man?

Even though it was released earlier this year, when the skies were slate-grey, there’s warmth to the album that’s better suited to this season, what with it being all golden harmonies and chugging guitars from two guys who love melody as much as they love the ladies about whom they so frequently sing.

As you would expect of Blake and Childs, there are plenty of musical nods to American bands of yore, most of whom favoured the definite article: The Byrds, The Monkees, The Doors, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and The Box Tops.

And there’s good humour. The whole affair is just so upbeat! True, it verges on the piss-taking on the excessive Cave Dance, the only track longer than three-and-a-half minutes, which swings with gusto for a short while in a cheeky, 1910 Fruitgum Company fashion (“Wear your hair long in the ancient style”) before slowing down and noodling for what seems like ages. And ages.

That indulgent track can be forgiven, though, because all those that surround it are so full of fun and tenderness that one might be mistaken into believing that the sun shines out of Jonny’s arse.

Right! Time to blast those quads…

BarLifeUK also recommends:

Foo Fighters – Wasted Light. America’s classiest rockers riff, roar and sound more than a bit like Queens of the Stone Age (which isn’t surprising given that Dave Grohl is a member of both bands – sometimes, at least).

TV on the Radio – Nine Types of Light. It’s the usual skill mix of rock, grooves and electro-pop, but it’s more laid back than the previous album, Dear Science. It’s better, too – and Tunde Adebimpe is still one of the most compelling vocalists around.

Apt title for a bartender's website...

Sheela-Na-Gig, from her debut album, Dry, addresses female gargoyles that yank open their privates; on the demo track Reeling she demands that Robert De Niro sit on her face; the title track of 2009’s A Woman a Man Walked By, the singer’s second long-playing collaboration with musician-producer John Parish, has her threatening to bum-rape some poor fella.

There are examples elsewhere of Polly Jean shoving her perviness into listeners’ ears, but none pop up on Let England Shake, which wholly concerns itself with the country and its wars of this century and the last.

That’s not to say it’s not graphic in its own way; soldiers fall “like lumps of meat”, limbs adorn trees, wives wait in vain for their men to come home, and children become orphaned and disfigured.

This ain’t a light-hearted work… and yet it’s really kinda pretty. The melodies on The Last Living Rose and Written on the Forehead are gorgeous, Harvey’s voice is higher and – ironically – less combative that it once was, and the arrangements are deceptively simple, flecked with intriguing samples. (The discordant hunting bugle on The Glorious Land is thrilling: it sounds like the opening of a spy’s coded broadcast over shortwave radio).

The production – by Parish, Harvey, Mick Harvey (no relation) and Flood – summons a warm haze that brings to mind the heat-shimmer on the sands of battle arenas in the Middle East and Turkey – the latter being the location of World War One’s savage Gallipoli campaign, which haunts the album throughout.

Which all might seem – eek! – over-worthy and really hard work to get through. But Let England Shake ain’t a BBC4 documentary; nor is it a protest album (at least not in the traditional sense. Harvey is a sad and angry observer rather than a screaming protester). It’s an accessible, intelligent rock album. And a bloody good one at that.

The Decemberists – The King is Dead

Hey! Come back! You ought to know that The Decemberists are also more than a little bit country… Wait! Don’t go! Be calmed by the fact that Portland’s Decemberists rock some, too.

There’s no fey, ‘hey nonny nonny’ tut on this, their sixth album; there’s a muscularity, a blue collar element in the spirit of Springsteen.

It’s particularly evident on the grumbling This is Why We Fight, opener Don’t Carry it All, and the killer track, Down by the Water, with its title similar to a line The Boss once famously sang (“We’d go down to the river”) and a harmonica break that could as easily have been parped by Clarence Clemons, E Street Band saxophonist.

The other side of The Decemberists is a genteel one. They sound like well-to-do collegiate folkies on the gorgeous Rise to Me. Rox in the Box is a Yankee take on north London’s Fairport Convention, and Calamity Song rings out like it was a track on 1984’s Reckoning, the jingle-jangle masterwork by R.E.M.

Those past masters of stadium-filling are evoked more than once: front man Colin Meloy’s quavering vocal frequently holds steady and drops deeper to become Michael Stipe-esque.

It no surprise that the most famous sons of Athens, Georgia, have an influence on The King is Dead; guitarist Peter Buck features as a guest, as does alt-country singer-songwriter Gillian Welch, who lends her distinctive voice – like that of a hard-toilin’ spinster of the old Midwest – to several tracks.

The Decemberists’ previous album, Hazards of Love, was a prog-tinged concept album of sorts, but its follow-up has a lightness of touch and a rootsy air. If there’s a binding theme – albeit a loose one – it’s the passing of a year: songs called January Hymn and July Hymn, and references to “summer’s freckled knees” and “cold climes come springtime”. This is annus mirabilis, not annus horribilis.

Barry wants to be a stand up comedian, but his dad doesn't approve.

Goths are like Simon Cowell and Daily Express readers: they don’t have souls. If they did, they’d shake their wretched asses to Groove Armada’s Black Light.

It’s gothic house: massive, sinister pop set to whomping beats and tired-n-emotional vocals from Will Young, Bryan Ferry and Empire of the Sun’s Nick Littlemore.

But it’s the unknown singer Jess Larrabee on whom the grainy spotlight shines the most, during tracks that smack of mysterious figures dancing in dangerously exclusive nightclubs to the new wave and electro sounds of the early ‘80s.

It would seem that 2010 was a good year for moody bleeders with lots of mates. Dark Night of the Soul by Dangermouse & Sparklehorse has a credit list longer than the novelty willy-warmer John Holmes’ missus bought him that Christmas – Iggy Pop, Frank Black, the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne, Suzanne Vega, movie director David Lynch are among the voices – and it has some well-morbid baggage, too.

Its release was delayed because of dispute with record label EMI. By the time the album finally dropped, two of its main men, Mark Linkous and Vic Chestnutt, had topped themselves. They left behind a fascinating, dark and gorgeously produced collection.

Here’s another list of stars: Rihanna, Elton John, Alicia Keys, John Legend, Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas, former Gap Band front man Charlie Wilson, and La Roux’s Elly Jackson.

They do their thangs on a single – that’s one! – track, All of the Lights, for Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It’s his ‘my gang’s bigger than yours’ return to form: egomaniacal and self-loathing, hilarious and scary, smart and filthy.

It’s also mental – like on Runaway, a ‘toast for the douchebags’ that starts with the echoing plink-plink of a lone piano and ends, nine minutes later, with mass of undulating fuzz that turns out to be West’s singing voice distorted to buggery.

It’s the weirdness of the year – which is saying something given folk-pixie Joanna Newsom released her third album. On the face of it, Have One on Me, is typically wacky: 18 tracks, averaging at nearly seven minutes in length, divided over three discs.

And with lyrics like, “Miss Montez, the countess of Lansfeld, appealed to the King of Bavaria” (sing that, Justin Bieber!). Except… except Ms Newsom, woodland soulstress, no longer sounds like Bjork with hiccups (thanks to a throat operation) and the piano is her new instrument of choice, although the harp still makes appearances. And she’s still the best songwriter in fairyland – and, indeed, on the planet.

And the best of the rest…

• Happiness – Hurts
• Night Work – Sister Sisters
• Postcards from a Young Man – Manic Street Preachers
• I Speak Because I Can – Laura Marling
• The Lady Killer – Cee Lo Green
• B.o.B. Presents: the Adventures of Bobby Ray – B.o.B.
• The Defamation of Strickland Banks – Plan B
• July Flame – Laura Veirs
• Lights – Ellie Goulding
• Where Did the Night Fall – UNKLE
• The Big To-Do – Drive-By Truckers
• I’m New Here – Gill Scott-Heron
• IRM – Charlotte Gainsbourg
• Come Around Sundown – Kings of Leon
• Odd Blood – Yeasayer
• Surfing the Void – Klaxons

Singer Caleb Followill’s face-fuzz was so dense that it seemingly prevented him from fully opening his mouth, making his delivery slurred like he’d enjoyed a jug of Uncle Jeb’s most gut-rotting hooch.

It was either this or a picture of Brian Blessed's crack. Thought this the best option.

And all the time, the rest of the band – the front man’s two brothers, Nathan and Jared, and their cousin, Matthew – played their Southern-boogie garage rock that smacked of young lads who loved boozy brawls and girls in old cotton dresses but had their gazes fixed far beyond their home state.

Critical acclaim was tailed by haircuts and commercial success, and eventually the Kings’ fortunes led to this, their fifth album. It’s the follow-up to the tremendous Only by the Night, which spawned the mega-smash single Sex on Fire and turned the group into stadia-filling bird-crap magnets.

(Earlier this year, the lads abandoned a gig in St Louis, Missouri, after getting liberally splattered with the shite of pigeons in the rafters above the stage.)

Rock music’s finest agonised howl?

Come Around Sundown continues in the same vein as its magnificent predecessor. There’s a darker mood, but there are the same scratching, trilling guitars (like U2 with a pair of deep-fried bulls-balls), detonating drums, threatening bass and surfeit of melody.

And there’s Caleb’s voice. It was alluring from the beginning, and after the gob-inhibiting chin-furniture went bye-bye, the singer got and better and better until finally becoming contemporary rock music’s finest proponent of the agonised howl.

Listen, for instance, to his delivery on Pony Up, a highlight of the album. He lets out an elongated ‘whoa-ho’ with panache, all the while sounding only a note away from throwing a tearful haymaker at whoever’s standing in front of him. Actually, his voice constantly threatens to crack but never does – and that’s what makes it sound damn exciting.

Musically, Come Around Sundown is less head-spinning. It’s has plenty of belting moments – the glam rock vocal harmonies on Mary, the insistent shuffle of Radioactive and, best of all, the faux-country sound of Back Down South – but it’s a little too safe, too slick, in spite of the band’s insistence that this was going to be a grungier work than Only by the Night.

Twangy Back Down South

Grungier, no, but maybe gloomier (“Everything I’ve cherished is slowly dying” is a fairly typical lyric) and too familiar; the boys haven’t advanced like they did from, say, Youth and Young Manhood to Aha Shake Heartbreak. There are exceptions, however, that suggest the Kings are heading in a playful direction.

There’s the twangy Back Down South and there’s Mi Amigo, which pours lusty admiration over a lass who gets Caleb pissed and tells him he’s got “a big ol’ dick”.

So, no masterpiece this time; Come Around Sundown doesn’t rule, but it’s a princely effort.

Half his choices – including the one in the top slot – were released in 2006.

Insert 'pussy' joke here

Our man complains that nothing much worth writing about dropped over the past 12 months. Clueless, for some dopey reason or other, has ignored (or, perhaps, never heard) the thrilling Cross by French DJ-producers Justice, the gorgeous country rock of Rilo Kiley’s Under the Black Light, the way-cool Desire from the way-cool rapper Pharaoh Monche, folk-prog weirdos Voice of the Seven Woods’ compelling self-titled debut…

The list of omissions goes on, and it includes Klaxons’ Myths of the Near Future, the brilliant beats ‘n’ guitars yell-athon that only recently (we’re still in 2007, remember) grabbed the Mercury Music Prize, thereby giving prominence to new rave, the media-constructed scene about which the band couldn’t give a toss.

Their interests are sci-fi and bonkers novelists like Burroughs and Pynchon, not glow sticks and fluorescent clothes.

Hyper-jump to the present day: our man Clueless is, bafflingly, still getting work as a music hack, new rave is as dead as Diana, Princess of Wales, and Klaxons have (finally) turned out their second album after having to re-record parts that the record company deemed too leftfield.

It’s even shoutier than its predecessor – and, yet, it’s less urgent. Many of the lovely subtleties that made Myths so cosmic – the sweep of Two Receivers, Golden Skans’ unforgettable wordless harmonies – are lacking, leaving Surfing the Void less likely to shoot lasers straight into your soul.

That’s not to say it’s a bad album. It’s good; sometime it’s really good.

The band has done away with the more conspicuous dance elements of the past (there’s no cover of a ‘90s house tune as there was before). A traditional rock sound is to the fore, with sprays of synth and a bass assault that sounds like a knackered F1 racing bike being over-revved underwater. (The four-string break on Flashover may lead to an involuntary evacuation of your bowels.)

The opener, Echoes, is typical of the band’s quiet-then-loud approach that includes lots of melody and double-tracked vocals, while The Same Space is a thunderous archetype of the album’s thrashing energy.

Later, Venusia ends with the sound of typewriter, suggesting that the lads are still in the thrall of groovy authors. They’re certainly still geeky for time and space, as is proved by everything from the song titles – Extra Astronomical, Future Memories – to the cover of a cat dressed as an astronaut.

So, while Surfing the Void probably won’t blast you all the way past Alpha Centauri, it’ll definitely take you for a quick jaunt among the meteors of the mesosphere.

To regular punters, he’s the geezer who last year brilliantly remixed La Roux’s In for the Kill into a five-minute slow-burner with a tooth-loosening bass line and a final explosion like a giant party popper filled with needles of ice made from the sweat of a million insane ravers.

Skream - Outside The Box

He takes the same sudden-surge approach, albeit more modestly, on this, his second album, during the standout cut, I Love the Way. That’s followed by the frantic Listenin’ to the Records on My Wall, which could be the soundtrack to a chase between two sentient sports cars from Planet Atari.

Arcade-game farts and hiccups, tightly coiled bass grooves and woozy energy are the signatures of Out of the Box, which sometimes surges forth with barely controlled aggression, while at other times it takes a mellower approach.

But it can never be called laid back; it’s more a chill-out zone for people who sleep with one eye open: the chemically enhanced, the psychologically frazzled, professional killers and the like. It’s also ideal for Saturday night drinkers who want to relax but remain jittery enough to throw measured poses in a high-end boozer.

In short, the album could be called Pacman Swallowed Too Many of Those Yellow Pills and Now His Erratic Heartbeat is Deafening Him.

Where You Should Be is what Daft Punk’s mellow Something About Us would have sounded like if Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter had been born in south London, rather than France.

Elsewhere, La Roux repay a favour by appearing on Finally, which has vocalist Ellie Jackson, she of the delivery like a ‘90s ringtone, sounding sweeter than one might have thought possible.

There are pop moments, there are hip hop moments and there are moments of electronic hooliganism – and, while not every track is a charm, you have to admire Ollie Jones’s attempts to subvert and expand the genre of dubstep while remaining respectful to its sound.

Does my bum look big in this bum?

Ana Matronic, Babydaddy et al may never again achieve such glory or perfection, and we shouldn’t expect them to do so. But we can hope. And we can enjoy the fact that the band are still capable of spraying their fans’ faces with jets of hot, sticky pop – albeit the kind that washes away more easily than the hits of 1994.

Night Life is the Sisters’ third album. It eschews the vaudeville-style romps that blighted its predecessor, Ta-Dah, and sticks to what’s most like to turn on its listeners: a sweaty orgy of disco, glam rock, the classic New York club sound and singer Jake Shears’s single-entendre lyrics. (Harder You Get means exactly what you think it means.)

But just ‘cause the band are filthy/gorgeous, it doesn’t mean they don’t take their work seriously. Night Work nearly didn’t happen. The Sisters shelved the first effort after 18 months of writing and recording because they felt it wasn’t up to snuff. Thankfully, they got back into the studio to create something they insist is “super-sexual and sleazy”.

Dry gussets

In fact, gussets will probably remain mostly dry – although chests and armpits will almost certainly issue forth cascades of sweat caused by dancing to the uber-camp of the title track, Running Out (which seems to allude to that year-and-a-half wasted) and Any Which Way (in which Ana is happy to be knobbed in front of her mum and dad).

The first half has the catchier cuts, but it’s in the second that the band try to surprise with a suite of tracks. Skin This Cat sounds like it could come from the Giorgio Moroder soundtrack of a crime flick circa 1983. Night Life begins and ends with a cacophony of rave whistles, and Invisible Light is the nearest thing the Sisters have to an epic. It enters “the doors of Babylon” and then prowls for six minutes through a fantasy world of “painted whores” and “sexual gladiators” described by Sir Ian McKellen as if he were Vincent Price receiving a perfumed handjob.

Not as cool as Billy Ray (Cyrus)

Since then, North Carolina-born Bobby has collected a few celebrity chums by the looks of things. On this, his first album, he’s joined by – among others – rap superstars Lupe Fiasco and Eminem, Weezer main man Rivers Como, Hayley Williams of US pop-rockers Paramore and vocalist-producer Bruno Mars, who guest stars on the smash hit Nothin’ on You.

Pop Sensibilities

It’s a banging tune, and one that’s typical of the other 12 tracks on B.o.B Presents. The album (which dropped in the US to a rowdy applause of sales) has clear hip-hop credentials – with the emphasis on hip – but there’s also a pop sensibility that’s obvious not only in the choice of collaborators, but also in the compositions and the use/pastiches of Vampire Weekend’s The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance and David Bowie’s Fame.

Down ‘n’ Dirty

It’s a remarkably assured, feel-good performance in the main, with hooks aplenty in the likes of Magic, Past My Shades and Airplanes, as well as some down ‘n’ dirty MCing on Fame and Bet I. Ghost in the Machine and the opener, Don’t Let Me Fall, provide soulful, hands-in-the-air moments.

There are, arguably, three tunes too many (the reprise of Airplanes seems to be for no reason other than to include a certain Marshall Bruce Mathers III), but that’s a small criticism when the whole thing comes in at a little over 50 minutes. That’s short for a lot of hip-hop albums – and this one doesn’t include any of those bloody awful skits that rappers love so much.

TV food geek Heston Blumenthal has a trick by which he turns chocolate into something that looks like water but tastes like a cocoa confection. That’s pretty much what Weller does to other people’s music: he dilutes his beloved soul, R ‘n’ B and psychedelia, and then removes the colour while retaining some flavour of the original. And then he barks platitudes over the top – often while that prick from Ocean Colour Scene noodles away in the background.

Paul 'Stupid Feathery Sideburns' Weller's New Album Stinks

Wake Up the Nation is a hell of a lot more energetic than its predecessor, the nightmarishly soporific 22 Dreams, but that’s the best that can be said of this latest release – that and the fact that it’s a mere 39 minutes long.

Something about his hard cock. Really.

But with 16 tracks crammed into the (mercifully short) running length, nothing lasts for enough time to grab hold of the listener. The Modfather and his muso cronies charge in, chuck around feedback, organ riffs, reverse-looped guitars, wobbly strings and epileptic drumming, and then they leg it.

It’s supposed to be smart and invigorating, but it’s just dizzying and frustrating. There’s barely enough time for the tired lyrics about lovers with long, brown hair, the “death of the post box”, and something about his hard cock. Really.

Chew-yer-fist-in embarrassment

These are the chew-yer-fist-in embarrassment lyrics that prove Weller is redundant. The album’s title track is, one assumes, meant to be the sort of call to action that The Jam made in their earliest days. Alas, the man who as a teenager lustily predicted a “youth explosion” now sounds like a silly old fool as he orders the listener to “get your face out of the Facebook” [sic]. Not even the presence of My Bloody Valentine’s chief noise terrorist, Kevin Shields, provides any élan.

Since he formed The Style Council in ‘83, Weller has flirted with self-parody, and now – at nearly 52 years old – he’s a full-blown caricature of himself, with his beads and his bleached feather-cut and this indulgent mess of an album.

We'll forgive the fact it looks like a Michael Buble album cover

A lot of people who heard Plan B’s previous effort, Who Needs Actions When You Got Words, his 2006 debut, are in for a surprise. Gone are the foul-mouthed raps about junkies, underage sex, urban decay and unprovoked murders, all set to sparse beats and acoustic guitar.

In their place are driving, late-Sixties Detroit sounds and gutsy falsetto vocals – although the grim subject matter remains. The album (and accompanying movie) tells the sale of the eponymous Strickland. Finding himself in a crumbling relationship he goes out for a big night with the lads, gets wrecked, and pulls some lass who falsely accuses him of rape. 

Our man gets sent down, to his horror, and holes up in his cell for fear of having his lungs beaten out through his arse. But he can’t avoid his assailants for ever and ends up killing a fellow inmate in self-defence. Wracked with guilt, he prays for forgiveness, but receives none – so he comes to the conclusion that God is a “made-up, fictional character”.

Young Mr Banks’s journey down throws up musical highlights aplenty. Many wouldn’t have seemed out of place at Wigan Casino back in the day. The Recluse, Traded in My Cigarettes and the single Stay Too Long (surely one the tracks of the year) are banging, with just enough potty-gobbed raps to connect the tracks with their predecessors.

Does Strickland find redemption, embrace liberty and be reconciled with his missus? That remains to be seen; the album ends on a cliffhanger of sorts. It matters little: when the tunes are this good, he could be bummed to death by the nonces in B Wing and we’d still have ourselves a crackin’ platter.

My, that's a big star...

But the Memphis four-piece’s debut is the prettiest. It’s like scented oil on the surface of a sunny lake, shimmering with the summery Sixties sound beloved of front-men Chris Bell and Alex Chilton (who died recently at the age of 59).

Those boys loved The Beatles – and they adored The Kinks, The Beach Boys, The Byrds and oodles of US soul. (As a teenager, the gruff-throated Chilton had been the lead singer of blue-eyed soulsters The Box Tops, who enjoyed a smash with The Letter.) Their influences are apparent in the swoony vocal harmonies of the Ballad of El Goodo and Give Me Another Chance, and in the pealing guitars of the joyous My Life is Right and Feel, which opens the album explosively. There’s even a nod, in The India Song, to George Harrison and his subcontinental spirituality.

But never does the album threaten to be consumed by other artists’ craft, and the best-known track is a simple acoustic one. Thirteen is a heartbreaking (and much-covered) celebration of adolescence, spilling over with teenage desire: “Would you be an outlaw for my love?”. Rolling Stone magazine placed Thirteen at number 396 in its run-down of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

There’s a beautiful melancholy to the number – and there is to much of #1 Record, which also lays on chugging, bluesy riffs. Don’t Lie to Me and In the Street benefit from Bell and Chilton spanking their planks with verve, while When My Baby’s Beside Me has a fabulous call-and-response guitar break complete with a throwaway wah-wah effect.

The final great thing about this ironically titled album (it tanked on first release) is that it can usually be found in CD stores as a double album with Radio City for about a fiver, making it pretty much the finest bargain in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.

Yeasayer album art... Moody.

That’s not to say they don’t adhere (most of the time) to the verse-chorus-verse structure. And they love melodies. Boy, do they love melodies!

They’re very partial to vocal harmonies, too. Odd Blood – the band’s second long-playing outing – is awash with both: beautiful things that provoke recollections like the “fresh cut grass in May” and “making out on an airplane” of I Remember. It’s the musical equivalent of sun-flare in a camera lens.

Electronic tweets and swirls

Not all the album’s tracks are wholly successful, but the majority hit a tender spot of good feeling, with the electronic tweets and swirls, frantic handclaps, squishy beats and lyrics about drinking metal that earn the band its unwarranted ‘experimental’ tag. Well, not entirely unwarranted; the opener, The Children, is straight-weird and you may want to skip it unless you like your patrons to feel discombobulated.

You could let rip with the rest of Odd Blood’s 40, short minutes and expect the question “what the hell is this” to be posed with pleasant curiosity rather than frustrated aggression.

The highlight is O.N.E. It sounds like the ‘80s if the decade had been a more carefree time for music and people. It’s a tune that’s likely to get customers who are a little worse for wear claiming they haven’t heard this for years. Actually, the whole album feels like it’s from about 25 years ago – albeit wearing jeans baggier than were common at that time.

My milkshake is better than yours...

Alas, Lights has received many lukewarm responses, not all of them entirely founded. It fails to dazzle, but it glitters in places. Its main drawback is that it isn’t as assured or sophisticated as the work of singer-songwriters Laura Veirs and Joanna Newsom, both of whom have released critically acclaimed CDs this year.

Pointy Bra-Cone

And it isn’t as substantial or plain catchy as the award-winning pop sounds of Lady GaGa, who knocks Goulding into a pointy bra-cone when it comes to alluring weirdness and having a smashing arse.

What Goulding does do (in spite of lack of a jewelled lobster mask and a high-quality rump) is write sweet, acoustic songs whose themes are mostly variations of “it’s you and me against the world, so let’s rub against each other”. And then the young Briton adds low-cal dance beats and other electro-business that gives the tracks propulsion. They’re further aided by a breathy, wavering voice that’s reminiscent of Icelandic warbler Emiliana Torrini’s.

Listenable and Engaging

It’s these talents that have scored Goulding prizes (though not everyone would say deservedly so) and which will – hopefully – lead to her eclipsing the overhyped (and fearsomely mannish) Florence Welsh (of + The Machine). But she’ll have to stretch herself if she wants to shine long and bright.

That having been said, Lights is an always listenable and sometimes engaging long-player – which makes it an ideal soundtrack to a few polite drinkies on a school night, when the urge to pogo on the furniture must be kept down.