Stuart Berman

The UK band follows its 2005 Edwyn Collins-produced breakthrough The New Fellas with a major-label debut helmed by Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos and mixed by alt-rock heavyweight Andy Wallace-- and it features perhaps the unlikeliest indie-celeb cameo since Laetitia Sadier showed up on a Common album.

The living legend follows 2005's mostly acoustic Chaos and Creation in the Backyard-- a retreat to homespun simplicity-- with a Starbucks-issued record that turns out to be a lot more idiosyncratic than its coffee-chain marketing plan suggests.

Like so many debuts, Hats Off to the Buskers is ultimately a document of a band searching for their own voice in those of others.

As evolutions go, Ode to Ochrasy makes for a particularly awkward adolescent phase, the sound of a band that is outgrowing their loud-fast-rules roots but still too timid to sever them completely.

In contrast to 1991’s other art-of-noise masterwork—My Bloody Valentine’s transcendental Loveless—Yerself Is Steam is an unrelentingly visceral experience that you feel not just in your blown-out eardrums, but in your accelerating heart and butterfly-filled stomach, reminding you that joy and panic often present themselves with the same symptoms.

My War may have been designed as a repellent response to a very specific set of circumstances and setbacks, but it remains a failsafe battle plan for fighting whatever war is raging inside your own head.

Thanks to four decades of advances in synthesizer technology and the album’s legion of imitators, No. 1 in Heaven may no longer represent the sound of the future—but its techtopian pop still feels like the future you wish you were living in now.