The 2kDozen 500: #333 - Peace, "EP Delicious"

Opening track, "Ocean's Eye", has a big epic feel to it, guitars spiralling out across nebula and funky congas rubbing seductively against snaky bass. But it's only two and a half minutes. What's up with that? Someone's not been reading their epic cosmic rock handbook probably.

It slides on into "Bloodshake", which has some of that Afro-flavoured indie shuffle while keeping the atmospheric Eighties U2 guitar in position.

"Here's one for all the diamonds in the dark/..for the amblers in the gloom" could be the beginning to a great tune, but it becomes about a girl that "tastes like sunlight" or being "born to live". It's called "California Daze", which is probably a pointer to a bit of an imagination vacuum. The same empty moves performed over and over again and printed on the covers of NME over and over again; the undying loop of acting like a rock star should act in order to be a rock star and reinforce the same empty postures.

The final track expands to fill the ten minutes that you might expect of a grander scale, "1998 (Delicious)". But it doesn't really take me anywhere. It probably needs some dub in it, to get me into a spiritual spiral. This just kind of plods. This EP just makes me even more impatient for the Tame Impala album. Dammit!!

A video on YouTube sounds better than the EP. More baggy, in the early Nineties indie dance sense. The video recalls Fools Gold (or was it Made of Stone; I've never really worked out which tune that was shot for) and there are grungey crashes at the start of the choruses. But the lyrics are just about living forever, so No, thanks.

Rating: Tiny Epic out of Tired Vacuum

The 2kDozen 500: #332 - Kanye West, "Good Music Cruel Summer"

This might be a Kanye presents... type joint rather than an album as such, but his chunky chipmunk face is written all over it.

But this is not a classic soul regurgitation with chat about thrones and platinum arse scratchers. Hefty slices of newer sounds buckle the template - "Mercy.1" is squashed with cheap, heavy bass noises and generous helpings of Giorgio Moroder Scarface samples and vocal hooks that sound like Ragga Twins. Sweetly claustrophobic. Nothing that deals in Moroder can ever go wrong. ("You don't just walk into Moroder...")

"I believe there's a God above me/But I'm God of everything else."

"New God Flow.1" rattles and booms in a great many of the right places. "Higher" (featuring Ma$e and Pusha T) sounds like a Flight of the Conchords pastiche of itself, vocals pitched so high they look down on parody. John Legend crops up on "Sin City", as do a lot of dodgy rhymes with "-city" at the end. All the action takes place over Miami Vice synth stabs and an almost motionless bassline. So a bit like being in GTA San Andreas.

Plain gloopy is "The One", slow, saccharine Auto-Tuned bilge. A sampled "One" from Public Enemy Number 1 rips and bares its teeth over and over, showing up the standing-up-off-the-bar-stool sludge that is going on atop it. "Don't Like.1" sees Kanye compares himself to both Christ and Michael Jackson, which is nice. And the sky rains with the n-word until I can't tell where the clouds stop and the brainfilth begins.

Kanye's out of touch, but not in a cool Roky Ericksen kind of way. My bad vibes towards his bland grandiose wealthiness continue.

Rating: Baller Dreams out of San Andreas

The 2kDozen 500: #331 - Field Music Warm Digits, "BBC Radio 3 Late Junction Session EP"

This was the shit I was after before! I must have overlooked it.

Field Music have already knocked out one of the albums of my year. At least one of the top 300. (I kid. "Plumb" is ace and I'd love to see it win the Mercury Prize.) So I'm expecting steepling melodies, clever time signature changes and some classy, warm motherboards lending their support. A touch of Northern wit too perhaps.

"Snow Watch" has a really nice unfestive, warped feel to it. Wintry psychedelia with pianos floating in the cold air and every instrument treated to within an inch of its very existence, spilling out from that inch and discolouring the space around it. "Higgs" shakes a funky chunk or two. But there isn't the swoop, the delicateness I'd hope for. I'd hoped for a brittle contrast between the Brewis Brothers swerving pop sensibility and the more geological instincts of The Digits. Instead, they meet somewhere less exciting in the middle.

There's a fractured early-Pink Floyd feel to the guitar on "Elements of the Sun" and "Travelodge Blues" opens with a typical Brewis set of progressions, choppy and purposeful. (The title I also like.) But it's not the cross-germination I was hoping for.

Even by my own obtuse standards I'm not sure what I'm getting at here.

Rating: Pop Geology out of Northern Souls

The 2kDozen 500: #330 - Warm Digits, "Keep Warm ... with The Warm Digits"

Saw that there was a collaboration between these guys and Field Music, which I thought needed to be heard. However, it didn't seem to be available, so I moved in this direction instead. Backwards in time to 2011.

I'd heard a couple of tracks before and had formed the impression of a friendlier Add (N) to X - vintage synths buzzing away while a live drum kit keeps things on their toes. Or something. "Warm Welcome" is the opening half-track, which is bursting with positivist scientific bubbling noises and happy feelings. No robots having sex with cartoon women anyway. "Trans Pennine Express" starts with a steam locomotive like grind, slowly picking up momentum - as though Kraftwerk had started in Darlington.

The pace continues, picking up a cowbell en route by the time of "Weapons Destruction", the electronic pulse now giving it a Holy Fuck momentum. It's quite musicianly, I hear jamming in the past. Chances are there is hair. Although the band are from different spots in the North, so that might not happen too often. Handclaps appear in "Grapefruit", slightly phased perhaps, which gives the track a woozy tang. Like off of a grapefruit.

"The Surplus of Seeing" is a bit more swampy and Quatermassy. Noises like pots and pans. "A Warm Front, Coming from the North" is back in the Kraftwerk space again, fanfares and metronomes. The stately progression of the Shipping Forecast, everything in its place. The slightest hint of a kids' drama series from the early Eighties.

The last track "Here Come the Warm Digits" seems such an Eno tribute that I suspect the band name was struck with this title in mind. There's something so gentle and un-rock'n'roll about the sound of Warm Digits; it gets me thinking about lab technicians and Rich Tea biscuits and afternoons. It's music for afternoons. This may be doing the pair a huge disservice. They may well consume half a Colombian hillside of recreational powders before breakfast and brush their teeth with lysergic-infused Jack Daniels. But somehow I suspect not. We need music in the afternoons most of all - to soundtrack staring out the window and wishing work was over.

Rating: Friendly Vintage Buzz out of Cups Of Tea

The 2kDozen 500: #329 - Efterklang, "Piramida"

This was another album I had to have on in the background while I was doing other things with my mind and fingers yesterday.

The most persistent thoughts I had while listening were COLDPLAY and A-HA. Maybe it was the Nordic twinge in the vocals, seeing as these boys are from the Denmark, that got the Morten sensors activated. But there's something about the structures that suggest a more laid-back Coldplay. His voice is of a very similar pitch but there isn't the cloying bombast.

The music chimes tastefully throughout. It has a classical jazzy shuffle of sorts; "The Ghost" in particular mixes the soft-brushed drums, avian guitar lines, warm brass and the musicianly air in a satisfying way. I read in the NME that there aren't enough choruses, which I can understand. It's quite a lateral album. "Black Summer" wanders too far into the detective soundtrack territory - a great many notes hanging in the air. Suspension in musical aspic.

I like it more when he sounds like Morten and less when he sounds like Chris Martin. I also read the description "adult pop", and I'm not sure about that. Is it the idea that it's adult in the sense that all the explosive, effervescent joy had burnt away and the shapes left behind in the dying light somehow represent adulthood. The sober surveying of the leftovers. I don't think I agree. (I don't think I agree with the idea I just made up myself based on reading two words.) But this album could fit that description: shapes made music that were left behind in the absence.

"Between the walls/I'm a werewolf"

Rating: Subtracting Bombast out of Coldplay

The 2kDozen 500: #328 - Wild Nothing, "Gemini"

And on to the debut album. Named for one of the more irritating signs of the zodiac and with an appropriately weird, double face made of photos of two women on the cover.

The introduction is so Johnny Marr, it's bordering on the hilarious. I imagine an updated version of Hank Marvin striding across some Stretford pavement, Rickenbacher in hand - all the way from Virigina. "I'd rather live in dreams/Than I'd rather die," he says, vocals a bit higher up the mix than the later albums. "Summer Holiday" has some full-on shoegaze background "aaah"'s that could've been cut out of a Ride record. After three albums full, I'm still not getting tired of the sound.

"Drifter" even cracks open a couple of Peter Hook bass solos. Blissfully Eighties alternative, this stuff; so many boxes touched and bases ticked. Sigh. How many albums would carry a title like "O Lilac" with s straight face? Maybe Jack Tatum isn't either. Even when the drum patterns get a bit ironically Hi-NRG on "Bored Games", it's still about slurred lyrics and gaseous melodies. "Where are you going?/Can I come with you?" "Chinatown" is a bit livelier too, but Jack still sounds largely unmoved.

How long might have gone within hearing these albums?

Rating: Three out of Three

The 2kDozen 500: #327 - Wild Nothing, "Golden Haze EP"

So, having enjoyed Nocturne I decided to stay my hand as Spotify scrolled back through two albums from 2010. The flow from one to the next was pretty seamless on first listen. A touch of drum machine that was less strict on this year's album. But the guitar lines are identically sweet. It gives it a bit of a New Order touch at times, especially with the keyboard stabs on "Take Me In".

"Your Rabbit Feet" sounds like a Smiths tune that has been pulled inside out. Even the lyrics have caught a touch of the same debilitated fever. "It was the hungriest night I ever knew/I was so hungry for you...What do you want to know/I'll take you anything!" Some low-level, near-inaudible muttering sees me off the premises as the shoegaze riff fades into nothing. "Vultures Like Lovers" has some sturdier teeth under the candy floss.

Reviving memories of times when indie meant something more than feather cuts and designer anoraks.

Rating: Drum Machine Drifts out of Indie Manufactory