WHAT is it now, 14 years, something like that, since Oasis first emerged to become The Saviours Of British Rock & RollTM?

That's 14 years we've spent being told by seemingly everyone - not least the band themselves - that Oasis were the new Beatles and the new Sex Pistols rolled into one, and 14 years I've spent being profoundly unmoved by every successive single and album release.

I keep thinking that someday, inevitably, I'll be rocked on my heels by an Oasis record, given that Noel Gallagher's listening tastes tend to be completely on the money. Well, that day isn't today either, I'm afraid. The Shock Of The Lightning (Big Brother) is, need you ask, yet more of the same. That bullish bluster and pathological avoidance of dynamics doesn't become any more palatable over time: and on the B-side, the band's long-term partners in drear, The Chemical Brothers, signally fail to psych up Dig Out Your Soul.

Way back when, Travis first made a name for themselves as an Oasis support band, then experienced a brief period of adulation before falling from grace for being too innocuous and decent by half - quite apart from having to shoulder the blame for inadvertently siring any number of Coldplays and Snow Patrols.

Their new single, Something Anything (Red Telephone Box), sees them consigning to landfill the melodious angst which was their peak period stock-in-trade for a beefier construction similar to the kind of thing they were doing on their debut album. I can't say it's the most memorable song I've ever heard, but it is at least extremely concise, and I genuinely wish them well. They've been unfairly pilloried over the years if you ask me, beside which Fran Healey really has one of the most affecting voices to have figured in the charts in recent times. Besides, he seems like a sweet bloke into the bargain, which always wins prizes round our way.

Speaking as we parenthetically were of Snow Patrol, they too are returning with Take Back The City (Fiction/Polydor): urgent, sleekly impressive but difficult to love, rather overstaying its welcome at four minutes and 16 seconds but again, commendably avoiding going down the lighters-aloft route which one suspects would have been the softer and more lucrative option.

Hooray for Sigur Rós bringing the Icelandic language to our keen attention with Inni Mér Syngur Vitleysingur (EMI). What a shame record shops don't exist anymore, otherwise I'd be urging you all to get shatteringly, pant-threateningly drunk then go out and ask for this by name.

In a sense, Sigur Rós are becoming more user-friendly now - at least they don't sing in an invented language anymore - and their trademark emotive sprightliness appears to be in fine fettle. Hardcore fans - apt terminology, as you will soon discover - can access www.sigurros.com for a special deluxe edition of the band's new album which will include a unique strip of 16mm film from the Gobbledigook video shoot, "perhaps beautiful shots of genitalia swinging around." They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder - but in this instance I really hope it isn't, for your sake.

Ah, now, if you were thinking that they don't make pop groups as intelligent and awkwardly-shaped as Sparks or Sailor anymore, treat yourself to a listen to Book of Lies (Tiny Dog) by Somerset odd fish Flipron, who I've exalted at interminable length on this page on previous occasions and who will doubtless get the same treatment again in the very near future when their new album is released.

Book Of Lies will do nicely in the meantime, with its slack-key Hawaiian guitar and 40s girlie backing vocals: not necessarily the first elements that would spring to mind if one was asked to enumerate the ingredients of a guaranteed hit single.

Lovely Joan As Police Woman is needless to say as captivating as a big-game huntress armed with a hypno-pendant on the swaying, weightless and all-too-brief Holiday (Reveal), while Milosh appears to be chasing the same chimerical crown on the insular, chattering and wintry electronica of the Remember The Good Things EP (!K7).

Reset To Zero (De Angelis) by strangely-spelled UK arriviste Anthoney Wright is far better than you would have any right to expect: the ideal artefact for a populace hungry for more of that retro-inflected but decidedly contemporary soul that Amy Winehouse invented the market for before her messy ongoing abdication. (Get well soon - please.) Finally, I solemnly promised I'd listen to the next two singles despite the certain prospect of my finer feelings taking a mighty buffeting. Last Goodbye (Island) by Avenue is not, alas, a cover of the Jeff Buckley song but is in fact the debut single by a 21st century boyband. Come now, if I liked it there would be something badly wrong with me and I would fully expect to be followed in the street and coshed by vigilantes, so it's just as well that I didn't like it - even if it didn't quite make me cough up my entire intestinal tract in one sitting as I expected it would.

Meanwhile, It's Summertime (Gut) by Fugative is just horrible, bringing out the harrumphing old gout-ridden retired colonel in me with that ghastly spelling of "fugitive" as well as being thrown together entirely from woefully flimsy hip-hop fillips. Fugative is only 14 years old, so there's always the chance that he might grow out of this crud by the time he's 15...