A third album of stentorian, second-person stories about how the singer/you kind of ruined your/his life by being sort of neurotic about some vaguely sexual but non-specific thing. Jagged tremelo guitars and a pervasive sense of Donnie Darko anomie throughout, as per. The boys still like trying on Black Francis' giant underpants and Kim Deal's bra, then sneaking out at midnight in the hope of snogging Joy Division. And you still wouldn't want to be Paul Banks' significant other, if only to avoid an aural assault with lyrics so obtrusively idiotic and similes so ridiculous they'd give even the likes of Noel Gallagher pause for thought (how does one "wear shoes like a dove"?) But despite it all, every time I listen to you, Interpol, I want you loud and on repeat. You moody, irresistible cads.

This is a huge book with so many characters that it has (and needs) an index, with no plot and no narrative trajectory worth speaking of, a book which witters autistically- for page after page- about the furniture, staircases or food in one apartment building, and which is French to the core, from its characters, through its lapses into pretentiousness, to its assumption that Paris is the centre of both the known and the unknown world. Any one of the above reasons is probably enough to a) make most people hate it without ever picking it up, and b) ensure that it would never escape the slush pile in today's aggressively vulgarian publishing industry. But overlong sentence 1 + a) + b) makes Perec's monomaniacal labour of love even more special to me, and potentially to anyone else who has a place in their life for a unique, kaleidoscopic book driven by the idea that everything, everywhere and everyone in the world might have a story worth recording.

Although the setting and characters are different, and it's nearly twenty years older, I'm tempted to cut and paste from the Georges Perec write-up. There's the same willingness to pay more attention to furniture than to people, the same determined denial of catharsis and plot, and the same occasionally stifling atmosphere of froggy affectation. It also shares with Interpol an archly stylised but elegaic evocation of a milieu where everyone is beautiful but hollow, their coolness a mask for the void within. People in formal dress participate listlessly in pointless intrigues in baroque mirrored rooms, or try adultery on for size with abortive fumbles in the Italianate gardens. It's a beautifully shot Rorschach inkblot of a film. You could draw almost any conclusion or rationalisation you like from it, and it's unlikely you could be proved wrong. You could scrutinise every image and every utterance for meaning, or regard the whole film as little more than a repetitive screensaver with subtitles. Very few films made before or since have offered such a mesmerising mirror for reflecting the individual viewer.

Folktronica is a pretty-sounding word but the concept seems like a potentially ugly hybrid until you just step back, take a deep breath and realise that all it means is technology humbly and subtly serving a traditional dedication to the craft of good songwriting. Anybody who wants to rock is barking up the wrong Wicker Man, but tracks like 'Bullets' swing and stomp like a lock-in at a scary/cool rural pub, applying a quintessentially British jolliness to lyrics about funerals and being shot in the back. With all the rain and grey skies in the UK right now, 'Good Arrows' is the perversely perfect (or perfectly perverse) soundtrack to an equally unusual summer.

The Richard D. James fingerprints are all over it: the slightly suggestive pseudonym, the cryptic, borderline dyslexic titles, the Cornish references and above all the unmistakeable musical complexity of either James himself or someone who's stolen his brain and/or laptop. Whether it really is a stealth Aphex Twin album or not, it's one of the most accessible and thrilling things he's done for years. Or the most accessible and thrilling Aphexesque thing somebody else has done... It's too complex for clubbers, but it would still be nice to hear this out somewhere. Maybe in the middle of some Cornish moor, where nobody but the sheep could see you trying to dance to it and looking like you have a degenerative illness.

Ignore the prominent cover encomium; all 'The Host' has in common with Spielberg's big budget brain-relaxers is humans being demoted down the food chain when nature turns ugly. In this case, the American military dumping toxic waste into Seoul's waterways creates a huge and hungry mutant, but as great as the monster is it's almost beside the point. There are fewer disgusting moments than you'd expect from the average nature documentary. The real heart of the film is the Park family, who lose their daughter during one of the monster's first attacks only to discover that she's been carried off alive for later consumption. When bureaucracy and international politics get in the way of retrieving her, the family sets off on a realistically botched and amateurish attempt of their own. Some people will be unsettled by the way it veers wildly from sly satire to deadly serious to falling-on-the-floor slapstick, sometimes within the same scene, but unpredictability is a rare commodity in films these days.

Not really a band (and not really a very good name for one, either), more of a pseudonym for Natasha Khan, who takes the kind of subject matter you'd expect to find doodled on the exercise books of a suburban 13 year old girl- horses, troubled girlfriends, wizards- and gives it an appealingly creepy Laura Palmer twist. 'Fur and Gold' is also a rarity in the age of the download; a cohesive album in which every song is distinct and not just more of the same. Although if you're not into Hammer Horror dulcimers, antiquated keyboard sounds and outbreaks of vaguely demented, heavily reverbed Shangri-La vocals you may want to give it a miss since they're the sonic signatures of the work as a whole. Very British, very gloomy, very feminine, very good.