This music declares war: face-punching, heart-stomping, no-holds-barred conflict for your ears and mind. It's an all-out assault on pop culture and its worldly accessories.

Almost everything is tight and controlled, returning time and again to the simple power of a pop song.

If anyone asks how Heroes differs from the 65 Willie Nelson studio albums that preceded it, the happy answer is: not much. The expressive, intimate tenor, the matchless musical instinct and Willie's distinctive ringing guitar lines are just as compelling, and just as delightful, as ever.

You'll wish you'd been there. You'll wish it would never end.

It's camp, but it's shadowy. It's epic, but it's introvert. It's highly peculiar, yet hugely commercial. It's one big, beautiful oxymoron.

ECM may have its detractors, but they've given us an unexpected gem here and maybe one of the jazz records of the year so far.

A little of this niggling frustration sticks, but for the most part Exister subsequently reveals itself as a more positive, uplifting record than its predecessors, adding something new to the band's eight-strong studio album canon.

Once more they've turned sludge, slime and slurry into heavy metal gold.

It's remarkable how purist a reenactment of three-decades-old LA hardcore this record is.

Wonderful stuff.

There's the occasional meander and they'd surely revel in a bigger production budget, but there's nobody remotely like them and few who seem to actually enjoy being in a band more.

One of 'dance'-in-2012's very best albums.

Adventures in Your Own Backyard is a frankly exquisite, elegantly crafted gem.

It's not groundbreaking, and it's not that interesting.

For a listener who's only been aware of Mraz by reputation, this is no instant-fix point of entry. It relies on past experiences, knowledge of what the artist is capable of rather than anything he delivers with consistency across these 12 songs.

SMD lovers will have to content themselves with a deep, well-crafted dance manifesto by two talented producers.

A few surprisingly wishy-washy string-synths aside, it is, as always, hugely impressive but disappointingly cold and forbidding.

Despite occasional lapses into overproduced mess, the surprise here is their enthusiasm.

You could argue that A Joyful Noise is the album Madonna should be brave enough to make. But it might also be the case that it's the album that Gossip should have been brave enough not to.

It's better to simply view this opus as a beautifully deconstructed blues that's equally effective as a paean to careworn Americana or as a sparsely-drawn exercise in restraint, meditation and composure.

His second EP after a Young Turks-released four-tracker of 2010, does a lot with little: three tracks contain vocals, but each hits a sweet spot with incredible accuracy, doing in a few minutes what some bands take an album to deliver.

The scattered approach showcased on this set needs polish and original thought to develop.

Without compromising their artistic vision one iota, Sweet Billy Pilgrim have gone from black-and-white art-house to breathtaking widescreen, and the results are quite simply glorious.

Once you manage to pull away from Bloom's magnified scenery and consider the record as a whole it's difficult to think of it as anything other than its makers' best work so far.

Best Coast still sound like Best Coast, but now they're tidier, shinier and looking us right in the eye.

This thoroughly enjoyable release does include one surprising blast of brass.

Torche have always been a good band and sometimes even a great one, but with Harmonicraft they've found the songs to match their extraordinary sound.

This is an album worth living and breathing to at least attempt to become acquainted with its wealth of emotional nuances and playful eccentricities.