As a whole, The Deep Field nails it. True, the songs are long, it is almost ceaselessly rich, and you're going to want to skip its first 30 seconds every time.

One of Metheny's best releases in recent times.

As it happens, most of these songs are rockers, and even the ballads possess a toughened core of energy.

Malo is busy carving out the new genre of sincere south-of-the-border melodrama. It's all delivered within a classic 40 minute album length. The perfect pop punch.

Quite who Harlem can hope to appeal to, in the UK at least, when music fans here are evidently besotted with sci-fi nonsense one minute and cleverly articulated kitchen-sink dramas the next is anyone's guess. Best to quit the questioning, though, and get down with the rollicking jams they're kicking out regardless of how many people are listening.

Oregon rock alchemists create soundworlds that one can be effortlessly immersed in.

She's not displaying much in the way of stylistic evolution, but it's not exactly certain whether this is a negative factor. As ever, raging raw emotion shouts out of Niblett's gullet, whilst sludge-chords resound from her low-hung axe, following the Nirvana (and thence PJ Harvey) school of quiet-then-loud, loud-then-quiet, but nevertheless imposing her own unpredictabilities on this dynamic.

Daybreaker is a great album. It'll go down as one of Architects' finest works.

Every Step's a Yes is a worthy partner to [Best Coast, Beach House and Wild Nothing's] records.

Despite the bounty of overdubs, however, there’s little self-indulgence to There Is No Enemy; Martsch’s overloaded approach might scream ‘prog’, but he also possesses a perfectly-disciplined, ‘pop’ songwriting sensibility, with every lengthy instrumental coda married to contagious choruses and melodic barbs that lodge in the mind.

It's a bewitching album that gives pause for thought throughout.

The album unfurls at a leisurely pace, the band's characteristic blend of burbling electronica and acoustic instrumentation at its most formidable, and most satisfying, yet.

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

Civilian pushes Wye Oak to the head of the nu-shoegaze pack with a record as blissed out as it is maudlin, as rootsy and tough as it is fey and introspective.

But when he's in his element – ruling over frenetic beats with rhymes that cut right to the bone – it's clear that Yelawolf's star is sure to shine for the foreseeable.

It’s an album whose ingenuous, often nakedly honest songwriting offers an emotional fist gloved in arrangements of seductive velvet.

If you thought him too weird for your tastes previously, Tha Carter IV is the album to introduce you to the never boring world of an artist whose importance remains so significant that, should he finally collapse like the star he is, he's likely to take half the rap game with him.

The album only really reaches the heights Bush has set for herself when she appears centre stage.

Claudia's timbres, eerie and winsome in equal measure, prove its greatest strong point. The combination of clarinet, accordion and vibraphone fashions an electric whistle and whir that squares the circle between 90s indie science frictioners Stereolab and 60s proto-proggers Soft Machine, making it clear that Claudia is a jazz group questioning the divide between genres and points in time.

Fall to Grace is proof that pop doesn't need to be grey and restrained to feel grown-up.

Thompson’s classic folk rock formula is revived once more, and his frequent guitar solos are as sour as his lyrical wit.

Though The Witmark Demos' contents may occasionally be unkempt, the same cannot be said for its trappings. As with all Dylan Bootleg Series releases, it is beautifully and thoughtfully packaged and annotated.

It's a real treat, so be sure to commit that title to memory should you be passing an emporium of musical delights anytime soon.

Few records in 2010 will contain songs quite so mind-bogglingly broad, playful, beguilingly pretty and intense as these slowly unfurling ensemble pieces.

Instead of shadowing the pack, this album puts them right up the front.

WIXIW is an unqualified success and, now that LCD are no longer with us, its makers are truly are in a field of their own.

It's a beautiful end to a touching, tragic album.

What remains is a nocturnal set of refined resonance.