On its own terms, it's a lean, mean success – and questions about longevity can probably wait until the follow-up.

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

Such lofty posturing could have easily ended up sounding like the ill-informed scribblings of a sixth-form politics student, but H-p1 is more about mood, feel and texture than lyrical conceit.

Between the bounce of the lighter numbers and the ache of the sweet ones, there's all manner of winningly realistic insights veiled underneath the music. This debut is a joy from beginning to end.

The players here use that joyful experience to forge exciting new traditions.

Take a finger to your fast-forward button, however, and without Jones' handful of mediocre performances, Rome breezes past with all the tinkling, indefinable intent of a lost Michel Gondry film score.

Florence, Santigold and the usually brilliant Danny Brown do little more than tick boxes, and ultimately Long.Live.A$AP fails to match its hype with a coherent trend-setting statement.

They’ll soon become enraptured by what accompanies these highest-of-profile pieces: music that embraces the listener with a silken touch and seduces them with a beguiling beauty that, still, sits prettily beyond the clamour of convenient categorisation.

This should have been a fiery celebration of three decades of waving the ragged punk rock banner; instead, it's a laurel-resting plodder.

GEM is far from a masterpiece, but it's the work of an intriguing young artist still shaping a distinctive voice. It's hard to know if the pleasure is in listening to it, or imagining where she might go next.

Essentially, this is some of the most consistent songwriting to come from Australia since the loss of The Go-Betweens, and some of the most arcane performing available anywhere outside of Arcade Fire.

White Rabbits concoct something both contemporary, cultish and catchy as a cod net.

She's full of vim and vigour, mixing tender character studies with doe-eyed love songs and impassioned protest pieces.

The group's melding together of dance music, metal riffs, punk energy and vocals that sound English rather than Californian make A Flash Flood of Colour not only a compelling effort, but an appropriately named one to boot.

More serious but still jittery, and not without detritus, this is the album that will decide the longevity of Los Campesinos!.

Unfortunately, most of 20/20 falls into a rut; it sets the mood, but then fails to create tension.

He knows great stories can be found in even the smallest moment, and that is something worth cherishing.

The sequencing seems illogical on first listen, but someone as dab-handed as Ward surely intended this, and the rollercoaster becomes easier to digest with each listen.

Meat + Bone operates with the same lean, restless energy JSBX always display in concert: at their best, no band sounds this alive, unable to sit still for a second.

It's tastefully done, and possesses many hidden textures and contours; the more you get of it, the more you like it.

For any bootlegging rappers with cerebral ambitions, this could represent the greatest thinking man's beat tape of all time. To mere listeners, it's an enveloping temporary distraction, more than fulfilling its purpose of whetting anticipation for El-P's mic-wielding return.

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.

This is a pop dance album par excellence bristling with positivity, tunes and ideas.

101 blends the quirky, the audacious and the touching to confident effect, emerging as a fine listen for all seasons.

The performances are terrific, and although the songs are from the more obscure end of the Western Swing repertoire, with the exception of Corrine Corrina and Right or Wrong, it’s an excellent introduction to this music--a delightful blend of country, swing and jazz.

It's not an album fans of Prekop's signature drowsy vocals and woozy choruses are going to warm to instantly. Not that it's entirely unapproachable--far from it, there are luminous passages and lulling, almost cartoonish refrains to be found among the synthetic scree--merely unexpected.

If there's a weakness here, it's in the lack of variety to Smalhans' structures and sounds, the emphasis on arpeggios and keyboard lines that arc ever higher.

As a standalone listen this is an interesting development of the stylistic restlessness that's driven Rose's progress so far.