Even though the initial delight wears off relatively quickly, this is still a weird and largely wonderful insight into a band equally capable of frustration as they are innovation.

Aside from the hype, this album is by no means a feasible breakthrough into the mainstream--there's not stride enough for that. But when it's at its best, it's boundary-breaking.

The core elements are so big, like blasts of pure plasmic energy, that it sounds planet-sized.

Captured here, however, the band is still full of the future, and as fascinating and beguiling as such things always are.

Shorter is firmly at the helm, yet benevolent enough to play the background when needed. The rhythm has taken him far.

Bedouin Soundclash's fourth album bristles and fizzes with elegantly understated passion and deadpan punky fury, as the group pursue their muse to various ends of the musical Earth.

She's refining her songwriting into an individualist composite of myriad genres, crafting works which resonate with her own personality. It's clear that she's no dilettante, and that her understanding of rock'n'roll, gospel, folk, country and rockabilly has a profound depth.

The man's bid for a place in the pantheon of gifted and fascinating greats is still on course.

Rise Ye Sunken Ships is the embodiment of that thought – the phoenix rising from the flames, scarred yet triumphant, sad and solemn but alive.

A rich debut (but brief at seven tracks) that sums up all that is beautiful and base in both music-making and love-making, Native Speaker consumes you like those lost hours spent locked away in a bedroom with a new lover.

A personal, private fourth LP from the Philadelphia native and select pals.

She's created a sound that's gritty and determined to avoid clichés.

Where special guests don't feature, Vieux Farka shows off his own playing on songs that often follow the same formula: starting with a burst of stuttering guitar work before easing into relaxed, rolling riffs and chanting vocals. His father would have approved.

If there is nothing here as instantly transfixing as some of her past work, Sun comes alive on closer listening, revealing myriad depths and unexpected vocal turns.

Ultimately, God is less in the details, here, and Lonesome Dreams' success lies largely in the irrefutably vaulting sweep of the music and the ineffable air of melancholy-dented redemption which it so effectively conjures.

It suits him well, and he knows it.

Alessi's Ark carries its ideas two-by-two, sails well above the current flood of increasingly desperate folk wannabes, and weaves a modest magic that is hard to pinpoint, yet even harder to resist. If Time Travel isn't quite a classic, it does enough to suggest that this 20-year-old has one in her Davy Jones' Locker.

Free from grandly theatrical flourishes that were threatening to become things of creative captivity, ¡Uno!'s graceful manoeuvres confirm Green Day's status as one of the world's finest rock'n'roll bands.

Strange, hypnotic and utterly transcendental.... Om's teachings have always been less about finding a goal than the overwhelming richness of the journey, and, with Advaitic Songs that journey is more glorious and all-consuming than ever before.

Although Mind Bokeh can be expected to be a wilfully eclectic pick'n'mix affair, what he's actually going to pull out the bag can still surprise.

Electra Heart manages to balance the ironic and the heartfelt, the quirky and the mainstream, the real and the fake with remarkable aplomb.

Cohen is clearly making the music he wants in the way he wants, but Milk Maid are releasing it into a world containing countless similar items old and new. [That have been influenced by 90's American lo-fi]. This needn't necessarily matter, but for many might mean the difference between a diverting record and an essential one.

For all of the fine craft on display, there's little obvious emotion. No matter, though, as there's room for everyone, and this makes for ideal driving music and it should sound sensational in a club.

Predictably but not to its detriment, Signed and Sealed in Blood delivers a mix of rousing rock songs and enough jigs and whistles to get a singsong going at one of their famous St Patrick's Day shows.

Once you strip away all this nonsense, The Chapman Family's music is thunderous and well produced.

Ahmed has pulled together a supporting cast with sufficient cutting edge that it comparatively endangers the razorblade impact of his original compositions.

This might not be the most forward-thinking LP you'll hear this year. But the emotion and honesty on display are qualities that will never go out of style.

As morose meditations on the miseries of fame go, it comes across like a rap version of Woody Allen's Stardust Memories or Deconstructing Harry.