On Mala he certainly could have done himself some favours by trimming away some lesser moments (particularly the pointless minute long “Mala” or “A Gain”) but there’s certainly a sense that’s he gradually becoming more efficient with his song writing.

ENERGY most certainly has more highlights than it does disappointing moments, and it marks a change in sound that the couple are moving towards – albeit slowly. We can still hear elements of Settle, but increasingly less so.

Repeated listens, indeed, prove it to be a perfectly serviceable, enjoyable offering. But there’s always that nagging feeling, once the DJ has packed up the gear and the dancefloor empties, that there could have been something more.

Wild Pink’s third full length sees them at their most fluent, achieving a compositional and performative apex.

When they really let themselves down is on the sappiest songs.

So much of Still Living is lost to completely monotonous-sounding songs, and while they are mixed impeccably and follow a certain rhythm, it's hard to get through the entire album in one sitting.

The record touches on new tonal and structural territories, however incremental, while maneuvering within the same basic framework laid out in Ital's debut.

Arrangements shows the band as a whole accessing a new sense of purpose and creative liberation, planting another flag in the crowded postpunk landscape.

Maturity and perspective are offered up at every moment of Which Way To Happy.

Voyageur is a very fine record and only a couple of songs short of a great one, with Edwards' vocals and songs plus the warm-yet-crisp production being the main attractions.

It’s a modest debut, and that’s the highest praise as O’Connell could ask for with an album this timid.

While Tender New Signs may not point you in any dramatically different directions than their debut did, it certainly displays a growing maturity in both Tamaryn and Shelverton.

With snappier sounds and clearer EQs, the tracks on BlackenedWhite sound much crisper than anything on Goblin – a record that sounded too muddy for its own good.

All in all, Nothing's Gonna Change The Way You Feel About Me Now is a good record, but it's not success it could have been as the songs are not as strong as one would have hoped.

Girlpool have finally escaped the contours of twee indie rock with their fourth album. It’s not your typical evolution; this record has always existed for Girlpool — they just had to begin to find themselves first. Forgiveness is a riveting glimpse into that ongoing process.

The triumph of Heady Fwends lies the way it sands off the rough edges off 2011's excess and whittles an honest, enjoyable set out of the mire while coaxing a wealth of unexpected voices into the fray without losing its way.

It manages to take inspiration from a grab bag of styles and still create an unified, singular end-product. Earnest and unburdened, Time Bend is a staggeringly bold statement for a debut album. It would, indeed, seem as though we have not seen anything yet.

It plays to their strengths in most places and often challenges them to retain the will to be original and innovative in their established modus.

Guitars jangle, piano keys ripple like they've been recorded from a jaunty saloon session while vocals harmonise and lift the spirit of everything around.

Venus finds Larsson serving energy and vulnerability in equal measure, however, still giving the listener an uneven experience when it comes to song choices and sequencing.

The National Health is not a poor effort, it's just woefully undistinguished.

Most of the takes on Songs From Isolation are engaging, if not provocative alternatives to the originals. Some are less successful, even if they constitute an ambitious undertaking. It might have been worthwhile if Williams had picked at least a couple of tunes more essentially divergent from her own style and energy.

Blouse are a promising, if yet to be fully realized, project.

Metronomy’s Small World shows us exactly what it’s like to take it easy but still deliver have a rewarding experience.

It may be a sprawling, jumbled mess, but if Goblin's primary reason for being is to further convince us just how completely nuts Tyler actually is, then I'd say it's a success.

The band delivered a tight album with hardly any missteps. It might not have been worth the seven year wait, but it's a really enjoyable album nonetheless.

While Fantasy is not a perfect return by any means, it’s a return that makes you remember M83’s power to combat the static void at the core of many of us. In place of that void, listeners are filled with the feeling that they’re part of something bigger and freed — free to fall in love with dreaming again.

The End of Silence is a serious statement that can bring the harshness of war to your ears and occasionally make you rethink how casually you consume the news. It’s by no means an easy album to wander through, but I doubt it was ever Herbert’s intention to make this “easy listening” in any conventional sense of the term.

Though it may take some time to grow accustomed to, this is a record you'll want to wrap yourself up in.

If the album in its entirety feels open-ended, well, that's because it is, but by any measure Family Perfume is a pleasantly disarming ride, loaded with great, barely noticeable moments.

Benny’s production work at times does a disservice to the material but, for the most part, Voyage is a welcome addition to the ABBA canon.

Corners are filled and silences left for dramatic effect. Sometimes the effect saturates, leaving certain numbers in the shadows of the grandest moments. .... However, some of the best moments come when Taylor sets aside the strings and choir, putting the focus on a driving beat.

It may have taken him a few tries but through Mary's Voice, Koster has finally found his own.

While shame is less ecstatic than its predecessor, it certainly doesn’t find the duo of Megan Markwick and Lily Somerville holding back – there are a multitude more complex and tangled feelings to be unknotted here.

The Libertines, with their second comeback, have chosen the other, “safe” direction, and sacrificed their integrity for it. Doherty sounds tired, abandoning nostalgia for kitschy gestures. Barât has fun, putting on his old jacket and playing rockstar, but he’s not rethinking his role as musician, or portraying growth as a songwriter.

The record is patient and delicate, but Chung remains a constant if not aggressive presence within every track, imbuing each with immaculate detail.

Much like DeJ, this is an album that occupies its own space, music to get lost in your head to. It may rarely run and may struggle to fully break through for that very reason, but it does more than enough at its own, proud, steady pace.

If nothing else, Attention Please proves Boris can do this softer pop-informed rock, but ultimately it holds more untapped potential than success.

Oceania isn't a great record, but it's a strong enough one, filled with songs that sound like the Smashing Pumpkins you remember.

Poster Girl is a step forward in a somewhat more concise direction for Larsson, but it could have used some fine-tuning to fully commit to its vision. She has created an album that is unapologetically romantic and fun but lacking in consistency production-wise.

The band has only strengthened their propensity for catchy, melodic pop hooks, and they come one after the other like a best-of Lite-FM programming block.

This new collection is most certainly not a pinnacle for the group, but it is a welcome rekindling of the same spirit and sonic magnitude that fueled their last undisputed gem, 2005′s Frances the Mute.

Veering from their signature alt-folk ditties chronicling the immediacy of transference and love, The Errant Charm presents a dense rendering of that blissful numbness promised by a life of aloof detachment.

As it stands, the record is too disjointed as a whole body of work, and you get the sense that when you return to it at a future point it’ll be to pick out the peaks and entirely ignore the lows. Such is life.

While there are some issues with the feeling of déjà vu, Unknown Rooms doesn't really do anything noticeably off the mark.

This record is a perfect soundtrack for any drunken destruction party, tantrum, or any other moment of great primitivism.

Sometimes pushing the envelope may be a grandiose gesture, other times more subtle, and while Wild Nothing may never be a Brian Eno, there’s certainly nothing wrong with being a Felt or Go-Betweens.

It's the beginning of something that is very promising--a surprise reinvention from an artist many had assumed they'd already figured out.

Even rapping alongside a ghost, Hav’s chemistry with P hasn’t lost a step and they feel as natural a pair as they ever did. Prodigy’s verses don’t feel awkwardly sandwiched in, instead naturally befitting each track, with each beat carefully curated to match his flow and tone.

It sounds like he's trying to sound less weird, when he doesn't seem to understand that this very weirdness is part of what made him so endearing as a solo artist in the first place.

They've ironed out their eccentricities, and produced their silkiest and least combative record in the process.

Ultimately what this record lacks is any sense of audacity or ambition.

Even though Supermigration is constructed as a whole, it doesn’t always work best in one sitting.

Grande’s immaculate outer shell both physically and artistically reframes her personal struggles through artifice, communicating relatability to her audience. Yet the lack of grit, grunge or goo keeps Positions distant from the listener, sitting far away, somewhere in the dark.

Sure, it's nice to hear such a talented songwriter working with ease and precision, but it's just not always that interesting.

52 minutes is a pretty damn lengthy runtime for a debut synth-pop album, but TRST flies by.

The record is at its best when it combines its pop sensibilities with its ambient leanings.

It’s a step forward, but one that feels entirely organic. Our little dramas and interpersonal frictions can often mask our own insignificance, but if we let that go then there’s beauty to be seen and Ricochet is an album that’s attentive to that fact.

It takes a certain degree of self-containment in order to encapsulate a place as well as Hundred Waters does, and it's clear that the band has it.

Crafting an album that's bold and expansive but manageable and narratively sound is no easy task, and that's exactly what AU have done.

Both [Frankie Rose and the Outs’ 2010 self-titled] and this one are short, sweet, and undeniably charming rock records that hold up on repeat listens more than you might expect.

Every song on this record is carefully crafted, and the way they’ve perfectly balanced the intimate bedroom atmosphere with the crystalline sheen of modern mainstream has created a set of unmissable pop pearls.

Don’t Be Dumb won’t replace old favourites. But it is, in its own sprawling way, a reaffirmation of what makes Rocky compelling: his appetite for risk, his curation of texture and collaborators, and his refusal to smooth every rough edge.

Sure Zonoscope is splattered with stumbled-upon gems, but a little more editing and maybe some more focused songwriting sessions could have really brought Zonoscope into focus.

While I don't understand a lot of the decisions made on this record, it is still undeniably an exhibition of some of the best sonic control and sound shaping around.

Bankrupt! suffers because it feels a little detached at times, like you can’t really tell where the band are in the big picture.

Soft Will is certainly not as immediately infectious as Smith Westerns’ previous outings, but that does not make it a weaker album. There are still many injections of fun in the wordless gang vocals and theatrical guitar solos.

What makes Collapse Into Now so satisfying is that it isn't a return to form so much as a realization that the band R.E.M. are now isn't necessarily a bad thing to be.

The most frustrating thing about these eleven songs is that it sounds as if Lidell is shackled by the aesthetic, and it’s totally self-imposed. He’s capable of more.

Mixed Emotions seems served just too late, and comes off as regrettably stale.

If Born Sinner proves anything, it’s that he’s not ready to take the fall, but he as a long way to go if he wants to rope off an area all his own in hip hop’s evolution.

Caravan Château is undoubtedly a sonically interesting album to partake in. But Izenberg’s compositions don’t always lend him any favours. They are considered, and everything feels deliberate (despite how sporadic it may be presented to be), but sometimes they don’t wander in any direction that makes for engaging listening.

While it’s not breaking any new ground or causing any philosophical contemplation, it’s highly doubtful that the album is trying to be more than what it exactly is: a collection of songs about dancing your way out of the complications and snares that so often accompany love.

After listening to Legacy it seems difficult to imagine anyone else achieving what they have whilst working with Disney studios.

I know the band can write damn good songs and they have proven that before and prove it here, but until they address the main problems (the still heavily reverberated vocals for one) or really venture out into something different (there is life beyond pasting snippets from philosophy lectures) I think history will keep repeating itself for these guys.

It is an unmistakably raw first album of ripe potential, and one of the more memorable releases of the early weeks of this year.

The end result is an unfortunate fact that while Death Cab For Cutie seems as capable as ever at expressing themselves, they are running out of things to say. Or, at least, things worth hearing.

It gets bogged down in the doldrums somewhere between the personal and universal, and ends without truly having reached either shore.

The surrounding material is all solid, if not to be ranked as some of her best stuff.

Nobody Lives Here Anymore is a respectable and melodious work of sincere and warm country-pop.

Extinction Level Event 2 is just too ambitious for its own good. Yet, for all the lazy sequels and cash-ins in a genre rife with them, it’s hard to fault Busta Rhymes for striving a bit too hard to go that extra mile.

Is 4 Lovers is the band’s most playful album to date too, oscillating between The Beatles, Lenny Kravitz, Big Black, early (aka: good) Muse and The Rapture.

At times invoking Sung Tongs-era Animal Collective, although never to the point of copyright infringement, Julian Lynch's Terra is certainly an interesting listen, even if it does come across as disjointed.

They sound like too much like themselves and too much like the others, and even if you discount the pinpoint instrumentation, it's depressingly calculated.

In changing the dynamic, The Mysterines get a little lost.

It’s far from a miserable affair, it certainly passes the time, it’s just hard to imagine how so much talent in a room didn’t arrive with something that didn’t feel so staid.

Feel the Sound is not a classic, it's not a masterpiece, and despite its pristine delivery, it's not perfect. But it is an honest and genuine sampling of a band who continues to subvert expectations.

On first listen to Fanfarlo's sophomore effort, it doesn't leave a lasting impression, but with repeat listens, more and more intricacies start to creep out of the woodwork.

It's nice to see that Tokumaru has shaken what seemed like guilt about trying to make a playful world filled with as many toy-instruments as possible. It's unfortunate, however, that he has removed much of the emotional content that made his previous albums so rewarding on repeat listens.

Headcage has a pair of iffy tracks to weigh down two good--if not great--tracks, the whole EP sits in a generally favourable position in my view.

While some tracks could stand to have their ideas explored more fully – in particular “Default” which ends suddenly right as things start to swell – this is still a satisfying listen from start to finish.

The record pleasantly showcases Kesha’s impressive vocal range, emotive delivery and riff performance, but the final song is a spark that serves to highlight the unevenness of the album.

From A Birds Eye View ups the stakes in every imaginable way from his rookie outing, The Lost Boy. Still, it lacks a true it-factor, suffering from questionable songs and moments. Luckily, the emcee’s ever-growing ambitions as an artist are put on full display here—even if they haven’t been fully realized quite yet.

There’s no denying the trio put on a dedicated show on Providence, but it’s easy to argue that producer Dave McCracken puts too heavy a coat of gloss over the whole thing, leaving a gaudy, saturated aftertaste on the album.

Balancing stately pop ornamentation with more bombastically orchestrated moments, the album allows Meiburg to both indulge and scale back his dramaturgical impulses.

The good news is that The Strokes have delivered a good album. The bad news is that for all its throwback production, it doesn't really sound much like The Strokes, and many of their longtime fans are probably going to be disappointed in an album that doesn't retreat to the sound of the band's glory days with its tail between its legs.

While One Second of Love contains this personal touch of sound, it isn't used to potential.

There's a lot of kinda clichéd and heavy-handed stuff.