This is a tremendously accomplished piece of work, but one lacking a little of the swagger of previous outings. Give it the time it deserves.

While there will undoubtedly be some who bemoan the same failing within Rock n Roll Consciousness, there’s no way Thurston Moore is going to stop for anyone.

The two together make magic: the songs don't feel like they've been crafted, rather that they just floated, fully-formed, into existence. Like the people Diamond Mine talks about, the songs aren't any one thing: they just are.

Sprinter manages to be defiant at its most minimal: she may not have made a fully realized masterpiece yet, but she’s staking-out the place between noise and silence where a masterpiece will be built.

After this confrontational opening ditty, Ill Manors becomes less overtly political but no less vivid, as the remaining tracks depict in gruesome detail the dismal lives of London's underclass.

Whatever happens with the technology and wherever the arguments over music, art and commerce drag themselves to next, it's these songs that are the triumph here.

There’s insecurity, certainly; self-reflection, yes; but more than that there’s resilience, romance, strength, sensuality and an album full of lurching, longing, lustrous pop songs.

The Family Sign is a strong continuation and addition to a powerful series of modern rap albums. It's bigger than past records and heavier, a nice combination that genuinely puts the listener into an emotional flux.

This record is a welcome addition to the long-haired monosyllabic troubadour's more than impressive back catalogue.

The music is returned front and centre for an album that's finer than the Biophilia source materials that spawned it.

There's nothing showy here, nothing flashy, just an understated, immaculately put together collection of happy and sad, yearning and sweet songs.

Amongst the nine tracks are some of Black's best work but although the album's ambience shifts - from the darkness in 'Black Suit' and 'Long Song' to the whimsy in 'Volcano!' and the breezy 'Break The Angels'--the consistency does not.

It’s a beautifully composed record, where songs gently bloom and the pace constantly ebbs and flows.

Mesmerising throughout, it's a beguiling and brilliant listen.

Short, but very, very bittersweet.

This really is a fantastic record, a heartfelt postcard from our old friends who formed a band.

Cut adrift with its own bewildering reference points, peppered with glimpses of cryptic brilliance and slabs of deceptive nonsense, Beat Pyramid is a flawed patchwork masterpiece.

Meet the Humans is the most concise and immediate record Mason has released in over a decade.

It's undeniable that for her self-titled third album, Marnie Stern has made some canny decisions. This time round, several of the tracks are built around huge, stomping riffs, with the speedier guitar lines mixed further back to create more space, without sacrificing that-which-is-Marnie.

It’s a visceral, pulsating entity, echoing with tinnitus.

While Aerial and Unbalance represented developments in Huismans' sound, Fever is more of a sidestep. If it is dubstep--which I'm not really sure it is--it is far more intriguing and individual than most releases I have heard in the last 12 months.

There is no slack, no flab and nothing that even comes close to pretension; the sharp sound and honesty come totally naturally.

Despite its hefty length, then, Atgclvlsscap works as a triumphant departure from the confines of the temporal.

It’s refreshing that the northerner is not shy about massive self-expression; besides, his lyrics are merely extravagant, not indulgent.

There are times on Let the Blind…, when the music around Cox veers subtly in the right direction, where you can hear the grub’s surprise as he wakes up with Great Admiral wings, ugly white noise turning psychedelic.

It may not be the old Mountain Goats kick, but whatever it is, it'll keep me returning to All Eternals Deck for a long, long time.

Yes, there’s technically more instrumental breadth in most episodes of Sesame Street, but this is a deeply, troublingly emotional record.

Folk can be a notoriously intransigent genre, and Basia Bulat probably occupies the less user friendly end of the spectrum, but for those who like an album which grows and reveals its treasures slowly, A Heart of My Own is gold.

Valtari might not be a huge digression for the band but that doesn't matter: this is quietly, entrancingly and thoroughly sublime.

Every Country's Sun sounds pleasingly massive, as any Mogwai album should, as there is something specifically about Fridmann's techniques that just understands the band's heavy hitting style.

False Readings On is a calmer, more pensive, and more inward-looking affair than Cooper’s recent Inventions releases.

The quality of the music is without question but the means of consuming it sometimes hinders the listener from soaking it in at a favoured pace.

Red’s a grandiose statement of intent, crammed with aspirational symphonies that run the gambit of popular culture over the past 40 years without ever succumbing to grating pastiche.

With a record possessing such an untamed imagination it’s fair to say that Abe Vigoda’s maddened prattle is a talent worth nurturing, whether soil in their teeth or blood on their knees.

Though harder, happier and a little more direct, Animal Joy is above all a Shearwater record: swooping, eloquent, concerned with nature.

Emotional ambiguity never sounded so good. Business as usual then.

There's an inherently joyous delivery to them that offsets their recurring themes of age and mortality from start to finish.

A spectacular triumph.

In Music for Insomniacs Berry has created a synth fantasia of dreamy soundscapes for the wakeful, but with a greater dynamism and more grandiose scale and momentum than most ambient music.

Devotion contains just enough variety to make for an enticing listen.

Neo, the Seattle group’s debut, is as painfully Sub Pop as it gets, and it’s painful in a wonderful, wonderful way.

Given his richness of experience before he entered the studio, it makes sense that the nine tracks here are as so assured.

After multiple listens, the desire to rip apart Martin-McCormick's stitched together freak is assuaged by a desire to submit to it and play it on repeat, to revel in its drive, energy and emotion.

End Times is a break-up album that lashes relationship breakdown onto societal collapse, and rarely has Everett sounded so plaintive, so utterly broken down.

Trick is comfortably Jamie T’s best album so far, showing off every element he can and touching many bases without ever feeling like the contrast is jarring.

Polished production and an ironing out of the music’s creases creates a less-relaxed feel than we’re used to hearing, but there’s also a sense of warmth which was largely missing from the previous Jicks-aided album, "Pig Lib."

The Clearing is a woody, creaky, but ultimately gorgeous folk record.

That sunrise-smile that hits before the first half-minute mark isn't blighted by the slightest smudge of cloud right up to minute 45, this is one of our best writers and the soul and centre of why he's always mattered so much. Heartily recommended.

Angles doesn't feel like an over-indulgent record, nor one that speaks of a dearth of ideas.

You can argue that it doesn’t break new musical ground, and you can keep your noses upturned if you like, but with consummate poise Alkaline Trio have cemented their reputation as this genre’s premier songwriters. It’s not too late to get a heart-skull tattoo.

If you liked Beirut, you’ll love this.

This Old Dog is the sound of an artist on top of his game. An artist shedding every inch of wackiness from his bone and sounding all the better for it.

It's Blitz reveals just how much the trio have grown and how well they know exactly the strange angular planet that their music inhabits.

It’s a confident, naive, sensitive journey that plays to all of the strengths of the artist without sounding ostentatious. It’s an emotional listen, but a necessary one.

Yes, this is a collection of Tracks and Traces, meticulously edited in the late-90s, and again more recently, so that none of the musical ideas outstay their welcome--in this respect, it’s not quite an album, and when the less melodically surprising tracks fade out, you feel like you’re moving along to the next case in the exhibit, whereas other albums by Cluster, Harmonia, or Cluster & Eno sustain a mood, and often a weird nervous energy, with their generally more urgent rhythms.

‘Armed Love’ then is The (I)NC’s straight ahead rock record but a superior one at that, one with a great deal of heart and soul, and one that should propel them onto the global stage.

An unexpectedly outstanding and uplifting experience.

It comes across more as a work that’ll maintain their admittedly excellent level of consistency, rather than proving itself to be the defining album of an already blessed year for music.

Some listeners may lament this retreat from the hefty barrage of sound that was 2009's Farm, but it is crucial that a band such as this progresses and varies itself, and it is somewhat adorable that J is loosely retreading the road that his group took beforehand, only this time he is doing it the right way, with his pals Lou and Murph along for the ride.

As adventurous as it is tuneful, and sealed in cover art even Def Leppard wouldn't sign off, it's an aggressive little record that takes you into the cosmos without making you leave your bedroom or put down the joypad.

Metz make you want to rock and then roll and then rock a bit more. By the end of this album's 30 boisterous minutes you'll feel absolutely exhausted.

The sequencing allows the listener space to breathe at the most opportune moments, and its leaps from ambience into adrenaline-soaked enthusiasm for hand-clap-happy high-jinx are worthy of celebration.

It’s not a game-changer of an album, but the game is certainly changing and Apparat is playing for the right team.

In spite of its gloomier mood, it’s a record every bit as spirited as Half Way Home, and possibly even more affecting.

An album that would sound as though it could have been made anytime in the last five decades were it not so immaculately produced, recalling Dylan and Springsteen and pretty much all of Almost Famous without ever descending into pastiche or mere homage.

Emotional, great and exhausting.

The whole affair is deeply involving, full of odd punctuations and wonderful non-linear compositional structures.

Far from being frozen in time, Wildflower shows a willingness to move forward with a sense of personal history, but unhindered by obligations to it.

It’s not just that Darwin Deez have recreated their first record, but made a more mature work, building on the intellectual learnings from the music they created in between.

Thanks to the calibre of the line-up’s musicianship, and Keenan’s ability to write lyrics that don’t insult the intelligence of his audience, the gems on Thirteenth Step outnumber the filler.

Not another album updating the great musical ideas of the past, then, but an album updating the great sentiments: to tell someone how much you need them and that you’d be lost without them. If you’re not in love right now--an album to fall in love with, until then.

There are few who could delve into such weighty issues without succumbing to empty rhetoric, but it's testament to Wyatt's unpretentious approach that he pulls off the trick while retaining a lightness of touch that makes Comicopera such a consistent pleasure to listen to.

It might not be their best-ever album--Phrenology can still claim that title--but Rising Down finds The Roots reinvigorated, more passionate than ever.

It’s not a showy record, but one that when peeled apart reveals itself to be a darker and more engaging album than on first listen. But not only that, as it might also be the best thing they’ve ever done.

The best way to approach this band is to stop comparing them to the usual reference points--instead, it's far more rewarding to accept Offend Maggie as a land of its own making, something to be indulged, explored and, finally, cherished.

With such a range of musical stylings on one record, No Shape occasionally sounds more like a collection of songs than a unified album, at times this can be a bit stifling to the listener. ... But these are minor flaws in a record with many a moment of gorgeousness.

Once again: there are six more songs on this album. Six songs that really aren't bad at all. But once your needle has dropped to the end of side one, it's only going back to the beginning again.

If you're tempted to go for a heavy dose of head nodding psychedelia any time soon, you probably won't find a better example released this year.

It’s a five-tracker with bite, with venom; it’s a reminder that while de la Rocha might age like the rest of us, the fires in his belly haven’t come close to being doused by mundane revivals of his most famous group’s mosh-happy hits.

It is a record which drinks deeply from the well of the past but could only have been made today. Megafaun have cast off the weight of the canon and are spreading their wings.

This is powerful stuff, showing that not only is Anders Trentemøller one of the best in his field but also a master of the album craft. One for the long haul.

Living With Ghosts, probably his most punishing set of tracks to date, is a British techno album whose ancestry lies in (to name only five) James Ruskin, Oliver Ho, Surgeon, Regis and Planetary Assault Systems.

At just over half an hour long Innundir Skinni is a modest little record compared to the self-indulgence of Joanna Newsom's latest or grandiose ambitions of countrymen like Sigur Ros, but its charms are plentiful and in her own humble, but distinct, way Olof Arnalds confounds expectations.

Far more than with his first album Overgrown is focused upon his songwriting rather than his technology, and it’s much stronger for it.

The music operates less as an end in itself and more as a counterpoint to the keening, whispering, screeching, gasping voice-as-expression-of-humanity: within the silicon maze, she suggests, there’s a ghost trying to get out.

Actually, the best way to experience what Mister Mellow is really about is to give the visual component of the album a go first. Yes, the audio more than stands up on its own, but the artwork courtesy a variety of incredibly talented artists really does a more comprehensive job of fleshing out Greene’s overall vision.

Where some records are maybe just too personal for public consumption, it's the uneasy fragility contained within Get Well Soon that renders it such a fascinating experience, highlighting Sarabeth Tucek as one of the most candid songwriters of her generation.

Genius, as you know, is all about the detail. The backing vocal on 'Revolving Doors' – if you're still struggling with the 'song' thing, this and 'Amarillo' offer consolation in the form of two of Albarn's loveliest unfinished melodies.

Yes, sometimes it sounds like a circus rave in a toybox, and it's not what you would call relaxing. But it's uplifting, triumphant and inquisitive.

Paul's Tomb: A Triumph has two distinct modes – those slowburn instrumental passages, and the lyric driven, quicker, melodic segments. Frog Eyes succeed when the joins between the two really 'flow', when the segues work.

Some listeners will have been craving something more alienating to sink their teeth into, but what we actually have is an appetising, confident statement of intent from a band that want us to know that they are still a force in contemporary music.

The combination of Mercer's lyrics and indie-boy-who-can-actually-sing vocals, paired with Danger Mouse's undeniable ear for awesome pop, means it's always going to be well above average. Very good, in fact. Occasionally great. It doesn't need to be anything else.

What Multi-Love lacks in immediacy it mostly makes up for in aesthetic.

Whether it's their best collection to date would be open to debate (and to these ears it isn't; Union still takes that accolade by a fair margin). In any case, it should serve them well both for the present and the future.

Chance of Rain defies easy explanation, an album that is more like a bout of freak weather than a light shower.

It might not rocket them out of their obscurity but Disappears have created a record that can appease fans happy with how they sounded anyway and those that are searching for something new.

All in all, With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery has the air of a project to it rather than a vital artistic pursuit.

To cap things off, there's an untitled track that feels distinct from the rest of the album, it's recorded in a pre-war style and sees a guitar gently plucked next to Taylor's voice. It's a charming end to a stunning, yet intense emotional ride that Piano takes you on.