It's practically a compulsory purchase.

Though Way is at his most engaged in years, there's no major reinvention here. If anything, his first solitary missive registers as much as a tribute to influences as it does a focused reboot.

This record may well work as ambient escapism, but in its serene tenderness it’s also a reminder of the fragility of all that surrounds us.

Celebrity guest star wobbles aside, Write About Love is a well crafted, very listenable album, one that sees Belle and Sebastian ditch the qualities of their music that were starting to cloy without totally jettisoning the old charm.

So there is a lot to love within this album. Its knowing winks to rock’s early ‘70s excesses and sage-like nods to the soulful marriage of rock and rhythm and blues exemplified by Sly and Curtis mean that we’re comforted rather than challenged.

While most would expect nothing less from a Mark Lanegan Band LP, the end result is a record for ardent fans and not casual admirers.

Apocalype then, is another Bill Callahan album, similar to those that came before it, with some particularly beautiful songs and some particularly considerate musical accompaniment from the band he has gathered around him. That it happens to be both heartbreaking and life affirming is just something we've come to expect.

Despite the occasionally more personal tone to Tooth & Nail, he continues his role as social commentator magnificently.

The scrappy indie bite of Lewis’ early work may be gone and you won’t find much in the way of Marshall’s emotional bloodletting. But even if it’s likely to cost Lewis the affections of online tastemakers, she looks set to charm an increasingly large audience for years to come.

This is strong stuff that thankfully avoids falling into crass sloganeering, and the music backs it up, it's arcing guitar lines and tribal percussion generating a growing atmosphere of anxiety, outrage and disorientation.

This isn’t the sound of him stretching himself, or pushing boundaries--it’s the sound of him comfortably in his sweet spot, and that’s no bad thing.

Somehow, by taking these backwards steps, Peaking Lights have, rather bizarrely, flown forwards, proving in the process that, when handled correctly, nostalgia can be a fine tool. A fine tool indeed.

It’s raw, human, stripped of all excess and laid bare--and it’s quite possibly the most beautiful thing the band has ever released. Near perfection.

All in all, a fine introduction to the compelling Will Johnson, but a peculiar idea, to make a painfully intimate album with two songwriters rather than just one.

It’s no laugh-a-minute ride, but there’s a beauty in Raposa’s misery that’ll appeal to acolytes of Will Oldham and his aforementioned collaborators alike.

Bahdeni Nami is nothing more than a dull and flat dance record, dressed in the trappings of the 'exotic' and 'worldly'.

Thrillingly improbable pop made by a grade-A maverick. Three cheers to that.

Expo 86 is good, it's just not great. Wolf Parade, the 2010 model, are good, not great.

Father Creeper is most certainly not a perfect record, the ride is a trek back in time to the fairground, riding the dodgems, and getting shunted, lumped and banged-up as sounds collide.

Although not quite out of this world as its title suggests, Interstellar represents a haughty development in Frankie Rose's artistic capabilities.

It starts with impressive gusto but meanders towards the end, drifting into slow, forgettable balladry.

For those exhausted by a modern landscape, where playing a game of spot the musical reference is de rigueur when approaching every new release, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is certainly a welcome relief.

Really, what you’re left with is an accomplished album, delivered with passion and feeling, that’s easy to acknowledge as pretty good--to admire, even--but hard to be seriously moved by.

White Wilderness feels like a record that could have become a compelling collection of wonky strum-along pop songs with imaginative and colourful instrumentation, but ultimately it's indebted to an over-complication of ideas in a collaboration that struggles to flourish the way it should do on paper.

This is a very well-made album; heads will nod and feet will tap. But it doesn't capture that molten energy that the Icarus Line have been capable of in the past, and as such falls short of greatness

Too often, Scott and his band are guilty of lily gilding.

Inventive and playful, their songs play out like animated thought processes, you're invited to figure things out with them as they try to make sense of the world around.

Live uses Simian Mobile Disco’s past to signpost their future--resulting in a record which is occasionally frustrating and even underwhelming, but one which is also a demonstration of confident execution, and a promising forecast of mature dance music to come.

The Wave Pictures have embraced DIY ethic and shown that less is more and will hopefully inspire more people to make a record this way.

Minor Victories is a thoughtful and regal opening bow, but you’ll want for a little more teeth when Act Two comes into play.

The tenderness, and longing in her songs are inescapable; it’s subtle and affectionateness are feelings long sought after in today’s landscape. We should long for more Khouri.

They’ve lost a little bit of the magic of their debut. The lyrics feel a tiny bit less wistful, while the bass is a little less heavy--that strange but heady mix from the likes of ‘Hey Mami’ just isn’t jumping out from any of the tracks on What Now.

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’re a Dinosaur Jr fan and you can live without a couple of Lou Barlow tracks per album then it would be well worth checking out Elastic Days and hearing J do what he does best in a slightly different setting.

From a listening perspective Drifters is an engaging, and often intriguing concoction. Slightly less appetising is the drawn out and mostly instrumental ambience of Love is the Devil.

A modest release, Tribute To will obviously be of most interest to My Morning Jacket and George Harrison admirers, but the quality of the covers deserves a wider audience.

Latin doesn't have a weak moment, and while LP's higher energy levels may indeed play better with that lucrative Top Shop demographic, it would seem remarkable if any right thinking fan of the band didn't think Latin at least its equal.

Its conceptual limits are conspicuously narrow.

They’re still an incredibly likeable band, unashamed of being rabble-rousing without ever resorting to lowest common denominator tactics, but The Cribs have toned down the things that made them great.

There may be less outsider allure now that he’s opened his heart, but his fourth consistently good LP in a row casts his authenticity in emotional honesty for the first time while expanding his musical palette beyond all expectations.

It’s a CD stuffed to the gill with great tunes, but little else. There's nothing to hang your heart on, as much as there's a huge amount to move your head and feet to.

In the end, perhaps In Search... is just so inbred it’s capable of little more than frenzied tail wagging on a podium - its maniac tongue lolling --all eager and expectant that someone will pin a rosette to it just for having a nice shiny coat.

The North Borders is as ambitious a record as its predecessor, and it’s just as successful.

It's an album sufficiently laced with despair to render the not-committed listener uncomfortable; delve deeper, though, to where the darkness makes way for an eerie underworld glow, and the record's beauty emerges.

Four-and-a-half decades on from the original band’s formation, Lynne’s voice is as warm and comforting as ever, his ear for a hook still sharp and his production is as shiny and gorgeous as a celebrity model’s hair from a shampoo advert. But still, there’s something missing.

On this record, Yellowcard cover all the same territory as those latter bands, with vague stories of broken friendships, frustrated romances and perfect summers that they'll never get back. Because… you know… growing up, like… sucks. The lack of detail is the problem here.

This is a blissful, radiant, rewarding listen; one recommended without hesitation.

Kudos doesn't so much follow on from the ragged density of songs like 'Mt. Kill' and 'Dickshakers Union' off their debut EP, but actually illustrates a band who've developed both a sound and identity all of their own in the process

Lanterns is Lott’s most cohesive work, his music a prism refracting light onto the spectrum of change.

In Electric Slave, Black Joe Lewis has crafted a reference point that’ll supplant those old YouTube performances and provide future Lewis scholars with what is arguably the defining point of his career.

Despite his various left turns, the one constant in Carlson’s work is the unrelenting hypnotic power of repetition, and a conviction that “the best music feels like the melody has been around forever.”

It’s very difficult to do anything new in psych but with their energy and enthusiasm, not to mention some interesting work with electronics, Wand have managed to bring a surprisingly entertaining offering to the genre.

When they do get it right, as they frequently do on The Physical World, it does provide you with more than a simple nostalgia fix.

This album ought to see Kate Stables recognised as one of the most compelling voices in alt-folk.

West, when left alone to his devices, is able to transform emotion into the esoteric, colluding synthesis into vibrant, organic swaths of sound. Rhythmically taking jabs like hesitation marks, throwing caution to the wind.

Reflection is quintessentially Eno. A beautiful, thought provoking and introspective body of work that is composed in a way that is still as unique and as radical as the man himself.

With pluses so few and far between, it’s a struggle to make it through these 11 tracks without feeling nauseous from all the sickly pop filler.

It’s not great, it’s not touching, it’s not... well it’s not anything but autopilot AC/DC, as they have been for many years now and it’s none the worse for that.

Nothing unduly groundbreaking here, yet at the same time always brutally refreshing.

These 20 minutes are of a higher quality than many, many bands manage in a whole career.

Weird Sister’s ebbs, flows, peaks and troughs: a shape-shifting, nuanced LP that could be described as derivative, but never formulaic.

If you're already aware of Koushik's work, this record may not be a revelation to you but if you are unfamiliar with the author, the laid-back magnificence of Out My Window is a fine place to start.

Pushing her quirks even further and adding new sounds to her toolkit are obviously admirable attempts to deepen her interest. But there needs to be more in the actual material to bring the listener out into the cold with her.

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.

Somehow all these disparate parts click together and make Government Plates the most captivating Death Grips album yet.

On One-Armed Bandit they’ve mutated into an even stranger beast; a chimera constructed of parts from wildly different musics that somehow work as a whole and which should only really exist in the most fevered imaginations.

Being a Liars album, it is magnificent.

With the musical inspiration behind it all available to hear, the whole exercise ultimately seems a bit pointless and leaves Danger Mouse looking more a dilettante than a genuine auteur. Nonetheless, Rome remains an occasionally breathtaking pastiche.

With the pop landscape becoming increasingly homogeneous, more artists need to experiment, and the variety displayed across Froot's 12 tracks is impressive.

A little shallowness is fine by me, but Rocky's studied, humourless delivery is harder to swallow.

It's as if Hospitality are using these songs to channel gnawing anxieties about their futures on one hand, while using insightful lyricism and breezy pop stylings to romanticise the plight of barely scraping together rent on the other

If only the album had been made up of songs where they’d allowed the songs to be low key and interesting, it could’ve been really good.

This debut--while not a technically poor album, boasting as it does pop hooks aplenty if you truly focus in, beyond the sometimes irritating vocal tennis--sags where it should soar, dips where it should peak.

Assured, short and ultimately sweet, Friendly Fires is a glib reminder that you don’t need an M6 underpass, New York penthouse or guestlist to have an all night disco party, and remind us there’s no shame in getting your groove on.

What they’ve made is a bold body of work that sounds effortless and odd and sophisticated. What they do next is likely to be stadium-filling and bonkers and brilliant, but it matters little when what they're doing now is so sensational.

It sounds a bit too much like it was made a year ago for Cloud Control's folk-rock to really stand out against new releases from, say, Okkervil River, or altogether newer acts like Grouplove. That doesn't mean Bliss Release is impossible to enjoy--far from it--but it does make it hard to imagine many new listeners making the time for it, and that's a shame.

As an album, it's divided into eight tracks but there's no sense of division whilst listening to it, it's one of the most seamless pieces of music I've come across all year.

Reinforced by the layered repetition that comes with recording on tape, this album finds its grace by turning heartache into cheeky, fork-tongued refrains.

This is all Broken Boy Soldiers was ever meant to be: an off-the-cuff collaboration between two friends and one which, despite its imperfections, is an effort worthy of applause.

With no warning whatsoever, this is an incredibly thoughtful, articulate modern rock record that stands toe-to-toe with anything released this year.

A sterile, witless turn here.

Their sloganeering, haughtiness and mocking dismissal of their dislikes will always remain contentious, but never suggest they don’t mean it. This matters more to them than it does anybody else; Romance is Boring is the openly flawed but often brilliant proof.

Sound Kapitol is a successful, if slightly creatively stifling refinement of a fruitful and unique musical partnership.

A lot of the magic of Kavinsky was the box freshness of his reimagining of the past, but across these 13 tracks the allure of Beverly’s Hills Cop high-tops and alien blasting game soundtracks begins to sound tired and worn out

For all the globe-trotting that went into the album, this is a band that--perhaps more than any other at the moment--innately sound like and capture their Californian home in all its beautiful complexity.

A magnificent album where every verse fills you with excitement for the next chorus, where wide-scoping fields of sound work in unison to stage the perfect pop-rock riot and where every meticulously crafted melody comes back to haunt you when you least expect it.

Whilst it in no way compares with the leap in ambition we saw between his first two albums, The 20/20 Experience is nonetheless another interesting inter-genre move, this time into alternative R&B and neo-soul.

Pretty much everything about Jens except the scale of his melodies is gentle and unassuming, and there is a quiet honesty here that is unique pleasure.

Amiina now daintily rap at the doors of a larger audience with a sound that is as delicate as it is arresting.

It’s a record to get lost in, and to find yourself in. And to put it as plainly as possible: it’s a record as emotionally and musically rewarding as anything Cass McCombs has ever released.

Like all Ward's best records, his eighth solo album plays like an intimate knees up. You'll swoon. You'll smile. You'll spin it over and over again.

Against such a strong back catalogue, Meat and Bone looks set to go down as an addendum rather than a milestone.

The strange thing about the record is that the tracks just keep getting better and better as you go along.

For those of us who hadn't got our hands on the earlier mixtapes or his remixes for the likes of Blackalicious and Rob Sonic, Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3 is an opportunity to assess El-P as a beatmaker on his own merits.

While it may be the most proficient musical record that Morrissey has put out in aeons... it doesn’t quite measure up to the high standards set by You Are The Quarry or the superlative debut that was Viva Hate.

There is something exorbitantly satisfying about enjoying what you might deem to be a comeback album, especially when it arrives from an established band that many - including myself - thought were out of fresh ideas.

If you’re looking for ease and comfort there’s a deluge of that available, but there are aren’t many records like The Centre Cannot Hold. Frost has achieved a thrillingly precarious balance whereby there is always the tiniest spark of light to glean amongst the relentless dirge.

The weight of it all means it could be quite impenetrable for some, and it nearly crashes under it's own heaviness sometimes--but for those of us with a melancholic heart, this could be our record of the year.