With rave reviews in Venice, The Master will undoubtedly earn its share of awards, and, if this soundtrack is anything to go by, it deserves to.

New Relics feels more like a work in progress, a record that was more satisfying to make than to listen to.

As it is Luxury Problems is a shift in a new direction that's not quite bold enough to make the jump in full, but still loaded with incredible ideas.

Whether it be the quaint elegance and flowing, reverb heavy guitars of kaleidoscopic opener 'I'm Gone' or claustrophobic haze of album standout 'Heavenly Bodies', there's little here that disappoints.

What really sets Psychedelic Pill out as some of Young's strongest work in a while though are those other epic tracks, which deliver that expansive, explorative sound with some deeper voyages into the singer's thoughts.

For all its manufactured essence, Red remains firmly grounded at the crossroads between innocence and experience.

Sadly, the quality of song writing and accompanying musicianship--i.e., everyone except 'arry--is mediocre at best.

Dept. of Disappearance is a good album that makes for a pleasing listen, despite its lack of ambition.

Lost Songs ain't a new direction for ToD. Far from it. But it's a frenetic, committed album oozing passion at every turn, and the world would be poorer without it.

Silver Age's songs come across as a little homogeneous, but it's an exhilarating homogeneous mass, which is all that really counts.

It lacks cohesion, with eerie instrumentals featuring with gentle acoustic tracks, it is a noble attempt to progress a rather formulaic, albeit excellent, musical career.

While Daughter of Cloud houses a number of Barnes' most flamboyantly weird musical ideas, they're also frequently some of his hollowest.

Napalm is a long ass 18 track slog, and the pointless thug boasts scattered throughout the album.

This effort is laudable, but she sounds best when pushing the envelope. A lively talent like hers shouldn't be so concealed.

Good rather than great, and enjoyable if rarely fully captivating, what's clear is that Barthmus has a talent both as a producer, arranger and writer that could well pay dividends a couple of records down the line.

One day the mainstream is going to claim him and he'll lose a little something, but for now he's still the prince of the misfits and the martyrs, the waifs and the strays, Sundark and Riverlight is him at his distilled best, tears in his eyes, glitter on his cheeks, tragic, magnificent, ours.

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.

All We Love We Leave Behind retains the fire of Jane Doe and harnesses everything they've learned since, combining to create something unrelenting, brutal, and never short of magnificent.

His songs are chiefly good, and there's little more you want of a loose garage punk rock record than that.

While The Bloom and the Blight may have fallen short in some respects, in others its style blossoms. Two Gallants have matured their sound, and clearly so.

Mumps, etc. simultaneously feels like a fresh start and consolidation for the band; it encapsulates what makes them so unique while subtly expanding and pushing forward their sound, and as such must be viewed a real triumph.

Jiaolong is a living, breathing animal, and all the better for it.

With nothing masking itself as filler here, it would be difficult to trim anything off without Mauve losing any of its impetus or impact. Indeed there's very little negative to say.

A couple of tracks at once would probably be the best prescription to suggest, rather than ingesting as a whole.

Circles revels in its consistency if nothing else, and while the element of surprise is something one is unlikely to be greeted with by a Moon Duo record, they make business as usual seem like an enjoyable pastime rather than a laborious chore.

If Transcendental Youth is the best thing Darnielle's ever done, it's only because it's about five per cent tighter and better-played.

It's amazing, actually, that despite having been around for over a decade, through trauma and breakups and now their fifth record, Menomena still sound fresh and uncontrived and, well, endearingly innocent.

He is, however, a radiant example of an artist with the ability at his fingertips to close the schism between the true avant-garde and the leftfield mainstream, and in this respect Until the Quiet Comes is the record to date we'll most likely crown his masterpiece.

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.

The 2nd Law is seriously fun.

On Sugaring Season she captures both the melancholy and the confidence that comes with growing older really rather well.

Putrifiers II is clearly a collaborative effort, and all the more delightful as a result.

Order of Noise shows how to balance the two extremes without committing to one single constant, and that anyone can make an original noise, but to make one that's accessible takes skill.

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

The result is exactly what I Believe wasn't: tasteful, sensitive and containing a fair few memorable tunes.

There is no concept, because sometimes an album just doesn't need to confuse itself with one, this is simply a collection of heavyweight dancefloor bangers and should be enjoyed as such.

Piramida is undoubtedly the band's most immediate work to date and it might be strange to be writing it, but nearly each and every track would work standing on its own.

¡Uno! finally sees the Cali-punk trio letting themselves sound like Green Day, releasing the pressure and defaulting to what they do best.

Sadly, the album at large is plagued by many of the things which have seeped into Folds' sound over the last ten years: the seriousness, the restraint, and the descent into middle age.

There's a delicacy, a deftness of touch throughout Total Loss that's wondrous.

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

It's hard to get excited about a record that rarely moves from its musical comfort blanket. But there are still moments.

This is a collection of massive-sounding, impeccably-produced songs which mask their dearth of ideas with hackneyed bluster.

This is music that you dive into wholeheartedly when there's time to examine its mutilated layers.

It's a warm-blooded record, beholden to analogue gear and flawless mastering--one destined to fit snugly on a turntable rather than to live as ones and zeros on your iPod.

[World Music is] a wonder through the traditional folk and more amplified sounds of the planet's history, yet infused with enough of Goat's own character to all glue together.

There are those that will love this record, for whom it will be the gateway into earlier, richer work. But for those of us who have already been spellbound by what Ben Bridwell can create, this is simply not enough.

The coherence of Tempest is the hypnotic key to its charm.

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.

While Observator may be no step forward, it is affirmation of a great formula.

It's the best representation yet of the sheer force of the band live, a perfect half hour snapshot of the energy and aggression they've never properly captured on tape.

Around two thirds of Theatre Is Evil's songs are bolted to the chassis of a loud, poppy guitar band, bringing inescapably to the fore Palmer's gift for killer-catchy melodies and stratospheric contrapuntal arrangements.

St. Vincent and David Byrne have brought out the best in each other--they should do this more often.

With a record as good as it is, it's difficult to believe that both they and pop music aren't alive and well.

To those who care about the small differences, it's another tremendously strong album from a career already littered with them.

Though the component sounds are familiar, they've been engineered into a blur.

The xx lay out all of their pieces beautifully. There are no extraneous parts. Not a second that they didn't intend. As a result, songs like 'Tides' or 'Chained' unfold as naturally as a ripple of wind.

There are times when Into The Diamond Sun hits a lull, most notably around the midpoint.

I Know What Love Isn't is a classy break-up record rather than just a classic one.

It's jolly and kinetic and greater than the sum of its songs.

Not a bad album, just a boring one.

Mature Themes is more detailed, more developed, more everything than its predecessor. It's nauseating and beautiful, troubling and hilarious.

A step backwards, demonstrating that to rehash old sounds you need to prop them up with new tunes.

It's immensely listenable throughout, but at its best--with 'Vistate' and 'Cara Falsa'--it's truly spellbinding.

It's simply another great album by an indescribably great band.

It's short (36 mins), but deep and heady, the sort of record that worms its way into your head and stays there, leaving a faint imprint on your psyche.

Thank f*** that they have delivered what we have come to expect from The Vaccines.

There's nothing that really stands out as a hit on here, nothing to get the crowds in Whitesnake t-shirts (ironic or otherwise) moshing in the manner of Permission to Land's hits.

Rap paradise is paved with bad intentions and Key to the Kuffs disappoints by shying away from greatness where we've come to expect nothing less.

For the most part it's good. Very good.

Even peering through the gauze of the back-story, Cat Power's ninth album is a feat of musical and emotional maturity.

The Seer is the culmination of Gira's 30-year-journey; his finest two hours, if you will.

This is an utterly pointless record with no artistic merit, creative spark or genuine ambition whatsoever.

There's no doubt that the familiarity of Dear's style after several records means Beams has to work a bit harder to hold your attention than previous efforts..... The good news is that until that issue is resolved, there's plenty here to hold your interest.

Solo Piano II's classical leanings and modernistic execution are testament to the piano's ever-lasting ability to dazzle the masses.

No one concept album, even one with the complexity of America, could ever hope to fully address the manifold problems of the USA, but in searching for his own answers Dan Deacon has crafted an unique testament to this fact and to his own inimitable, and ever increasing, talents.

Fragrant World is by far the band's most immersive and consistent record, a buzzingly exotic mass of nervy future soul and paranoid disco that grows in stature with each listen.

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.

Both the Laurel Halo and Panda Bear collaborations are sadly somewhat dreary by comparison, making Tracer sag at its centre.

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

This collection is worth picking up, purely because it is nice as a listener to have a rummage around 60-odd songs in the search of something good; the challenge might be to narrow that batch down to ten songs worth keeping, and to forward those songs onto someone you know.

Whilst it would be easy to say that the 136 tracks across five CDs make this boxset a purchase for completists and enthusiasts only, to do so would be reductive.

It all adds to the feeling that there's no particular point or guiding aesthetic here.

It's still discernibly a James Yorkston record, and full of what you'd expect from one, but there's enough shading in the corners and drawing over the lines to add new sparks of interest.

Taragana Pyjarama is unstimulating, oddly soothing in an anesthetized way, hypnotic in the most guileful sense.

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.

Major moves some distance away from Fang Island's core aims, and their first record's core strengths--instead offering up a collection of tracks which do far too little, for far too long.

The best moments are those which eschew any attempt to write proper 'songs' and instead simply try to convince the listener that he or she is travelling on an epic, wobbly, thrilling and frightening, mind-expanding journey through outer space.

Shrines is the sound of the air beneath your bed whispering when you rest.

To pretend that Life is Good is flawless would be misleading, but it's a thoroughly enjoyable return to form.

Beyond genre lines, racial lines, sexuality lines, any lines you can think of, it's that all-too-rare gem: a universal story you'll come back to long after the hype's been and gone.

As an insight to a world within a world of black American music, Personal Space elicits interest. As a compilation, it fails to sustain it very long.

As long as sincerity still counts for something and melody remains king, we'll let these qualms lie and lap up a record that's chock-a-block with comfort food choruses.

Advaitic Songs shares a lot of the same strengths as the recent output by Earth--every listen unfolds another texture, another line gets embedded in the brain.

In Time to Voices is aggressive, it is irreverent, yet also very ambitious.

While retaining this overactive production style, Angelakos manages to make Gossamer feel more effortlessly human, more like the self-realised artistic vision of an individual than Manners ever came close to being.

Micachu and the Shapes are fun. Their new album is fun.

On A Bedroom Wall is a work of music that won't be matched this year for its pained beauty.