I have finally arrived at the conclusion that this record somehow actually works. Quite well in fact, so much so that by the time 'Here Comes The Day' reaches its glittering, Broadway-themed conclusion, one almost forgets whose name is on the front cover.

In the end, it’s the lack of direction that’s fatal for Concrete and Gold; at least the last three records, scored through with problems as they were, had a sense of what was driving them, even if it was something as superficial as Sonic Highways’ city-hopping.

Congratulations is no more impenetrable than the Flaming Lips at their most commericial, with Sonic Boom offering a bright, upfront mix that keeps the baffling array of omichords, guitars, sitars, synths, organs and FX percolating in dynamic, uncluttered fashion.

Everything about Jessica Rabbit is visceral--full-force drum slams, the slick claps, Miller’s steely slabs of guitar, lyrics replete with bombs, knives, and natural disasters.

The album falls somewhere between curio and convincing; there’s enough here to hold the attention of the casual Mac fan, however fleetingly, but diehards should find a bit more to dig into in the brighter moments. A worthwhile exercise.

Unfortunately, too much of NLOTH sounds staid and uninspired, again maybe due to the changing musical landscape that was going on all around them during the making of the record.

Unfortunately, the writing and production is as saccharine as the topics covered, either gossamer thin semi-ideas of tracks padded out, or bogged down by strings and a blinding sheen of instrumentation that does nothing to appeal to anyone beyond easy-listening FM aficionados.

The fact of the matter is that Bryan Ferry has produced another album of inessential middle-of-the-road cosmopolitan adult-pop. The only difference is that this time they are his own songs.

The result is a collection of pop songs with a good sense of both depth and dynamics.

Snow Globe is one of the more palatable additions to the Christmas cannon, and a really good Erasure record to boot.

Anyone looking for all of the above is not going to be disappointed by Something Dirty, which contains more than its fair share of mischief and mayhem. Crucially, it's in keeping with Faust tradition, but it always looks forward rather than back.

'I'm Still Believing' and 'Dream Orchestrator' provide capable reminders of Toy's cosmic rock outs from yore but its the dreamier, lovelorn compositions that steal the limelight and honours here.

This is the most brutal metal record to see a release in 2006.

A record that has clearly been crafted with great care and a terrific talent behind both the songwriting and the production.

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.

A shimmering, optimistic record recalling Stevie Wonder and Brian Wilson, the LP makes for a comparative step back in time, with smooth yet fuzzy basslines, funk breakdowns, clever arrangements and soaring backing vocals.

If you love The Icarus Line and Comets On Fire, and wonder what a record exploring the expansive middle ground between the two outfits might sound like, look/listen no further.

That they’ve somewhat restricted themselves in the way the record was constructed is also, oddly, a very good thing because it’s allowed them to strain and work within a framework and yield excellent results.

Largely acoustic, it is a drowsy, potent EP.

They try hard, Coldplay, but it just isn't enough; their fourth album might just be their best yet, but it's still a long way from being the epochal classic that Chris Martin is desperate to create.

So while it’s still tough to classify his sound, Silver Wilkinson is Bibio’s most streamlined recording to date.

Occult Architecture Vol. 1 makes for a sorcerous entreaty to dig that little bit deeper when weighing up the relationship--and clearly quite inspiring power--of the inner world and the outer realm. Here’s hoping the second installment delivers just as forcefully.

Not since Mansun's "Six" have I heard an album twist its songs into a musical Lombard Street--and I can already picture the audience screaming its approval in the break--before a wall of static and synthesizers takes us home. And home is a little nicer place to be after taking a ride on Spirit If...

Like horror films or ghost stories, the upside of ADULT.’s brand of dark paranoia is its visceral thrill; it’s as nasty as electro can get whilst maintaining a remnant of a reassuring pop edge.

This isn’t an album to expand musical horizons, as much as it might expand a few minds. Yet it’s deeply enjoyable and more often than not thrilling to hear a band mouthing “We don’t care” over and over before showing two riff shaped fingers to the naysayers.

If Paris, Texas concerns itself with flat desert landscapes then Amplifying Host makes the sea its home, with a too-steady rhythm always threatening to halt the potential for a clear reflection on the infinite horizon.

The National Health gives the likeable quintet a firm footing from which to stop their seemingly inevitable decline.

The comparative simplicity of these songs makes this a more of a compelling curiosity piece, rather than the explosively satisfying--potentially classic--albums that both of these bands have in them as separate artists.

As a debut album, it shows great promise and potential for what’s to come, as she develops her own style as an artist.

Despite its heavy subject matter, this record sparkles and whirrs in a way that is very easy to fall in love with.

For longtime fans, a dubbed-out Grace Jones begets an exotic retelling of her myth, like painting a Sherman tank in watercolours - sure it's pretty, but under those runny dub brushstokes is hidden a killing machine.

There are moments of brilliance; sketches on a theme but with no real conclusion.

Waterloo To Anywhere might not redeploy any cultural guidelines, but take it at its own merits and you may be pleasantly surprised.

ike all the tracks on 24/7, exercise in precision from the Icelanders, German style. Not Swiss. There is no neutrality here. Every loop and bassline employed on the album has an eye to a tension held just out of view.

Sometimes it can feel like wading through mucky water, but it’s far from a bad trip; more like a damn fine party that will no doubt find its home in many fields during the summer months.

It's frustrating, because if you took Our Ill Wills' best moments and condensed them into an EP we'd easily be talking an eight or nine, but as it is, the second Shout Out Louds LP is a Jekyll and Hyde record that ultimately flatters to deceive.

Chambers is a beast. A glorious black hole of modern romanticism.

In the end, what was once an exceptional record is now merely a rather good one. That’s a real shame, but it can’t entirely derail Alphabeat and their purist pop vision.

Like a Shakespearean monologue you're either going to be living every moment with the narrator or gazing on indifferently as your attention drifts away. For those in the former camp, this is a challenging listen where life mirrors art in a profoundly resonant way.

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.

There are muddled, muffled messages here, whispers of golden horizons and awards cluttering the shelves; it's just a shame that the filler is so predictably repugnant and the brilliant gems so widely scattered.

Even the most ardent of fans may find themselves somewhat irked to be given essentially the same album, from the same band for the fourth time.

The plot is complicated and would take innumerable listens to get the complete story without the aid of RZA’s interludes, but the storytelling is vivid and full of colour.

Thorburn splits his calculated kookiness into two halves: rote indie synthpop vying for your Noughties nostalgia on Taste, and straightforward, more-of-the-same twee rock that also vies for your Noughties nostalgia on Should I Remain Here At Sea?.

Despite their implacable cool there’s a lot of soul searching going on here and the band turn their back on the superficial and hedonistic L.A, setting out in search of something deeper and more profound. In Worship The Sun they find it.

Frankie Rose and the Outs grants her the right to carry on doing as she pleases. As Lady Gaga comes across as a glorious car crash with her incessant costume change homages, Frankie similarly deserves the right to chop and change between band and styles. For as she chews music up and spits it out, she makes a beautiful mess.

On Let’s Be Still, they sporadically do a good job of nagging at the heart, but fail to convince the head that this hasn’t been done better elsewhere, plenty of times before.

It’s also a big album: a long, sprawling epic that stretches out for it’s slightly-padded running time, but one so full of ideas and intricacies that it’s an easy album to get sucked into.

Those wanting an intense, borderline overdose, hit of rushing psychedelia for 42 minutes need look no further, whilst others wishing for a bit more diversity are barking up the wrong tree.

It’s not essential in the way Illinois is essential, but fans would be mugging themselves to not at least give it a whirl.

The Thermals are in transition, sitting awkwardly between their lo-fi roots and a clear desire to do something grander. They seem stuck at a point where their skeleton is no longer fit for purpose.

Yes, it's enormously derivative, but it's also frequently exhilarating.

Despite the heterogeneous nature of the album as a whole, Patton is never out of his depth, even when paired with unusual collaborators.

While being pleasant and listenable enough, Pink Graffiti simply doesn't do enough to set itself apart from the post-chill-glo-surf-wave-fi trend, which is ultimately its downfall.

10 Futures categorically sounds like an album that was made for the sake of it, for the joy of it.

All in all, You Got Me Singing is wonderfully curated and beautifully executed, with just the right amount of imprecision in the pretty-much simultaneity of when the two sing together.

[Darcy's] never sounded more relaxed, more relieved to be relaxed--and the soft edges, the familiar refrains, the gentle tones, they’re all windows to that light in [him].

If we look to the previous literature, we find that no components of >>> are particularly novel.

Ditherer also displays sneak-up-on-you tendencies, initially bewildering, tough to get a handle on, eventually beguiling and beautiful in a manner magnified by casual boundary obliteration.

The Blood Bank EP is a fine appendix to the Bon Iver story, so far, and in its subdued elegance, the title track has all the emotional generosity of giving blood, tinged with the awareness of mortality.

When you heard Cape Dory, you probably didn’t expect Tennis to be growing into soulful artistry six years and three albums later, and they deserve an incredible amount of credit for that. But you definitely wouldn’t ever have expected them to sound dreary either, and that’s something of which Tennis are slightly guilty on Yours Conditionally.

After 21 years, it's hard to believe Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayres are still capable of producing moments as vivid and relevant as these.

This band has a ways to go: they can write more substantial, affecting music than this, their songcraft can indubitably be tightened up. But I think maybe it's Man Alive's sheer confidence that makes me feel alright about saying that: this is a band going places.

Smoking in Heaven is a still novel and mostly welcome dive into an often ignored and overlooked era.

While Irreal might prove a difficult conundrum for those that favour their music structured in an orderly, compartmentalized fashion, perseverance has its rewards. Intriguing.

As a rule, Dove meshes into a good album that might be accounted a small disappointment if this was 1995, but is a pretty spectacular accomplishment for a group of semi-retired musicians in their fifties.

Dulli isn’t in Johnny Cash’s league yet -- then again, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits are the only people who are -- but 'She Loves You' marks him out as a fellow traveller.

It’s all over the place, yet perfectly fresh and maligned.

While the songs on their third recorded set are confident, compositionally astute and capable of slotting into any indie-disco DJ’s mid-set surge towards an electric peak, they more often than not sound like the sum of parts, rather than the frenzied party jams deployed by the band at their scintillating live shows.

As is often the way with collections of B-sides, EP remixes and rarities, The Juan Maclean's Everybody Get Close is a mixed bag featuring some very lofty highs and a whole bunch of stuff that the world probably never cried out for, but will be more than happy to have gleaned as a result.

I Still Do is solid, unspectacular blues. Take Clapton’s voice out and this could be one of those Jules Holland collections they promote at weekends on Radio 2.

For an outfit who've been heralded as the industry's great white hopes of 2009, The Big Pink undoubtedly have several moments of pure genius here, but ultimately, A Brief History Of Love lacks the consistency to elevate it from the status of a good debut album to that of a great one.

Whereas Pollock’s 4AD debut was fairly charming and instant but a little slight, The Law of Large Numbers is the total opposite; a wonderfully simple, clever and loveable record initially masquerading as a complex and awkward one.

As the album enters its second half a number of elements which made the its first half so enjoyable begin to get tiresome, particularly the over-reliance on piano.

It’s still simplistic and limited but it’s meant to be. That’s the whole idea. The converted will remain.

There are moments which hint at Casablancas’ underlying skill as a writer on Phrazes, but there’s such a ruinous deployment of disparate ideas that they never form a cogent whole.

At times hypnotic and otherworldly, it's a soothing, unsettling and challenging listen.

There’s a difference between original and interesting, though, and there’s plenty of the band’s own identity on Cursing the Sea, which marks the start of what could yet be a tremendous 2014 for the quintet in deliciously dark fashion.

As side projects go, this is one of those that will happily turn left rather than right when climbing onboard that transatlantic flight to you.

Although much of Heligoland suggests that Massive Attack might finally have burned out, the glowing embers of what they once had can still be glimpsed providing a light in the dark.

These climactic moments help Belly Of The Lion to ultimately feel more consequential and less of a project for a moonlighting soundtracker. He’ll need some help to recreate it live, but on record David Wingo has shown that he can pull it off on his own.

It's not an album that will be remembered for its songs, but it's coherent enough as a whole to make up for that. In 2016, it's refreshing to indulge in a collection of songs that work best when they're heard all together.

French Kicks cannot rightly be pegged as a one-trick pony but the formulaic organisation of this record emphasises lushness at the sacrifice of any surprises.

I’m sure there’s a decent record in here somewhere, but it’s hiding in amongst the detritus which seems to have been added in almost at random.

The cover of the Isley Brothers, "Why When The Love Is Gone" after "Don't Make A Sound" seems like sloppily tagged on attempt to be shown that the group's influences are genuine. Otherwise, Release Me is a perfectly produced pop gem with all substance and a lot of style.

Jukebox is an unsurprising album. It sounds exactly how you'd expect–-classic, but not overly well known, songs, like Dylan's 'I Believe In You,' squeezed by the Cat Power sound into tracks that sound like they could feature on "The Greatest."

The whole of In Our Nature benefits from the air and space around the songs. Rather than attempting to embellish his new album in an attempt to garner a wider audience, Gonzalez keeps to minimal pleasures that make his work an unfussy yet sophisticated joy.

Mark T. Smith from Explosions in the Sky and Matthew Cooper of Eluvium have come together as Inventions to construct something that leans on the ingredients of their day-jobs but is simultaneously exactly what a combination of both acts should sound like and somehow greater than the sum.

Whether Colors will be a success within the pop world it is clearly aimed at remains to be seen, but one suspects even pop fans will see through this for it appears to be: an album documenting a mid-life crisis.

A carefully considered, exotic and mature record that stands out as a blueprint of how to handle the move from lo-fi to, well, just –fi.

The details rest comfortably in the background and add only to a sense of ambience, not to a bold artistic statement.

In producer David Fridman, whose psychedelic instincts have added glow to everything from Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev to Creaming Jesus, MGMT and Sleater Kinney, Lovely Eggs have found a collaborator who understands that warmth, weirdness and wit can be melted into walls of queasy noise to quite gorgeous effect. Between them they’ve made something genuinely glorious. There’s nothing funny about that.

It remains, at its heart and in the best possible way, a very small record of considerable charm. Warmly recommended.

Volcano is a fun album of tightly-crafted, catchy melodies. But it’s in no way reinventing the genre the band members so keenly idolise.

Repeated listenings reveal the record for what it truly is - the most human of comeback records.

Overall though, Travellers In Space And Time is a fascinating collection that won't be everyone's cup of tea, but should at least cement its creators cult status for the forseeable future and some.

The template hasn't changed much, and to some extent this is no bad thing.

As it meanders towards its conclusion, the LP melds into a uniform mesh of pleasantly forgettable ditties.