Possibly a little early to be wheeling out 'album of the year'-type assertions, but with The English Riviera Mount has set the bar nice and high.

Other changes of note are a full remaster, which has actually made a palpable difference to the plumpness of the bass in songs like 'Hispanic Impressions', and three extra tracks, all released on split EPs prior to this album coming out. They haven't ruined it or anything daft, but also aren't cooking at the level of most of the actual album.

To truly grasp the vigour of Do Whatever You Want All The Time, do it yourself. Grab four mates, pick up some instruments and go nuts. Just don't cut an album from the sessions.

If you had to single out something as being symbolic of 2011, you could do a lot worse than this album.

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.

Nine Types of Light feels like the work of a band more than content to make a good album - a really, very, very good album, yes - but only because they can't be bothered to make a great one.

So where the Share the Joy may inhabit a broad spectrum of emotions, inflicted with anxiety in places and rife with The Vivs' trademark wit, ultimately, it can be viewed as a shiny beacon of joy in an ever growing climate of discontent.

Holy Ghost! is an interesting album and much of the production is loving, well-crafted homage to some wonderfully overlooked disco genres.

Helioscope is another example of Vessels' growing ability to map out enormously ambitious journeys that go beyond the obvious touchstones and influences. In short: definitely worthy of your attention.

A small and totally unpolished gem, sparkling and anti-lapidary.

A good deal of the success of C'mon is down to its solid foundations – its quality song-writing and deft sequencing.

Because however cheesy, however smothered in Eighties patische, what Within Temptation have done is write a collection of killer melodies that are so strong it's almost impossible to sniff at them. I just wish they'd done it with a little more of a personal flourish.

Limp and uninspiring, this is a disappointing effort considering the potential the band initially showed back in 2009.

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.

EUPHORIC HEARTBREAK should at very least cement Glasvegas' status as one of our most intriguing mainstream indie/rock groups and given a chance by those of a more cynical standpoint they might just find themselves enjoying the titular sensations the record promises and, for the most part, successfully delivers.

With Native Speaker, Braids project dreams onto iridescent lakes and marvel at how they glimmer, and the results are every bit as lovely as that sounds.

The album doesn't have that 'grab-hold-and-don't-let-go' emotional pull that would elevate it beyond sounding nice into something to treasure. It's worth your listening time though, because even though it's not always consistently a great album, it's never less than an intriguing effort.

The song quality is set on an upward trajectory from start to end, with the last two tracks also distinguished by their fleshed out arrangements.

Here Belong have depersonalised an already stark landscape, making a record that's easy to admire but hard to love.

Put simply, The Pains...are a pop band with songs about young love and teenage misadventure.

Whilst everyone else continues to pelt fellow pastiche merchants White Lies with sticks and dried lumps of shit, I might unfortunately suggest Cherish The Light Years to be an equally deserving recipiant of your faecal ammunition.

The Kills are back - still covered in dirt, sleaze and reverb, but with a cleaner, softer centre.

Live on I-5 is still a good, if slightly misjudged and mistimed, effort and, regardless of criticism, Soundgarden finally have a live album to their name, even if it doesn't capture the band at their peak.

At this point Rival Schools sound like Nada Surf without the pop nous or OK Go without the videos. Perfectly listenable, perfectly agreeable, absolutely forgettable.

For the most part What Did You Expect From the Vaccines? fails to muster much sense of enthusiasm for itself beyond those first and last tracks.

While there are some moments of transcendentally dazzling pop nous on display on Hunger, it is, fundamentally a cosy, harmless record in a retro stylee, made by an all accounts pleasant bunch of musicians who have enjoyed a fairly smooth --by today's standards--ride to where they are now.

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.

Vices & Virtues is quite some distance from the triumphs of that remarkable record.

Sonically speaking, Hunx And His Punx have hit on an essentially 'vintage' sound without being terribly authentic.

The blueprints of a fun time are here; the melodic and rhythmic groundwork is all in place. All we need now is to have Matt and Kim bring this ruckus in person, rather than through the middleman of mp3.

This is dead-eyed pop with aspirations of being your comfort food but turns out to be a starchy soulless slop.

Erland and the Carnival make good at being a group who successfully accent their modern indie rock with olde world aspects of folk in a much more effective manner than so many acoustic troubadours.

If these average songs existed without the mercurial glow burning beneath the surface, you could unconcernedly dismiss it as another so-so album.

Gimme Some delivers more than a few pop songs, a legitimate pop album written with the subtlety of a band that has come to appreciate, instead of run from, their hit-making ability.

Much like kindred spirits The Beta Band once did, this is a band plugging the gap between pop finesse and esoteric art school gristle without reverting to gimmicks or cliche. And, for Found, that's very little to be surprised about.

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

In shedding his layers of pain, Pearson reveals his heart: broken and bloodied, but still beating, still fighting. We share and revere in his redemption, rarely has something so physically fragile sounded so mighty in its emotional resonance. A truly magnificent record.

It's a solid addition to Greenwood's burgeoning catalogue, and worthy of a listen in its own right.

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.

Kiss Each Other Clean makes Sam Beam four for four--more if you count the EPs and 2009's rarities set Around the Well.

The band has pulled off the difficult trick of sculpting a record concerned with weighty, complex themes and made it sound like the breeziest, most effortless thing in the world: a collection of fleet, shimmering pop songs; a master-class in sonic splendour; a bold, beautiful and brilliant reinvention that should surprise as many as it will enthrall.

Leanness is their ideal body state, dirt under the fingernails a sign of rude health. No doubt Riot Now! will only be purchased by those who know, but it's a commendable album.

Every note is considered and played with joy, care and a sense of craft. Together with the record's beautiful packaging, Cervantine feels like a personal historical document, speaking to and from the soul.

This is a fast-tempo, punk and metal-tinged homage to days gone by and those yet to come and, as a result, may well be the band's best effort since their much-lauded debut.

With a little more focus and a little less self-doubt, The Chapman Family's second record should easily surpass this still pleasing statement of future intent. Just so long as they don't take too much time recording it.

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

Michel Poiccard is an inconsistent, raucous, sleazy mess. But that's what The Death Set do best--and you sense that Beau Velasco would approve.

Completely nonsensical, yes; yet also the perfect way of describing this album as the whimsy-filled journey through life it is.

Whether this latest release is merely another development or a sign of things to come, it is their most beguiling collection of songs for a number of years, a labour of love, and a record that that deserves more exposure than it's probably going to get.

Land and Fixed's deliberately obscured pop elements--irrefutable though they are--come across slightly too studied to tempt that kind of empathy. The album hovers between the audacity of no wave at its most impulsive and the poignancy of crossover artists who've openly borrowed from the genre, reaping the benefits of neither extreme.

It's been nearly two decades at the top for this seminal hip hop group, and on this evidence they show no signs of losing their edge.

My only qualm with The Magic Place is with its song structure. Each of the nine songs starts sparsely, weaves into an intricate texture, bulges with layered loops and then tails off.

It's not a bad record (they knew I was going to say that) and in the Eighties-MTV alternative rock-lite rush of Thrones it does have one genuinely great pop moment, which as far as I'm aware is more than can be said for any of its predecessors.

It is, all at once, accessible as a song, but interesting as a piece of music. But the problem with Let Me Come Home overall is that, as before, there is a bit too much of the former and nowhere near enough of the latter.

With Last Days on Earth, the persistently-versatile Noah continue to set to music those picturebooks of get-togethers, easy plateaus and break-ups that we've all got stored in our heads and add to year-on-year – and, in the process, they've managed to forge some great big tunes. More or less irresistible.

If in the meantime you've lost your copy of Loveless, you could do far worse than listen to Colour Trip.

Like all of R.E.M.'s most recent albums, Collapse Into Now is flawed; a reflection, I'm speculating, on the fact that that band's working process is now flawed.

Boys And Diamonds is an album that takes two different roads. A journey down one avenue finds Rainbow Arabia exploring the unrefined, bespoke freedom of African rhythms, ad hoc instrumentation and unfiltered self-expression.

Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 is not just an inevitable player in album of the year discussions for those with more avant garde tastes; it's yet more proof of Earth's symptomatic tendency to continuously re-evaluate their own legacy and drag themselves forward simultaneously.

In an industry that so often seems dizzily preoccupied with a desire for the shock of the new, real or wilfully imagined, we should be grateful that a bunch of steady-goers like Elbow have continued to perfect their craft and simultaneously achieve such acclaim and recognition.

It's fair to say Smoke Ring...'s reliance on gloom and loneliness rarely lets up. But he's trying to find beauty in it, which I guess is the point.

Constant Future is the sound of a band who, after nearly ten years together, are comfortable with their sound, who know exactly what they're good at and sound like they're having great fun doing it.

We could go on about how great this compilation really is until the cows come home, the Thurston Moore sampling 'Heaven's On Fire' possibly explaining why such documents as Passive Aggressive are essentially vital in rock and roll's present transitional phase.

Civilian has just enough personality to stop it being completely pedestrian.

It's no good for serious contemplation, but then I doubt that's what it's intended for – definitely one to keep handy for a sleepy August afternoon.

While the rest of the album does falter a little towards the end, as a piece of work overall it's one that they should rightfully be proud of.

Different Gear, Still Speeding is not a disaster: by and large it radiates the stolid competence of a band on autopilot, with a couple of flashes of likeable enthusiasm.

Gamelan Into The Mink Supernatural basically embodies that: an album that might take a chomp at your fingers if you reached for the pause button. II is a bit like that, just not all the time.

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.

So, yeah, Tyvek (on this album anyway) are pretty trad-punk. Which is not all that bad. When one wants to listen to something that sounds like old punk rock but isn't actually old punk rock, one could do a lot worse than listen to these guys.

Wounded Rhymes is an album that has not escaped unscathed from its wounds.

Whilst Return to the Ugly Side undoubtedly sustains an affective mood of unease and intrigue, it ultimately falters in its structural underdevelopment.

Three albums in, they haven't yet – but I trust The Cave Singers – I think their next might be the one.

While all the productions presented on End It All show real depth and attention to detail – like most releases associated with Anti-Pop Consortium – the words leave a bitter taste and the faint suggestion that Beans is way better with APC than without.

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.

Even if, as a whole, The Deep Field isn't quite as rewarding as Wasser's first two records, it's an altogether different, diverse and challenging experience. Thankfully, that voice remains intact: vulnerable but somehow powerful.

You probably won't head to the record store for this one unless you've been obsessive-compulsively collecting all the previous releases, but if you do, you won't be disappointed by what you hear on the turntable. After all it's Sonic Youth.

The general malaise that characterises Outside manifests itself in many forms: 'Mighty Long's overwhelming dearth of meaning, the sluggish pacing of 'People You Know' or the shortlived kick-back against mediocrity that is 'Freak Out'.

Played out in full, the record resembles a depressing rummage through early-Nineties record racks--listenable, yes, but without the nerve to tickle more ear-pleasing teats

As part of a longer discography, Smart Flesh will probably stand as a good, solid point in The Low Anthem's career, a sign of the band developing their sound and their songwriting before delivering something truly special.

A top-heavy track-listing does the album's more abstract curios no favours, and some will find it too much to take in in one sitting. But for me, headphones donned and lights extinguished, each submersion is every bit as worthy as the last.

The overall effect is like a lighter, more self-conscious, throwaway, altogether 2011 take on David Bowie's Low, a collision of popstar and avant-production that is all the more interesting for not quite knowing where it is.

Asleep on the Floodplain is billed as a return to that pared-down sound, and it is as close as Chasney has come since to capturing the simple beauty of For Octavio Paz.

While Smith uses this album as an outlet to explore a variety of different styles, importantly he never loses sight of the source material. Even so, in paying tribute to a great artist, Jamie XX has laid significant claims to being deserving of that title himself.

Lerner has every inch of the stadium-indie minefield mapped out and slapped in plain view on his sturdy pop-machine's fulcrum.

En Form For Bla is a record where it's tempting and possible to zone out of and forget that you're even listening, let alone any specifics of sound.

The release of Broken Wave heralds the arrival of a genuine creative force in British folk music, and one of the scariest things about it is that you get the impression that Peel hasn't really even got going yet.

Palace is neither quite as original nor quite as good as the hype would have us believe. As an album, however, its strength lies in its depth of feeling being instantly recognisable to any listener who's ever had their heart broken, broken a heart, or generally had a romantic endeavour that's gone a bit shit.

For now, this just about gets the job done, but a little more variety, even if it's just a return to the noisier interludes of those past recordings, would be welcome next time.

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.

Little Comets have some energetic hooks and straight-to-the-point post-punk choruses that would make many of the resident bands in their native North East proud. There just isn't quite enough to get carried away about.

This is an engaging, rewarding listen that promises great things in the future from our four heroes.

The album is largely stuck analysing lost feelings and past regrets, when it would have been much more entertaining if it focussed on living for the moment.

Computers and Blues, ultimately, just passes the test with a studious recount. It is neither atrociously bad nor staggeringly good: no stand-outs, no teeth-clenching clunkers. It is just okay.

As a collection of songs and sentiments there is a nagging sense that Dulli is revisiting old haunts. Yet it feels reassuring, as Dynamite Steps continues the resurgent course he's been treading in recent years.

Really guys? Next time, try a bit harder.

If gentle psych-pop is very, very much your thing, you may fare better with Jonny, but otherwise the overriding impression the album will leave you with is that it would have made a really strong EP with some judicious pruning.

Whether this is a better record than previous Mogwai releases is hard to say categorically, but it is certainly bolder and braver than what came before it. Yet equally, it is the same trademark moves and subtleties that will make and just as rewarding of repeated listens as its predecessors. Mogwai have released another jumper, but not quite like we know it.