After 40 minutes you’re still not totally sure what it is you’ve listened to. This could be great, messy pop music, or just as easily be something you dreamt, dozing in post-coital bliss with a detuned radio in the background. Whichever it is, you’ll just be glad it exists. If, that is, it exists at all.

As a whole, perhaps unsurprising to those well-versed in the band’s skyscraping sonic feats, Electric Lady Sessions is an affecting appetiser with riveting moments strewn throughout the 12-song compilation.

An album-long search for new ways to express old thoughts, and far from any prescribed formula of tempos and buggery that would entail techno or drum n’ bass or other electronic information media.

It takes some talent to blend elements of metal, prog rock, classic electronica (Brian Eno has been an acknowledged influence, and Rogerson will be releasing a collaboration with him in the near future), techno and hip hop into an album, but Three Trapped Tigers have pulled it off so convincingly here that it makes some of their previous material look unfairly clunky in comparison.

Stripping away all of the surrounding noise, it allows Krauss to bring her dizzyingly sweet voice to the fore, showing that Sleigh Bells are not just a one trick pony and that these songs work on more than just the basis that they are great at shaking windows.

Constant Bop has an air of effortless accomplishment and fresh brilliance, which can only come from hard work and a fastidious attention to detail.

This is an essential purchase for any Rancid fan.

Under all its punk ferocity, however, lies a grander message of mindfulness and mental strength. That’s an immeasurably powerful theme from two musicians both known for bringing vulnerable accounts of severe anxiety and depression to hip hop.

Stanger Today is the sound of a band doing what they want, knowing how to do it and, most importantly, having a blast doing it.

For now though, as an album, as a piece of art, it’s beautifully painted but the colour palette needs to expand substantially.

Inevitably, it’s a mixed bunch of tracks taken out of context without the pictures to go with the sounds.

Stage Four is quite possibly Touché Amoré’s best album yet. They have once again one–upped themselves into crafting a fierce record which would do all their families proud.

On Let them Eat Chaos Tempest has cemented herself as a poet/rapper of the highest order, who isn’t happy just make the masses smile, but to challenge and make them think and love too.

It’s a frighteningly powerful album that will be adored by open-minded newcomers and "Miss Machine" converts alike.

Laurel Halo’s most ecstatically esoteric effort to date, which, in the case of this artist at least, is another way of saying that is both her best and her most joyously listenable.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have made a soundtrack that is haunting, mechanical and beautiful.

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.

As the Richard Harris exhibition showed, by enabling us to momentarily confront our own mortality, morbid artistic meditations on death can be oddly and overwhelmingly uplifting.

If Fall Be Kind is noticeably less hooky than "Merriweather Post Pavilion," it sounds just as ravishing, and offers an equally cohesive whole.

You know a good sound when you want to take out a second mortgage to buy headphones good enough to appreciate it.

Stark but lush, these are pop songs for moonlit lakes, soft throbs to bob in while no one else is looking.

Animal Collective have made the album I hoped they’d make, and even that it’s autumn and summer’s over.

All together, Alpha Mike Foxtrotis a lot to take in at once--over five hours of material, and Wilco enthusiasts will have heard much of the contents already.

Under closer scrutiny, a three song lull holds it back from being as powerful as it might have been, but I’m happier listening to this flawed, fumbled and underdeveloped Kanye record than I am a thousand other records that came out this year and didn’t even try to change the world.

This is not a flirtation but the sound of the Necks entering genuine rock territory... and it’s brilliant.

Ten is just Ten, and I guess for all their reservations, the band have come to accept that: there’s no mystery to the new cover, just Pearl Jam in plain view, big shorts and all.

What’s really on display here is a well honed, experienced band flexing their muscles and creating tightly controlled, good old fashioned rock ‘n’ roll music (of a rather cerebral variety) on their own terms, free from the weighty plague of fashion.

There is something to be said about a record like Quiet Signs, which finds its maker willingly dwindle and fade within the corporeal world’s fog and decay. It may be an old fashioned idea, sure, but it’s one that will undoubtedly age well.