Like other effective instrumental LPs, The Most Beautiful Ugly compiles a series of vignettes into one coherent stream.

When it's good, it's very very good, and when it's bad, it can veer from dull to irritating and back again over the course of a single verse. Thankfully though, there's enough of the good to make this a hugely enjoyable album overall, and more than deserving of your attention.

Perhaps Nightmare Ending would have been a more interesting record if Cooper had let himself off the leash rather more and explored ‘flawed’ ideas and sounds more purposefully.

It brings with it a deftly executed change in tone that we've only glimpsed in the past and a refreshing emotional honesty, which not only feels mature but enduring.

So while Blue Lambency Downward may not be punk in body, it’s certainly filled with that same defiant spirit.

Occasionally they over-indulge, and it’s certainly not their best LP, but it's easy to forgive them given the obvious love that’s contained within the tracks here.

This 1989 may work wonderfully on its own terms (if Adams had written this himself it would be his best album) but its real strength is in highlighting Swift’s immaculate writing for those of us whose relationship to the original is intellectual rather than instinctive.

It’s a tricky album to judge, considering its best moments are easy to overlook, but there’s enough to make this worth a listen and suggest that better days might lie ahead.

With the singular exception of the mournful, aching track ‘Mawal’, To Syria, With Love is a celebration of the music of Omar’s home. With the life and vibrancy of the compositions necessarily tapered by the sobering, harrowing reality of the honesty in his lyrics, he has brought us an all-too-real-life case of tears on the dancefloor.

It’s been said that Let’s Stay Friends is more pop than anything Les Savy Fav have put out before, but it’s still tight-fist tough.

As The D.O.T., the material on Diary has an honesty of its own, at times perfectly balancing Skinner and Harvey’s styles.

These songs don't linger too long, and the album--with its 36-minute runtime--feels efficient and complete.

Above all, I can't help but feel that Wiley is still too much of a creative character, one relentlessly trying new and different things, to offer the sort of polished and succinct singles that would stick with a daytime radio audience. This unrelenting originality at least is something to be celebrated.

Just like Sky Blue Sky and Wilco (The Album), there's songs that are more ambitious and some that are more successful, but all of them fit as a cohesive whole, just as on every Wilco album so far.

It’s pleasantly like listening to a lost Bobby Darin or Andy Williams recording session where they took the wrong medication for shits and giggles.

This is a work oft-enchanting and tenderly relayed: the sound of a first hand both confident and considered, whetting the appetite for more from this young American with a stately flourish.

This is a surprisingly engaging record that highlights Ian Brown as an underrated songwriter and arranger, and underscores the point that while his enthusiasm for creativity is as infectious as ever, Spike Island and its ilk are unlikely to be revisited in the forseeable future.

three of the five new tracks are worth getting hold of, but the rest will be familiar. Does it hang together as an album? Definitely--it's a pretty accurate summation of the band's career so far, and would be a terrific way to introduce yourself to them if you haven't already done so.

Tunng have been moving towards this downbeat place slowly, and their arrival here shows a real cohesion in them as songwriters and as a band. It’s less the sound of a band losing their edge and more the sound of them finding their zen.

The surreality and absurdity of dance music from the apocalypse is a joyful alternative to the surreality and absurdity of disaster movies and real life disasters.

Geocidal is a fascinating listen purely for the fact that it acknowledges no boundaries: musical, geographical or otherwise. You may not love it; you may not even like it; but you'll pay rapt attention regardless. What it lacks in immediacy, the duo's debut album makes up for in sheer spirit.

In Each and Every One is a whirlwind of an experience that elevates as much as it does bury you in fear, you'd be foolish to write this off.

Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know isn’t quite the gaudy-T-shirted teambuilding horror it threatened to be. But Múm would do well to note that a quiet, solitary hum can be just as stirring as a rousing chorus.

The lack of cohesion is not a criticism per se, but rather a recognition that The Air Between Words is not really an album in the classical sense, as its parts are greater than its sum.

Thanks to a couple of moments where they give in to the anthemic impulses, the rest of Slave... can afford to drift along at its own singular pace, with rewarding results.

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

Perhaps the highest praise of Lights Out is that it portrays the gamut of romantic and sexual longings and emotions of adolescence with the honesty that you would expect from someone who recently experienced them, but with poise, melodic nous and a musical maturity that doesn't forsake youthful vitality.

It's more adventurous than the album prior–-and generally more successful in this eclecticism than her debut, certainly--yet that Torrini’s best work lies ahead of her seems indubitable.