Nocturnes comes off as a monochrome drag.

Some will decry Valhalla Dancehall's essential familiarity, but on their fourth album proper British Sea Power are a band unique, complex and confident enough in their own right to remind us why we loved them in the first place whilst making modest refinements to their sound.

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

Four's own structure helps this insisted variety stick together, resulting in another piece of theatrical songwriting that confirms Harvey's genius as an arranger.

Much as it tries to be quirky and difficult, it is in fact a wonderfully satisfying listen.

There are delights to be discovered here for fans of Mac DeMarco’s grinning sleaze, the reedy pop of Best Coast and the straight up tunefulness of the UK’s largely overlooked Weird Dreams and it is clear that The Growlers, when not obsessing over gimmicks and borrowed tropes, are perfectly capable of graduating to become a great, insightful pop band.

This sunny half hour lacks an overarching aesthetic or a big, ten-minute cathartic blowout.

The result with For Crying Out Loud is that it has bright moments but ultimately adds to the collection of below-par efforts that will do little to extinguish the elitism scorn that they attract.

It has flashes (man this is writing itself), but they are like good new Simpsons episodes: few and far between.

Suuns don't need to be a Queens of the Stone Age, but they have the potential to do more than just throw a cool clutch of songs together.

It’s as accessible as his debut, that much is true – Tricky’s welcomed the pop infection that’s spread through his system since the bleak Angels With Dirty Faces – but it lacks a standout single voice.

The Evening Descends isn’t actually a concept album (at least, I can’t find any hard evidence saying it is), but the mixture of overblown seriousness and misfiring silliness, cut with a bludgeoning lack of subtlety and some well-worn-out running themes, mean it sure as hell sounds like it would’ve been if it’d been given half a chance.

Stopping short of outright pop and heading in a direction that has yet to fully materialise, let's hope things eventually progress for Ra Ra Riot as well as they started.

Washed Out always stood above his supposed peers; the more he progresses out of his shell, the farther his voice will soar clear of the soon-to-break wave of generalised chillwave nonsense.

While it's obviously been personally cathartic, you have to think that it's far from the best record Benjamin could have put out.

Danger Days is a record that too often passes by with a few cursory nods of the head and the odd prickle of emotion and swell of pride that is soon washed away by another ill-considered chorus repeat or bashful refusal to drive for the summit. It ambles, it slouches; it says little of consequence.

What Neufeld shows again in The Ridge is that the violin and her superbly expressive playing is more than enough to make for a great record but it shows this at the expense of making the other elements thrown in occasionally feel superfluous or underdeveloped by contrast.

Where this album sets itself apart is with Roche, her contributions otherworldly and out of time, strange Wicker Man chants both charming and sinister. Her siren song laces Amen & Goodbye's best moments.

A patchy return, then, from a band whose prolific status never looked in jeopardy before. While it's good to have The Coral back, it's unlikely that Roots And Echoes will win them any new converts.

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

Leave your prejudices behind, shut your eyes and just enjoy.

Listening to 'Blueberry Boat' is a little like careening around an enormous multicoloured funfair - joyous, unpredictable, kaleidoscopic, tacky, and at times scary and sinister, sometimes all in the space of one song. But even if it occasionally makes you sick, it’s a thrilling ride nonetheless.

There is no such contrast on this album, nor much of a sense for a distinctive or special musical moment.

Don't listen to it because it's dubstep, or R&B or soul or from a singer-songwriter who isn't a David Grey clone, although it's all those things. Just listen to it because in any genre, it's a great album.

The thing is, Mogis’ ‘Americana’ treatment of Lavender Bridge’s core material all too often saturates each song, soaking though to the core of Hynes’ material and threatening to set in to rot.

There are moments worth latching on to but for the full effect, go stand in a club with him and watch him perform.

Sistrionix could be a foundation for something much better or something infinitely worse, but for now Deap Vally don’t particularly deserve your hate or your love.

Intuit is, unfortunately, probably not a high profile enough release to be mentioned in the end-of-year lists nearly as frequently as any of the aforementioned albums. But it’s easily the equal of any of those releases, in terms of its breadth of vision and depth of emotion, and it really establishing Knopf as a supremely talented and truly heartfelt songwriter.