The Habitat EP shows the heart of a band who are effortlessly versatile and willing to mutate, experiment and push in whichever direction they goddamn please.

Days of Abandon lets the songs breathe and ultimately speak for themselves.

This is their best yet and possibly the best of the year.

Black Pompadour is not a bad album, it’s just flat; it’s delivered with little to no passion, meaning that listening to it in its entirety will be a test of patience for some.

What we’re left with is an 8/10 EP stretched way past the point of interest, five or six songs in you start knocking half a mark off with every fresh coat of same-old. A worthy idea, but one you’ll rarely reach for twice.

Amongst the nine tracks are some of Black's best work but although the album's ambience shifts - from the darkness in 'Black Suit' and 'Long Song' to the whimsy in 'Volcano!' and the breezy 'Break The Angels'--the consistency does not.

A glossy Sixties pop sheen hasn’t just been splattered wholesale over every track but instead nicely integrated resulting in a new and engaging, but hardly incongruous, Rumble Strips noise.

While Broderick’s prescription is perfectly phrased for its purpose, as a stand-alone collection of music it has accompanying adverse side effects, i.e. it's not really a very enjoyable listen.

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

Glow, then, is generally a mixed bag, gothic, cinematic and made for large spaces and big stages.

Vezelay's sensual poetics melding into Rix-Martin and Paradinas' lush electronica on an album of retro-futuristic pop that improves with each spin and shimmers bright with widescreen radiance.

Pattern of Excel is a difficult album. It subverts your expectations and deliberately goes against what convention would suggest in terms of direction and vibe.

his is The Veils as you would expect to find them, untroubled too much by changes to their formula. And that’s just the way that most of their loyal fans would probably want it.

You can’t say it’s a great album for 2009 when it would have been a merely good one in 1981. But it is good, fitfully very good, and when considered alongside Cremations, this two year old band have build up an undeniably impressive body of work.

Thankfully, One Thousand Pictures was well worth the wait.

Confident song structures, accomplished, fearless vocals and beautifully put-together instrumentation, Heartstrings will coax the band's early fans into forgiving them for their previous offerings.

A New Nature breathes more freely than anything this group has ever produced before and, as such, showcases a more confident and coherent band than one may reasonably have expected.

X-Treme Now is an intriguing, often entertaining bit of art from a duo that seem locked into a long-running lark that sometimes, perhaps accidentally or even incidentally, delivers the genuine article, sometimes makes do with platitudes and sidelong, distancing glances, but more often than not is a summery slab of fun.

While Caer stumbles over artifice at the gate, Twin Shadow eventually rebuilds a vibrant pallet to unload actual confessions that other lonely listeners can relate to.

For all the sonic acrobatics though, it’s a record that feels like it’s missing something vital.

There are those that will love this record, for whom it will be the gateway into earlier, richer work. But for those of us who have already been spellbound by what Ben Bridwell can create, this is simply not enough.

There's nothing wrong with making demands of the listener, but there's little to no reward to be found across these eight increasingly alienating compositions.

While the instrumental augmentation in most of the songs is impressive, the setlist feels less immediate than the band's past work.

Thankfully there’s enough genuinely high quality Fall material here to ensure that any newcomers to the band are fairly sure to move directly from ‘Quit iPhone’ to ‘Frightened’, ‘The Classical’, ‘New Big Prinz’ or another classic Fall album opener.

Whereas at times in the past it seemed like he was searching for his place in the crowded field of modern singer-songwriters and in danger of sounding too much like others, here he clearly finds his own voice. ... This is a really fine album.

In concert, the results of these expanded horizons will sit among an enhanced and emboldened set list. On record, though, this feels an uneven entry; too self-conscious in its attempt to transcend the expectations of contemporary Welsh language music.

Overall, Clash The Truth isn't so much a departure from Beach Fossils' playful innocence as a more a mature statement of intent documenting Payseur's coming of age as both a musician and songwriter.

It may take some perseverance to get on board here with Gibson’s vision--but, if you achieve that, then you’ll be rewarded with a record that’s as beguiling as it is strange.