While the first offering holds a quite tangible anger and general gloom within, 'The Lyre of Orpheus is a much more mellow affair, contemplating existentialism and the like.

This is music that lingers in the mind and seeps into the bones. And while you can view it as melancholic, Scally and Legrand never dwell on sentimentality or allow anything to sink into despondency.

This is an album that can (and I think will) transcend musical taste and age range... 'Lifeblood' may well live forever as one of the best commercial albums of the bands career.

Their adventurous spirit is in such clear abundance on Open Here, that you could almost forget that this is a band with a stronger grasp of the basics than most.

There is so much to go back to, beyond cheap thrills and catchy, yet dimensionless, hooks. An album for the ages.

What Xiu Xiu demonstrate throughout Always, is the way in which they can lay down so starkly how terrible life can be and how fucked up one can feel and create something amazing, angry, political, fierce and defiant out of all of it.

You’ve [Lana Del Rey] found your own style and run with it. It’s amazing to see someone so free and in control.

The fact that Smith rarely untangles The Fall from the cryptic absurdist approach that has become his stock-in-trade, to head toward this type of profoundly personal material, only makes it that more affecting when he actually does deviate from his path most traveled.

How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident is arguably the band's finest hour.

It's more than a return to form for SSLYBY--it's potentially their finest hour.

Everything sings here, no matter how dark the matter at hand.

Scott Litt's crisp, clean production always had a plangent directness that suited Out of Time perfectly, and any remastering tweaks are pretty imperceptible. Disc two here is entirely comprised of demos, many of them instrumental, and certainly not something to repeatedly listen to in a single sitting.

Ultimately, Cheatahs haven't just upped the ante with Mythologies, they've created one of this year's most definitive albums and probably increased their own burden of expectation tenfold.

The Hunter is a pitch for the mainstream--but it doesn't compromise on Mastodon's core ambition.

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.

Bright Like Neon Love feels like the record The Human League could have made if they’d remade Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours in 1985. It’s like the soundtrack to the best party you’ve never been too, but always wish you had.

There’s nothing else like this out there that’s as perfectly realised as this, and to draw upon previous, albeit indirect precedents, that leaves only one outcome from this unruly verbiage.

Loss in its many forms shades Ruminations, and the matter-of-fact nature of its acceptance makes the record all the more devastating.

For Skelethon is the kind of record an artist only makes once in their career; the culmination of long-gestation, departing loved ones and having to innovate out of your comfort zone.

While there is still plenty of those addictive sonic downpours, The Colour in Anything is arguably Blake’s most create cloudburst to date.

Hands down, ‘Pawn Shoppe Heart’ is the record to blow their contemporaries out of the water.

Sleep Of Reason is darker, deeper and more daring than either Coexist or Overgrown and more emotional and soulful than The xx or James Blake. Ninja Tune won't release a better record this year.

Whatever happens next, she can rest assured safe in the knowledge that together with her beau they've conjured up one of 2012's--or any other year in recent memory--finest debuts.

It’s not what you might have expected or even--on one or two initial listens--have been hoping for from Kendrick Lamar. But this is an artist in his absolute prime: artistically, lyrically and musically.

Travels... is a 33 minute monster without a slither of excess fat, and the best thing Andy Falkous has ever put his name to.

It’s disarming, actually, how an album this heavy can be so kinetic, so compulsive, so--the word seems wrong, but funky.

Black Dice still belong in the DIY basement space but with Load Blown they’ve made their most accessible album yet.

Ultimately, this is the best thing Dulli has put his name to since Blackberry Belle.