An activated rage focuses and elevates the album from standard melodic post-punk to a timely, resonant mission statement.

Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II represents not only the most overt and successful attempt to capture the patience, subtlety and fluidity of Earth's talented cast, but also the most accurate document of their patient, stoical and determinedly psychedelic ethos.

O’Connor has a clarity of purpose and a truly unique sound that is perfectly suited to his vision of suburban nihilism.

There is something both abstract and individual and yet universal about the way that Harding writes and presents her trials and triumphs of the heart.

Luck In The Valley is a brilliantly strong record that reminds you both of Rose’s own majestic ability, and the playful power of these seemingly ancient and ‘primitive’ musical forms, something Rose understood as well as anyone.

Everything sounds fresh, new and different, but every song is still recognisably Wilco; it just sounds like Wilco at their best.

This album is a love letter, written in elegant cursive (and blood, obvs), for anyone and everyone that holds the underground to their heart.

Patchy, perhaps, but there's plenty over the course of American Gangster to suggest that, even if sullied by a lack of prolificacy, at least the Brooklyn beatnik is keeping the right company again.

Severant's biggest strength is its optimism--very few of the tracks here fall into introspection, with nearly all of them boasting a crystal ball looked into by the meanest of hawk-eyes.

As a genre post-rock is certainly stubborn and persistent in the face of rocky times for guitar music, but its value is no illusion if Do Make Say Think’s latest is anything to go by.

Slave Vows is--easily the finest guitar album The Icarus Line have produced since Aaron North precariously sprinted across a row of trembling amps to crash out the window and join Nine Inch Nails in 2005.

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

This is the next record you have to buy. Absolutely. Unequivocally.

In covering just three to four years of Lee Hazlewood's less readily available material The LHI Years mines a rich seam of individualistic pop genius, even the rump of which betters that found within the entire back catalogue of many artists.

Life Will See You Now doesn’t quite hit the heights of 2007-era Lekman, but in his mid-thirties, Gothenburg’s favourite son remains a vital artist. May it not be another five years before he returns.

An endearing, very likeable record indeed, and a confident first entry under the Flock of Dimes handle.

The group do not always connect perfectly on this album but when they do, it’s magical. Hive Mind celebrates musical collectivism and succeeds when it is at its most collaborative.

So slick is the production and so smooth is the transition from one moment to the next that Andorra suffers from an apparent reluctance to take us by the scruff of the neck and rattle us out of our mental Laconia.

Perhaps it doesn’t thrill the same way his younger records thrilled with their wiliness and exuberance; but perhaps it was disillusioned by that type of thrill, and elected for something a little more reliable.

Whether this will go down as one of Motorpsycho's best albums (and there are a lot of contenders for that crown) only time will tell. Clearly though, they are a band as vital as they've ever been.

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.

Like an unexpected fist in the face from a five-year-old, Ponytail’s boisterous pop-punk jams are saved from saccharine overkill with some unexpectedly tight hooks, plus a paradoxical, feathery lightness of touch that makes their music feel orgasmically flush even at its churningest and most densely impenetrable.

Transgender Dysphoria Blues demands a more visceral reaction than mere respect. These songs have just as much heart as they do guts, and the LP stands as Against Me!’s first forward looking album since Searching For A Former Clarity.

If you’ve any interest, whatsoever, in rock music in any of its subgenre forms, you need to afford Blood Mountain some considerable attention.

There is a lovely, childish innocence to how much fun you can hear them having on this record, revisiting the music that once made them dream of making music their life’s work.

Teen Dream is kind of MOR, it would go down a treat at a dinner party, there are boring bits and the doleful DIY magic of the debut seems to have more or less run out. But it’s shot through with more than a handful of heartstoppingly wonderful moments.

The whole record possesses an industrial feel, be it in the synths or the drum machines or the moody-sounding atmospherics that are peppered throughout the record. Option Paralysis, may not win back fair-weather fans, but they've again proved why they're regarded as one of the best in their field.

Nine Types of Light feels like the work of a band more than content to make a good album - a really, very, very good album, yes - but only because they can't be bothered to make a great one.