Despite being an album that appears to be made up of such personal and reflective lyrical themes, the tunes themselves mostly rattle by in a flash with less regard for steady contemplation.

Do It is simply a case of Clinic once again doing what they do best; but with a new-found vigour that rediscovers the confident swagger of earlier releases while building upon realms explored on later excursions.

Throughout the album Ronson plays the role of puppet master to an impressive collection of musical talent.

The Age of Adz is not an unqualified success; occasionally it does feel like a little too much, and until the dust has settled it is difficult to say where it will sit in his discography as a whole.

This is essential listening and a likely cult classic for years to come.

The thing is absolutely laced with wall-to-wall bangers.

You could accuse Cymbals Eat Guitars of being derivative, but the idea is that all of these influences are broken down to component parts and then reassembled into something different. Some of the pieces are still recognisable, others disguised or twisted.

Everything’s so crisply atmospheric, and Stelmanis is such a talismanic presence, that the album’s momentum never flags, even if there’s sometimes a minute or two without a hook.

What Live At The Hollywood Bowl, and its parent movie, shows us is their primal power. The sound and the fury (not to mention the banter) that conjured a roar unheard since, both on and off the stage.

What is most interesting about this record, apart from it’s self-assured collection of off-beat laments is the amount of exciting doorways it flings open for the future.

No Luscious Life exceedingly delivers on all the promise Golden Teacher have shown so far in their still relatively short careers and is perhaps the moment that breaks them through into a wider audience.

When the mood is right, Trust sounds like one of the purest doses of emotion you can experience.

Questions aside, it sounds badass; dope, even, like any good hip-hop record should.

They’re not inventing any new wheels at this stage of their career, but dEUS are delivering the goods at a level where established fans will immediately click their subtle steps forward and newcomers can get a grasp of what to expect from prior long-players should they decide to delve into the catalogue.

This is music that the listener can plunge into and summon up her own images and sense from.

For while the aforementioned songs all have recognisable parts borrowed from their peers, they all also contain moments of genuine beauty, fear and grandness which demands you to fall into hell just as Dante's Devil demanded him to.

Will this please die hard fans? It surely will, being filled with the signature Don Broco charm and sound, but shows elements of growth and diversity--as a third album should. The year is off to a good start for them.

It’s a well-rounded album that defies the notion of a man being allowed to rock himself to sleep on the porch of rock’s sappy dotage.

To conclude that Bromst is a triumph of inventiveness is too easy. It is wildly inventive, but what impresses most is that for all the levity, Dan Deacon has managed to impressively reign in his flights of fancy.

A refreshing debut.

On this record they have taken a bold step forward. It shows them as a band with greater vision and ambition than they first seemed and one who want to lead conversations rather than follow them.

Yet despite being a busier effort than …To The Beat of a Dead Horse, it's probably on the whole more accessible due to a sharper production job and a new found clarity in the vocals.

Kiss Each Other Clean makes Sam Beam four for four--more if you count the EPs and 2009's rarities set Around the Well.

The album, while inevitably stuffed with humour as per the MO of any good rap set, is as dark as coffee, especially as it comes to its close.

Far from being just a gifted synthesiser experimenter, then, Sarah Davachi is increasingly establishing herself as a multi-faceted explorer of the many liminal terrains of minimalist music. Gave in Rest is a work of disarmingly simple, yet often extremely profound, beauty.

Fading Frontier is another superlative achievement from a band who are, unfailingly, one of life’s great mysteries.

Chardiet’s electronic manipulations are subtler and more thought out than those of many of her peers. This, ultimately, means that Bestial Burden, like Abandon before it, deserves to be considered as near the top of its class.

It’s not so much sidestepped the perils of the second album as trampled them, taking the sound that won the band all those packed festival tents and driving it forward, matted and bloodied like Miles Teller at the end of Whiplash, no longer weeping and withdrawn but pulsing and alive. And it’s genuinely exciting to hear.