False Readings On is a calmer, more pensive, and more inward-looking affair than Cooper’s recent Inventions releases.

The quality of the music is without question but the means of consuming it sometimes hinders the listener from soaking it in at a favoured pace.

Red’s a grandiose statement of intent, crammed with aspirational symphonies that run the gambit of popular culture over the past 40 years without ever succumbing to grating pastiche.

With a record possessing such an untamed imagination it’s fair to say that Abe Vigoda’s maddened prattle is a talent worth nurturing, whether soil in their teeth or blood on their knees.

Though harder, happier and a little more direct, Animal Joy is above all a Shearwater record: swooping, eloquent, concerned with nature.

Emotional ambiguity never sounded so good. Business as usual then.

There's an inherently joyous delivery to them that offsets their recurring themes of age and mortality from start to finish.

A spectacular triumph.

In Music for Insomniacs Berry has created a synth fantasia of dreamy soundscapes for the wakeful, but with a greater dynamism and more grandiose scale and momentum than most ambient music.

Devotion contains just enough variety to make for an enticing listen.

Neo, the Seattle group’s debut, is as painfully Sub Pop as it gets, and it’s painful in a wonderful, wonderful way.

Given his richness of experience before he entered the studio, it makes sense that the nine tracks here are as so assured.

After multiple listens, the desire to rip apart Martin-McCormick's stitched together freak is assuaged by a desire to submit to it and play it on repeat, to revel in its drive, energy and emotion.

End Times is a break-up album that lashes relationship breakdown onto societal collapse, and rarely has Everett sounded so plaintive, so utterly broken down.

Trick is comfortably Jamie T’s best album so far, showing off every element he can and touching many bases without ever feeling like the contrast is jarring.

Polished production and an ironing out of the music’s creases creates a less-relaxed feel than we’re used to hearing, but there’s also a sense of warmth which was largely missing from the previous Jicks-aided album, "Pig Lib."

The Clearing is a woody, creaky, but ultimately gorgeous folk record.

That sunrise-smile that hits before the first half-minute mark isn't blighted by the slightest smudge of cloud right up to minute 45, this is one of our best writers and the soul and centre of why he's always mattered so much. Heartily recommended.

Angles doesn't feel like an over-indulgent record, nor one that speaks of a dearth of ideas.

You can argue that it doesn’t break new musical ground, and you can keep your noses upturned if you like, but with consummate poise Alkaline Trio have cemented their reputation as this genre’s premier songwriters. It’s not too late to get a heart-skull tattoo.

If you liked Beirut, you’ll love this.

This Old Dog is the sound of an artist on top of his game. An artist shedding every inch of wackiness from his bone and sounding all the better for it.

It's Blitz reveals just how much the trio have grown and how well they know exactly the strange angular planet that their music inhabits.

It’s a confident, naive, sensitive journey that plays to all of the strengths of the artist without sounding ostentatious. It’s an emotional listen, but a necessary one.

Yes, this is a collection of Tracks and Traces, meticulously edited in the late-90s, and again more recently, so that none of the musical ideas outstay their welcome--in this respect, it’s not quite an album, and when the less melodically surprising tracks fade out, you feel like you’re moving along to the next case in the exhibit, whereas other albums by Cluster, Harmonia, or Cluster & Eno sustain a mood, and often a weird nervous energy, with their generally more urgent rhythms.

‘Armed Love’ then is The (I)NC’s straight ahead rock record but a superior one at that, one with a great deal of heart and soul, and one that should propel them onto the global stage.

An unexpectedly outstanding and uplifting experience.

It comes across more as a work that’ll maintain their admittedly excellent level of consistency, rather than proving itself to be the defining album of an already blessed year for music.