Metz make you want to rock and then roll and then rock a bit more. By the end of this album's 30 boisterous minutes you'll feel absolutely exhausted.

The sequencing allows the listener space to breathe at the most opportune moments, and its leaps from ambience into adrenaline-soaked enthusiasm for hand-clap-happy high-jinx are worthy of celebration.

It’s not a game-changer of an album, but the game is certainly changing and Apparat is playing for the right team.

In spite of its gloomier mood, it’s a record every bit as spirited as Half Way Home, and possibly even more affecting.

An album that would sound as though it could have been made anytime in the last five decades were it not so immaculately produced, recalling Dylan and Springsteen and pretty much all of Almost Famous without ever descending into pastiche or mere homage.

Emotional, great and exhausting.

The whole affair is deeply involving, full of odd punctuations and wonderful non-linear compositional structures.

Far from being frozen in time, Wildflower shows a willingness to move forward with a sense of personal history, but unhindered by obligations to it.

It’s not just that Darwin Deez have recreated their first record, but made a more mature work, building on the intellectual learnings from the music they created in between.

Thanks to the calibre of the line-up’s musicianship, and Keenan’s ability to write lyrics that don’t insult the intelligence of his audience, the gems on Thirteenth Step outnumber the filler.

Not another album updating the great musical ideas of the past, then, but an album updating the great sentiments: to tell someone how much you need them and that you’d be lost without them. If you’re not in love right now--an album to fall in love with, until then.

There are few who could delve into such weighty issues without succumbing to empty rhetoric, but it's testament to Wyatt's unpretentious approach that he pulls off the trick while retaining a lightness of touch that makes Comicopera such a consistent pleasure to listen to.

It might not be their best-ever album--Phrenology can still claim that title--but Rising Down finds The Roots reinvigorated, more passionate than ever.

It’s not a showy record, but one that when peeled apart reveals itself to be a darker and more engaging album than on first listen. But not only that, as it might also be the best thing they’ve ever done.

The best way to approach this band is to stop comparing them to the usual reference points--instead, it's far more rewarding to accept Offend Maggie as a land of its own making, something to be indulged, explored and, finally, cherished.

With such a range of musical stylings on one record, No Shape occasionally sounds more like a collection of songs than a unified album, at times this can be a bit stifling to the listener. ... But these are minor flaws in a record with many a moment of gorgeousness.

Once again: there are six more songs on this album. Six songs that really aren't bad at all. But once your needle has dropped to the end of side one, it's only going back to the beginning again.

If you're tempted to go for a heavy dose of head nodding psychedelia any time soon, you probably won't find a better example released this year.

It’s a five-tracker with bite, with venom; it’s a reminder that while de la Rocha might age like the rest of us, the fires in his belly haven’t come close to being doused by mundane revivals of his most famous group’s mosh-happy hits.

It is a record which drinks deeply from the well of the past but could only have been made today. Megafaun have cast off the weight of the canon and are spreading their wings.

This is powerful stuff, showing that not only is Anders Trentemøller one of the best in his field but also a master of the album craft. One for the long haul.

Living With Ghosts, probably his most punishing set of tracks to date, is a British techno album whose ancestry lies in (to name only five) James Ruskin, Oliver Ho, Surgeon, Regis and Planetary Assault Systems.

At just over half an hour long Innundir Skinni is a modest little record compared to the self-indulgence of Joanna Newsom's latest or grandiose ambitions of countrymen like Sigur Ros, but its charms are plentiful and in her own humble, but distinct, way Olof Arnalds confounds expectations.

Far more than with his first album Overgrown is focused upon his songwriting rather than his technology, and it’s much stronger for it.

The music operates less as an end in itself and more as a counterpoint to the keening, whispering, screeching, gasping voice-as-expression-of-humanity: within the silicon maze, she suggests, there’s a ghost trying to get out.

Actually, the best way to experience what Mister Mellow is really about is to give the visual component of the album a go first. Yes, the audio more than stands up on its own, but the artwork courtesy a variety of incredibly talented artists really does a more comprehensive job of fleshing out Greene’s overall vision.

Where some records are maybe just too personal for public consumption, it's the uneasy fragility contained within Get Well Soon that renders it such a fascinating experience, highlighting Sarabeth Tucek as one of the most candid songwriters of her generation.

Genius, as you know, is all about the detail. The backing vocal on 'Revolving Doors' – if you're still struggling with the 'song' thing, this and 'Amarillo' offer consolation in the form of two of Albarn's loveliest unfinished melodies.