Despite his various left turns, the one constant in Carlson’s work is the unrelenting hypnotic power of repetition, and a conviction that “the best music feels like the melody has been around forever.”

It’s very difficult to do anything new in psych but with their energy and enthusiasm, not to mention some interesting work with electronics, Wand have managed to bring a surprisingly entertaining offering to the genre.

When they do get it right, as they frequently do on The Physical World, it does provide you with more than a simple nostalgia fix.

This album ought to see Kate Stables recognised as one of the most compelling voices in alt-folk.

West, when left alone to his devices, is able to transform emotion into the esoteric, colluding synthesis into vibrant, organic swaths of sound. Rhythmically taking jabs like hesitation marks, throwing caution to the wind.

Reflection is quintessentially Eno. A beautiful, thought provoking and introspective body of work that is composed in a way that is still as unique and as radical as the man himself.

With pluses so few and far between, it’s a struggle to make it through these 11 tracks without feeling nauseous from all the sickly pop filler.

It’s not great, it’s not touching, it’s not... well it’s not anything but autopilot AC/DC, as they have been for many years now and it’s none the worse for that.

Nothing unduly groundbreaking here, yet at the same time always brutally refreshing.

These 20 minutes are of a higher quality than many, many bands manage in a whole career.

Weird Sister’s ebbs, flows, peaks and troughs: a shape-shifting, nuanced LP that could be described as derivative, but never formulaic.

If you're already aware of Koushik's work, this record may not be a revelation to you but if you are unfamiliar with the author, the laid-back magnificence of Out My Window is a fine place to start.

Pushing her quirks even further and adding new sounds to her toolkit are obviously admirable attempts to deepen her interest. But there needs to be more in the actual material to bring the listener out into the cold with her.

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.

Somehow all these disparate parts click together and make Government Plates the most captivating Death Grips album yet.

On One-Armed Bandit they’ve mutated into an even stranger beast; a chimera constructed of parts from wildly different musics that somehow work as a whole and which should only really exist in the most fevered imaginations.

Being a Liars album, it is magnificent.

With the musical inspiration behind it all available to hear, the whole exercise ultimately seems a bit pointless and leaves Danger Mouse looking more a dilettante than a genuine auteur. Nonetheless, Rome remains an occasionally breathtaking pastiche.

With the pop landscape becoming increasingly homogeneous, more artists need to experiment, and the variety displayed across Froot's 12 tracks is impressive.

A little shallowness is fine by me, but Rocky's studied, humourless delivery is harder to swallow.

It's as if Hospitality are using these songs to channel gnawing anxieties about their futures on one hand, while using insightful lyricism and breezy pop stylings to romanticise the plight of barely scraping together rent on the other

If only the album had been made up of songs where they’d allowed the songs to be low key and interesting, it could’ve been really good.

This debut--while not a technically poor album, boasting as it does pop hooks aplenty if you truly focus in, beyond the sometimes irritating vocal tennis--sags where it should soar, dips where it should peak.

Assured, short and ultimately sweet, Friendly Fires is a glib reminder that you don’t need an M6 underpass, New York penthouse or guestlist to have an all night disco party, and remind us there’s no shame in getting your groove on.

What they’ve made is a bold body of work that sounds effortless and odd and sophisticated. What they do next is likely to be stadium-filling and bonkers and brilliant, but it matters little when what they're doing now is so sensational.

It sounds a bit too much like it was made a year ago for Cloud Control's folk-rock to really stand out against new releases from, say, Okkervil River, or altogether newer acts like Grouplove. That doesn't mean Bliss Release is impossible to enjoy--far from it--but it does make it hard to imagine many new listeners making the time for it, and that's a shame.

As an album, it's divided into eight tracks but there's no sense of division whilst listening to it, it's one of the most seamless pieces of music I've come across all year.

Reinforced by the layered repetition that comes with recording on tape, this album finds its grace by turning heartache into cheeky, fork-tongued refrains.