The Family Sign is a strong continuation and addition to a powerful series of modern rap albums. It's bigger than past records and heavier, a nice combination that genuinely puts the listener into an emotional flux.

The music wisely remains sombre; eschewing the cheesy crescendo you kinda fear is coming at the chorus only for it to stick to gloom as the vocals reach to be optimistic.

Much like Fleet Foxes, the music contained within isn't particularly ground breaking, but what is done is done well.

Magic Chairs is an album that understands the importance of harmonies, and the importance of the score.

Flume’s decision to try his hand at everything, whilst demonstrating his evident enthusiasm and frequent successes, comes at the price of the album’s coherency. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of potential here.

It’s just brilliant.

For Wilderness Heart remains, ultimately, a collection of ten tracks of roughly equal length, each taking roughly one classic idea and pickling it in (admittedly, impeccably realised) production gloss and traditionalist technique.

It’s a confused effort, with the songwriting faults, misguided lyrics, and the foolish sidelining of Cage the Elephant's greatest weapon (Schultz’s voice) torpedoing the vast majority of tracks.

If you had Nada Surf down as a one-hit wonder indie band that should remain sidelined to compilation tapes, then the magnetic glory of this album will turn your head.

With Couples they've managed to turn two years of inter-band heartache into an ambitious, forward-thinking pop record that tops their debut by quite some distance.

On An Object, No Age push their weakest attributes firmly into the spotlight; a move indirectly admirable for its continued ambition, but one which makes you wish they’d go back to being punk rock, rather than just punk.

These wandering riffs, devastating drum rolls and rollicking motifs will stick with you, but primarily to serve as an appetite-whetting taste of where their makers may venture next.

Pantha du Prince has gone one further and created a piece of music that soothes and entices even the most impatient of modern ears.

That said, it's not all killer; a song or two in the final third fails to match up to the calibre of the rest, and at times the lyrics can descend into mild cliche, but overall it's evidence of a young man with a great understanding and love for a particular period giving it his best shot.

It's not a perfect record in any sense (the occasional lyrical couplet falls awkwardly), but within such punk atmospheres, flaws perversely become strengths.

Beach House have created as profound an invocation of the sacred and the sentimental as you’re ever likely to hear.

All in all, it’s the usual captivating chaos.

In between almost every track the calming voice of an unnamed narrator tells us a bit more of the fantasy. Such a pompous, and quite frankly pretentious, idea shouldn’t work, but the sheer chaos of the group’s music wrapped around each piece of spoken word makes everything flow beautifully, somehow.

An inviting, maturing album that still shows enough vitality to still be classed as a good rock album.

Like the three series of Deadwood, you could spend time picking between each of the three Brokeoff's releases, but they should instead be seen as a single evocative triptych, although one that would nonetheless leave enthusiasm for another blood stained instalment.

Original? No. Enjoyable? Yep.

It’s a good record, it honestly is. But good grief, it’s a hard one to be excited by.

The rock these four men so easily brandish is every bit the equal, if not the better, of that deployed by so-called peers half their age.

Keeping a band going for 25 years is no easy task, and there’s not many in the world who can still keep pushing forwards, but without losing what it is about them that’s so unique. Tortoise manage that weirdness, that jazz infused strangeness, and that downright groove that they’ve always traded in, but re-mould it for 2016.

Pantha Du Prince describes The Triad as 'about more human ways of interacting... about meeting up and jamming' and, in many ways, it does resemble something close to a jam session where unpolished but great ideas are worked out to be developed more fully later.

The blokes have always goofed too much to fluke sensuality, but there’s some spark of intimacy, which ties off Marble Skies with an unexpected bow.

Treat it like a work-of-art, you might be moved to see shapes too. Treat it like a comeback album, and you might find you miss the point. Open your minds, your ears, your energy--and it will show you incredible sights.

I only wish that they had given us something with a little more substance rather than the bland mess we’ve been left with.