On occasion, it’s actually borderline thrilling but those moments are too few and far between.

If you like your pop music intelligent, layered and tinged with drama, this is an album you can’t afford to ignore.

Devastating until the very last note subsides, this is arguably The Telescopes' finest record for over a decade. Prepare to be pulverised.

The four Californians smother their country-fried rock with more southern tropes than a gravy-sodden biscuit, from the bits of blues and gospel and old timey R&B.

Green Lanes, the second album from Ultimate Painting, is really, really nice. It doesn’t do anything special, or new, or especially original.

It's a stunning collection of the most forward thinking dance and electronica I've heard all year.

As an alternative introduction to one of our greatest bands, or a gateway towards getting to know them a little better, it is excellent. If you’re a superfan already, then the novelty of having this particular collection of songs you already own in a nice gatefold package is about as far as it will go.

It’s left to the previously-released singles to save Dornik from disappointing mediocrity.

A strong bottom line is that Whine of the Mystic is, above all else, an enjoyable album.

In Cascade the loop is repeated fairly cleanly, although the piano is drenched in a magical, woozy and slightly unsettling echo; while it is certainly quite relaxing and takes you on a wonderful eleven minute journey there is something oddly otherworldly and plaintive about the whole thing.

The plot is complicated and would take innumerable listens to get the complete story without the aid of RZA’s interludes, but the storytelling is vivid and full of colour.

There is the air of HEALTH now being at a cross roads. Their rampaging style of yore feels a little constrained and tamed by the booming production and ‘nice’ singing, but at the same time they are beginning to write some pretty stupendous ‘proper’ songs.

If Lovers Know initially feels like it’s dipping into the golden age of the American songbook, then this must be the most fruitful panning for gold to be released in eons.

Abyss proves that there's still much work to do in the dark side of alt rock. Chelsea Wolfe is surely ahead of the curve.

Waters is on fiery form, and you get the sense that by 1992, he’d finally settled into his own corner of the world a little more.

What Another One does provide--in abundance--is proof that DeMarco has the songwriting chops to back up his reputation as one of indie rock’s last true characters.

In this debut, she emerges fully-formed yet ethereal, a spirit slipping between silky and sassy, between clattering beats and electro grinds.

At his best Turner can be immensely charming and gloriously witty. Sadly, these facts only makes the dreary, alarmingly soulless retreads that populate most of Positive Songs for Negative People all the more depressing.

This is perhaps the most deeply rewarding album from a singer songwriter released this year. Each time you think you have the measure of it, it takes things in a wildly different direction.

When Grossi nails the sweet spot between these two poles the result is nigh-on perfection (Curtis Lane’s 'I'm In Your Church at Night' and 'Hanging On' from 2011’s gorgeous You’re All I See to seize on the most obvious). The disappointment with Mercy is that he never quite finds that spot to the same extent.

While Matt Bellamy drowned in pretension and tone-deaf bombast, Stickles astutely embraces the grandiose, distilling his troubles into some of the sharpest songwriting of his career and a spectacular display of ownership.

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

This is a beautifully composed album and one which frequently feels like a blessing that we even get to hear it at all.

An album-long search for new ways to express old thoughts, and far from any prescribed formula of tempos and buggery that would entail techno or drum n’ bass or other electronic information media.

Although Blood only features ten predominantly short songs, the myriad flashes of brilliance render the album’s brevity irrelevant.

The more restrained, and slightly less expansive feel, of some of the tracks here perhaps makes the record as a whole feel slightly undercooked in comparison to its predecessor. Nevertheless it is another fine entry into the enviable discography of one of the most sadly underrated of British songwriters.

The lyrics ring true enough, but not forcefully enough to really resonate with any depth.

All Tense Now Lax, then, is brilliant precisely because of the way it flits disconcertingly between the two extremes presented in its title, between the constant and unrestrained tension of technological progress and the contrasting looseness of our day to day existence alongside it.