Taken as a three quarters of an hour lump, the narrowness of her vision is brought into sharp relief, as Keeler-Schaffeler struggles to salvage a bona fide record from admirably restless blogging.

Cheatahs might not have done anything especially new on their debut record, but they’ve delivered it in such incendiary fashion that it’s impossible to ignore.

July is a grown up album--but it’s not a cleaned up one: Marissa Nadler may flirt with the sun now, but still articulates the dark like no one else.

Augustines is a record that was born to run, taking hearts along with it as it goes, and is, to these ears, one of the great rock records of recent years.

Restraint and getting to the point are valuable commodities in music, but Too True misfires in this regard.

Genuinely, it’s the lyrics that are stopping Little Red from being properly brilliant.

Angel Guts: Red Classroom is the typical blend of passion, pain and awkwardness which makes Xiu Xiu what they are. Fearless, demanding, relentlessly subversive.

But for all its wandering into uncomfortable territories, Small Sound preserves the core of Tennis’s charm, and it's savvy of the duo to (hopefully) consign their elements of feet-finding to a stop-gap EP.

What War Room Stories makes clear is that the way forward is further exploration and boundary pushing. Unsurprisingly, given both their sound and their ethos, Breton are not at their best when static, but rather forging ahead--cramming the bare bones of their sound into new and unsuspecting genres and influences.

It's neither forward looking nor, overtly retro or especially of the moment--it just is, in the best sense.

Their least bowel-emptying tremor to date, it does make one anticipate Sunn O)))’s next move with both excitement and anxiety.

A collection of songs and 'works', the latter of which clutter the end of the record with a mess of somewhat ill composed 'classical' pieces, Mind Trap largely acts as a collection of initial ideas, with no songs feeling overly finished.

R.I.P. suggesting a fitting final ceremony, where Ghettoville evokes Actress driven over the abyss, As an obituary, however, it’s a fittingly emotional, opaque and confounding conclusion for a project that has been an outlier amongst a scene of outliers from its inception.

When the beats eventually die down the album shows its soft underbelly.

The 'odds and ends' packaged at the end of disc one feel like Jay Farrar’s discarded solo off-cuts, although disc two’s collection of demos is an intriguing listen; the ten tracks from the Not Forever, Just For Now tapes being what persuaded Rockville (then Giant) to sign them in the first place.

Minor criticisms aside, this is elegant dreampop at its finest, and a worthy introduction to the incandescent world of Snowbird.

If you’re looking for a neat musical reminder that David Crosby is one of the most influential men of his era--and can still sparkle with some of that same musical magic today, Croz is a worthy listen.

All in all, Chiaroscuro is an engaging record that brings new flavours to the palette with every subsequent listen. Prepare to swoon...

Trouble is--in more ways than one--a far more mature album than their debut, and it’s also a far better one.

The truth is Tranquillisers has no teeth; being neither truly reprehensible nor in the slightest bit memorable.

The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink promotional campaign--an appearance on Made In Chelsea here, a cover of ‘Wrecking Ball’ on Dutch radio there--might smack of desperation. Fortunately, In the Silence is more than good enough to dispel any such impressions.

Accomplished and polished, if a little slight compared to its predecessors, AGE doesn't quite equal the consistency of The Smell Of Our Own or Awoo but is, nonetheless, a welcome return for one of this century's finest songwriting collectives.

If the band have got their eyes on a full-length record then they might want to consider varying the pace a little more--it certainly feels like they’ve got at least a couple of rapid-fire numbers in them--but for now, Lowtalker will certainly help to blow the wintery gloom away.

Following on from last year's EP1, this a tougher, leaner Pixies than that of their classic era, missing some of the ramshackle charm on which their most well known work floated.

Fans expecting moving, but wearily delivered, post-rock may be disappointed with that position, but it may just have seen Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra produce a classic. At the very least it is the culmination of a discography that has always been leading to this as its high point.

Transgender Dysphoria Blues demands a more visceral reaction than mere respect. These songs have just as much heart as they do guts, and the LP stands as Against Me!’s first forward looking album since Searching For A Former Clarity.

The dub-littered textures and conceptual frameworks are admirable in their artistic reach, but Jurado’s greatest strengths are found at his most stripped back on Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son. Not coincidentally, the songs which he presents with least decoration are the songs which bear the closest scrutiny.

Despite its lengthiness, predecessor The Fool always felt structurally mighty. Warpaint, while a gentler, more complex thing, leans hard on atmosphere and collapses, elegantly.