As an album Candela has everything: it's energetic and adventurous but these adjectives are synonymous with Mice Parade’s constant journeying through music.

There are some great moments on this record, but by the end they’re lost under swathes of synths and looking for a sense of purpose.

A thrilling ride nonetheless, unlike many others you’re likely to experience in 2013.

Despite something of a slow start, Letherette builds into an expansive, absorbing album, spanning a huge variety of influences and threading them together impressively within a coherent framework.

It is a blazingly enjoyable record, the most purely fun album the band has made since Fever to Tell.

Save Rock and Roll isn't life or game changing but it's probably the album FOB needed to make--if only for themselves--and as an honest portrait of the roller-coaster ride that is FOB's career, it finds them on a high.

As the Richard Harris exhibition showed, by enabling us to momentarily confront our own mortality, morbid artistic meditations on death can be oddly and overwhelmingly uplifting.

The Thermals are still a band in awkward transition resulting in a record that is reliably good by their own decent standards, but which fails to fulfil its very apparent potential to be great.

Whilst arguably Beam's most consistent album for some years, there are fewer moments of raw beauty here than on past excursions, resulting in a whole that is somehow less than its impressive component parts.

If you had the latest Pig Destroyer record high up on your ‘Best of 2012’ list, if you hold John Peel’s Napalm Death and Carcass sessions close to your heart then Abandon All Life will be a record for you to cherish. If not: move along, there’s nothing for you here.

Despite Jello Biafra’s best intentions, White People And The Damage Done seems to settle for righteous belligerence while falling some way short of being a worth soundtrack for the anti-globalisation movement.

It is a joyous, emboldened return to form and one that reminds us of what a treasure Edwyn Collins is.

Free The Universe reeks of chasing the success of Baauer’s 'Harlem Shake'--shich, incidentally, came out on Diplo’s Mad Decent label--like a rabid dog. As such, it’s just another notch on macho rave’s bedpost.

The playing is astounding throughout, with Barnes and Trost turning a dizzying assemblage of strange instruments into a strikingly cohesive whole.

Wakin' on a Pretty Daze is one of those rare examples of an artist’s uninhibited self-indulgence resulting in an LP which plays firmly to their strengths.

Paramore feels far more human and honest than anything the band have committed to tape to date, and even at its most intense, the record feels intimate (or at least like a gig happening in the back corner of your mind).

The sound of this record is one that may have gotten them a record deal, but will not get them much of an audience.

While it’s very much business as usual--groove-led-Stooges-acid-pop with added screaming--it sounds so gloriously Mudhoney it offers a thrill akin to Popping Candy fizzing in My Little Pony blood.

Depeche Mode’s biggest crime is that they're just a bit boring.

The Leisure Society have certainly woven a kind of magic here, but with all their era-hopping it falls a little short of the climaxes of their live performances.

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

Amygdala is a thoroughly immersive album, possessing so many layers that it seems to change upon each listen.

The Ascent doesn’t actually feel like a Wiley record. That’s mainly because it’s a struggle to find him amongst the gaggle of voices that spit their way across vapid efforts like the Chip and Ms D collaboration ‘Reload’ and the pedestrian Far East Movement-mauled ‘So Alive’.

A refreshing debut.

There is a lack of substance in the middle of the album as tracks fly by, melting into each other, and because the album bombards us early on, it doesn’t pick up until the final stretch.

Shaking the Habitual is an entity entirely unto itself; a warm chaos that drinks you in.

Further exploration and perseverance reveals a collection of tunes rich with details, awash with well honed musical ideas, thoughtfully arranged vocals and expression filled lyrics.

Unfortunately, Indigo Meadow is a so-so affair that never quite fulfills expectations.