Listeners who enjoy acts such as The Flaming Lips, Pavement, Dinosaur Jr, Superchunk and Neil Young would also enjoy Built To Spill. No, really, they would. And There Is No Enemy would be a pretty good place for those listeners to begin their investigations.

Aufheben may not be vintage BJM but it's still pretty groovy stuff.

For Drab Majesty to take the next step, with an album that resonates with a larger audience, you feel that more depth is required along with more of the melodic excellence provided a handful of times here. If that happens it could even rival some of the best albums your dusty collection from the 80s boasts, such is the potential here.

LP4, without a shadow of a doubt, is the most self-indulgent, unpredictable record of the year so far.

For those prepared to take the rough with the smooth, there are many moments of exquisite beauty to enjoy on this record.

It's a slight album, but by the standards he himself set, and patchy Black Francis is better than no Black Francis at all.

[Majenta is] an album that brings the influence of Prince on his music to the fore. It works well, with a healthy funk quotient present throughout, going with some lyrics that might make a grown adult blush but which stop short of being too risque.

It’s true, the constant drone can prove a bit wearying over the course of an album. But Can I Get A Pack Of Camel Lights is an album that will reveal its charms to anyone willing to make the effort.

Brasstronaut don't leap between genres so much as they shuffle, but Mean Sun, at its best, is an album that quietly exhilarates.

More polished and yet somehow less exciting. Nonetheless, The Other I is an album which offers plenty of eerie, shadowy pleasure.

As a homage to all the good things about ’60s easy listening this ticks all the boxes even if it feels too much like a re-hash of times gone by.

All in all, passably decent party music, but lacking in the divine touch its title might imply.

This may not be an album you’d revisit often, but we should be very glad that it, and its unique, maverick creator, exists.

A rousing and eye-opening full-length debut.

The music of London Grammar continues to bewitch, soothe and inspire in equal measure, and when Truth Is A Beautiful Thing is at its best, it fully lives up to the title.

Some long-term fans may miss the studied cool of the band’s earlier material, and there’s a definite sense that, as good as they can be, Bar Italia are still a work in progress. Yet it’s a work in progress that can, when they hit the right notes, sound utterly thrilling.

It is hard to ignore how limited, both musically and lyrically, the Darling Arithmetic tracks sound when played alongside their predecessors. However, despite its limitations, Villagers’ latest LP does succeed in producing some very worthy reinterpretations and weaving them seamlessly together, which is often easier said than done.

In ramping up their scope--a laudable and understandable idea really for a second LP--Widowspeak instead often lose sight of their strengths, too often not seeing the wood for the trees. Indeed, it’s when they’re seemingly less sure of where they are that Almanac excels.

As a whole, it’s a robust LP, deeply in touch with the zeitgeist of an era marked by, indeed, surviving against, the odds. While surprises are few, fans will find plenty to satisfy here.

The music on Hippies is formulaic, but in their ability to work so perfectly within a rigid aesthetic, Harlem hint at real songwriting ability.

It is arguably one or two songs too long, but otherwise AudioLust & HigherLove is a strong pop music record – disposable, yes, but with a songwriting sensibility and deep house production that means it works on several levels.

It’s all rather wonderful nonsense--playful, engaging and not always entirely successful.

It may have been written and recorded in double quick time, but Won’t You Take Me With You is still an impressively assured, fully realised record.

It should be an overblown, riotous mess, but it's perfectly held together by musicians seemingly forged as one by long nights in spit and sawdust boozers, and in singer Craig Finn, a lyricist of remarkable poise and eloquence.

How Did We Get So Dark? has plenty of appeal, possibly just edging the debut, and is the sound of a band enjoying their niche, but how long that can last has to be the concern here.

It probably would have come across better as a slightly leaner offering that was all killer no filler, but at its best Physical develops on his work with Factory Floor to create a distinctive style of his own, an unsettling retro take on house music that yields many fantastic results across the record.

Their music is always beautifully rendered, and there is plenty of interest for the listener, but the hang, their most distinctive weapon, feels underused, its tones not bought into the foreground as much as might be expected.

There are sections of this album where the excessively excessive for excessiveness’ sake draw attention away from the parts that are genuinely fantastic. Not that Prince cares what anyone thinks. He proves with this album that he will experiment and make the music he wants to make.