Hardcourage steps on from the broken UK garage rhythms that typify much of FaltyDL’s earlier work and into the sort of soulful, pleasurable house grooves occupied by the likes of Four Tet and Jamie xx.

All boxes ticked for hip retromaniacs, but certainly not “the next millennium”.

While it’s not quite all gold--over two CDs the listener’s resistance to slap bass and super-smooth vocals may be tested--the standard as a whole is incredibly high.

A few more like ‘College’ and ‘Figured It Out’, with their emotional weight and memorable choruses, and they’d be onto something.

It’s a groove and a mood piece; a funk report for the ages and the future--and, after less than 40 minutes (including the bonus tracks), it drops out of space at exactly the right moment.

There are no real bangers here, but for once that’s not a disappointment cushioned by wafty ballads. Instead the low-key, moody production throws the spotlight on the words and the images brought to play by Beyonce as serious album artist, encompassing bulimia, post-natal depression, the fears and insecurities of marriage and motherhood, and lots and lots of sex.

The Fall: quantity and quality.

At its best it’s like sifting through a treasure trove of half-remembered gems, the chief reference points all coming from the colourful side of the ’60s.

Any attempt at bombast is pinned down by singer Liam Palmer’s weary baritone and wry poetry. Intriguingly glum.

Dougall relies too much on overly simplistic lyrics, and it gets a bit annoying.... But this is a minor flaw in what is otherwise a strong second album from a band in the ascendancy.

It’s smartly done but strangely rootless, roaming far and wide but without a place to call home.

You Were Right pretty much fulfills all the criteria for being a successful radio rock record, apart from the one about having a chorus you can actually remember 12 hours after hearing it.

Welch displays little dancefloor nous. Conversely, these cheerful jumbles of loops and kickdrums aren’t the kind of ambience you can sink into.

Bejar has a wondrous lyrical facility that it’d be a shame for him to forsake--but he’s also possessed of a beguiling, breezy touch that acts as a musical lingua franca here.

Some isolated moments make you want to vom a bit--Groove Armada trombone on ‘Many Rivers’--but ‘Love Inc’ neatly reworks a snatch of Lil Louis’ house classic ‘Club Lonely’ into insistent Balearica, and you can’t argue with that.

An enjoyably kaleidoscopic experience, Better Ghosts pays good homage to its influences but doesn’t strive to do much beyond that.

In between, it’s a wade through thick sonic sludge, but the oncoming doom of ‘Endless Drops’ is bleakly tuneful and ‘He Looks Good In Space’ is soothing.

Good Graces may not be reinventing the wheel, but it leans out of the hammock to give it a good spin.

While it’s stronger than the messy ‘Born This Way’, Artpop feels little more culture-quaking than a good collection of fun, silly, well-crafted pop songs.

Jamaica Plain is inessential stuff.

It’s wrought with haunting, high-stakes emotions, but the strength of Scott’s voice means it never feels melodramatic or plainly vulnerable.

As ever, Wareham’s work sounds like the model of stateliness and simplicity, but look beneath the surface, and you’ll find a deep, rewarding roil of complex emotional currents.

Temple’s unassuming sound can often hide how experimental he is. Not so on the lysergic electronics of ‘Sue’, which swirl like watercolour dreams.

While the Nicolas Jaar, Liars and Lindstrøm remixes add synthetic space to ‘Sleeping Ute’, ‘A Simple Answer’ and a Daft-ly disco ‘Gun-Shy’ respectively, it’s the fragile new tracks ‘Smothering Green’ (a muted, modernist Cole Porter clatter), ‘Taken Down’ (falsetto Fleet Foxes) and the two versions of ‘Everyone I Know’ (one churchy, one space-jazz meltdown renamed ‘Will Calls (Marfa Demo)’) that are the real treasures here.

At times Siskin’s story is also the album’s downfall, the music suffering from a lack of diversity despite being heart-wrenching. The high points salvage things.

Rick Rubin’s final Primal Scream-gone-hip-hop remix of ‘A Light That Never Comes’ saves Recharged from disaster, but you might need resuscitating after this lot.

There’s been a hope that he’d one day return to his dream-pop roots. Stars Are Our Home isn’t that, but there are shades of his past on the twinkling, self-titled opening track and ‘(I Don’t Mean To) Wonder.'

No-one actually ever put out a request for an indie Pet Shop Girls, but thank goodness The Blow decided to do it anyway.

As Minor Alps, Hatfield and Caws have made a gorgeous debut that sounds as if they’ve recorded it in each other’s pockets, their tones exquisitely matched, the songs intimate.

Kurt’s going for a mirror image of the album here: reimagining some songs (‘Air Bud’ becomes ‘Wedding Budz’), expanding others (‘Snowflakes Extended’), adding reprises and, thankfully, including a brand-new track--the lovely ‘Feel My Pain’.

It’s skillfully realised, but feels like a soundtrack missing a movie.

Shangri La is basically more of the same, and for many of his fans, that’ll be more than enough. It would be a shame, however, if it was enough for Bugg, too.

It’s spunkier than 2008’s ‘Sebastian Grainger & The Mountains’, but still meek in comparison to DFA 1979.

Cupid Deluxe is a shop window for the future sound of pop. But perhaps he should quit trying to be a Prince-like polymath and concentrate on being a nimble-fingered production wizard instead.

I’m A Dreamer is another stellar effort.

She’s as frustratingly twee as a hailstorm of cupcakes. Her second album’s adventures into electronica on the squelchy, sulky ‘Kill My Darling’ and the unsettling ‘Next Summer’ are more remarkable.

The result is a great album that simultaneously wears its bruised heart on its sleeve (the lovelorn should be warned: it’s a real tearjerker at times), and sugars its melancholy with opulent musical arrangements.

Mug Museum, her third full-length, is as wonderfully weird as any of its predecessors. And there’s now sparseness in her music, plus a cool, controlled confidence that showcases her knack for the surreal more than ever.

Opening track ‘Back To Land’ wouldn’t be out of place at an Eric Clapton gig, closer ‘Everybody Knows’ is dreary, and ‘These Shadows’ could be a Mazzy Star throwaway. The rest, however, is gold.

The result is well produced and enjoyable, but it would be nice to see personality and innovation--two things The Prodigy rarely lacked--emerge among the Altern-8 tributes.

When the songs descend into repetitive strummed choruses and tired imagery (“Ain’t it so good to be young in America and watch the world burn”, on ‘If The Moon Rises’) you realise a bit of rock-star pomp could’ve livened things up a little.

They swiftly slump back into portentous jams made for mourning failed crops, made worse by the ye olde farmhand Yoda-isms of Eric Pulido.

Allow Caramel to ooze out and it’ll rock you into an unsettling trance.

She’s reminded us exactly why she’s important: she’s a hyper-intuitive artist with a mongrel sensibility who bows to no one.

The initial feeling that this album is destined to be one of their many jokey, disposable ventures dissipates slightly as Osborne’s near-peerless ability with a brain-alteringly great riff takes hold.

To be clear, the good outweighs the bad here, but Tinie has lost a lot of the charm that, when he turns it on, makes him so appealing.

It’s nothing new, but it is fun.

Vocal-free, Chance Of Rain sees Laurel Halo once more stepping back behind the sounds of her machines, but it’s the depth of those sounds that speaks volumes.

Smoke And Mirrors [is] a dense, torrid quicksand of clattering shoegaze chaos at the heart of this six-track stopgap between Brooklyn duo Widowspeak’s celebrated second album ‘Almanac’ and their soon-come third.

Fortunately the ponytailed Dane has a distinctive voice that’s both tough and vulnerable, and enough personality in the four tunes on her debut EP to stand out from the crowd.

Get marooned with them, while you still can.

Intimate, unpolished and worth getting to know.

It’s a showcase for Pusha’s cold-blooded flow and crammed with memorable lines.

While Negativity is an apt word to describe the impact of the events that inspired Deer Tick’s fifth full-length, it’s not an overwhelmingly dark record.

Every track here follows the same pattern over identical lackadaisical rhythms, her vocals never rising beyond a low-slung murmur with most of the lyrics drawing the same conclusion: she’s bored.

Follow-up No Blues finds the band settling into a more consistent sound.

Good moments include the drama-packed ‘Just Another Night’ and the fun pop of ‘On A Roll’, but neither resembles the formulaic trash cluttering the rest of the record.

Reflektor is cleaner, sharper and dancier than anything the band have done before.

This excellent eighth solo album again finds him honouring tradition while taking pride in his struggle to find his own path.

Hip-hop may rule the locker room, but it’s the sensitive beats that make the girls swoon.

Their truck-stop talk of tumours, drunk moms and Isaiah 11:6 focus the album on Deep South degradation, but the lush Lemonheads-pop of ‘Drive’, the stoned drive-in glam of ‘That Man’ and the girl-band psych-blues of ‘Baby Mae’ lend this record the tint of a narcotic and poetic take on Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Tusk’ with Jack White on fuzz and Phil Spector on shotgun.

Ducktails have been labeled ‘chillwave’ and ‘hypnagogic pop’ due to their naval-gazing appeal. Sadly that appeal is lacking from this release, as is any sense of urgency, leaving Wish Hotel languishing in the middle of nowhere.

It’s the sound of the genre at its most bonkers, with the scene’s most brazen producer churning out never-before-heard sounds that range from the acid-ghetto-house of ‘Acid Bit’ to the footwork/jungle hybrid of ‘I’m Too High’. Impressive stuff.

Moby has created an album full of saccharine strings, endless loops and narcoleptic synths. The mind boggles.

His ninth leaves behind the wearing synth experiments and lo-fi oddities of recent years for a set of witty piano-pop songs.

A couple of slower-paced moments, ‘Khattaba’ and ‘Mawal Jamar’, drag a little, but 'Warni Warni' is undoubtedly the best Syrian-folk techno banger you’ll hear this--or any other--year.

‘The Yellow Roses’ typifies the lull in the album’s mid-section, and is all the more annoying when you realise how special this record could have been with a little more quality control.

It is a serious album for serious rock fans, even though taking anything seriously isn’t exactly Andy Falkous, Jack Egglestone, Jimmy Watkins and Julia Ruzicka’s strong point.

[Lemmy's] voice is a bit croakier these days, but the band’s riffs are as pummeling and unforgiving as ever.

It's a well-assembled album, and the steady trance-like flow of 'The Forest At Night', and the eiderdown of sound on 'Transcend' are absorbing.

If you’re a fan of the band’s stoner charm and enjoy guessing lyrics to songs as they meander from your speakers, there’s fun to be had here.

Overall, Shulamith is a record that takes on serious issues but always feels engagingly personal, with ideas set to the kind of alt.pop melodies you couldn’t forget even if you wanted to.

On the whole, Red Hot + Fela works both as an introduction to Afrobeat, and as a reworking of the genre, making it a fitting tribute not just to Fela’s music but also his indomitable spirit.

Sheffield's ever-progressive 65daysofstatic have outdone themselves here, loading their fifth album of megaton guitar instrumentals with electronic styles.

BOATS II is your standard 2013 Southern hip-hop record, complete with ticking beats (‘Extra’), Auto-Tune (‘So We Can Live’) and eye-rollingly explicit lyrics (‘Where U Been?’).

It’s not awful, just bland, and lacks the bite that electro-pop records need to be lifted out of the purgatory that is mediocrity.

Across is nonetheless a very fond retread around the outskirts of a dank, delectable career.

A rush job, perhaps, but it’s still the sound of three guys having the time of their lives.

He’s mastered this stylistic skittishness and you’ll do well to find much dispute about his talent.

Although not as immediate as his collaborators’ work, his introversion pulls you into his unique soundscape.

Drizzy’s candid lyrics about battered egos and insecure relationships were refreshing early on in his career, but the persona is wearing thin as he recalls how rich his melancholy has made.

As a whole, it’s winningly Lynchian, and ballsy enough to open with an 11-minute song.

Two properly good moments out of five isn’t a great ratio, but at least it’s telling us that The Men’s wagon is still rollin’ steady.

He flirts with past glories on the throbbing ‘I Am Dust’, but Splinter never sounds ahead of the curve he created.

It’s fun, but not the comeback it could have been.

Turn it off halfway through and it’s brilliant.

New is the sound of an old dog having fun with some old tricks.

There’s something very ‘mopey American teenager’ about Lightning Bolt.

A whiff of unoriginality aside, what this EP offers Parquet Courts addicts is fresh meat to chew on, signs of innovation and further evidence that these New Yorkers are one of the world’s most essential new bands.

It’s minimal without being clinical, catchy without being clichéd and, thanks to the influence of MBV and Neu!, full of sonic left turns.

the promised sense of youth and experimentation rarely surfaces. If anything, Feel Good goes too far the other way, sounding insipid and polished in comparison to The Internet’s debut.

While it doesn’t reach the impossibly high standards of their back catalogue, there’s enough promise to suggest there are good times ahead.

Somewhere beneath the unconvincing sheen of these songs there’s a great band trying to break out. Maybe next time.

Yet as her sounds grow bolder, her lyrics become more intimate. Mesirow is in confident control of an inviting world that’s all her own.

Bitter Rivals is their toughest and most focused work yet. It’s also their poppiest, which is very much a good thing.

There’s new confidence here, and a sense that she’s stretching herself musically and lyrically.

If only the rest of the album was as inventive [as 'Spend Some Money'], instead of a derivative box-ticking exercise that features Dizzee going on about his "willy" a lot.

Tracks like 'Torture' borrow far too liberally from A$AP Rocky's cloud-rap aesthetic to be considered original. But otherwise, Old is a perfect example of why 2013 is a very exciting time for hip-hop.