Mvula’s keenly awaited debut record is ornate, gentle and clearly composed by someone with vast musical training. So it’s a shame that so much of it sounds lightweight and shallow.

While Cox is no stranger to gut-spilling, it feels as poignant as ever on this record.

OK, at Disneyland. Yes, on drugs.

Ghostface calls upon most of the remaining Clan members, switches the formula occasionally and hey presto, yet another minor Wu-Tang classic 20 years on from their debut.

The musical results feel more like a touristy package holiday through Jamaican dub history.

It's still party music, but for a different kind of party.

Head for Home if you want to hear where drum'n'bass, dubstep, garage and old-school jungle meet in 2013, but really just pick it up if you're looking for more bangers than a barbecue at a firework factory.

Ultimately the confusion and convolution is all part of the charm on this adventure into a world of history and imagination. It doesn't hit the peaks of 'Stainless Style', but is still a record worth investing time in.

It's impressive that singing about the careless abandon of life seems as natural as ever for him, even as he hurtles towards 70.

Simply put, Strokes have every quality rock'n'roll requires from its finest exponents and Is This It is where they come together.

Only 17-minute finale 'Friendly Society' wears thin, its ideas forced and spread too thinly across clunky sub-sections. The rest, though, is languidly atmospheric, peaking with the moonlit disco jam of 'Sideways Glance'.

It'll never be your favourite album, but you'll wish your adolescence sounded as carefree as this.

Despite the surreal subject matter Johnston's soundtrack for his own comic book is romantic and deeply human.

That's not to say this is a bad record, just one that's clearly in love with pop music, and one that'll require another leap of faith from the band's hardcore fanbase.

At the moment, her music is best consumed in blog-sized chunks, not as a stodgy 48-minute album.

An intensely personal record, the process of listening to the dozen tracks here is as intimate--and sometimes as uncomfortable--as reading pages ripped straight from Frank's diary.

Phoenix are no '80s copycats, but they occupy a sweet spot where influences and their own flashy banks of synths and treated guitars sound meaty and perfect together.

Despite some misfires--notably 'Blue Neck Riviera', which features a strange programmed hip-hop beat and a Diiv-style jangle accompanied by some semi-rapped verses--it's an admirable listen.

Clearly fed with water from a pool full of wide-reaching influences, Mind Control is a record that reveals more about itself with every listen.

Wayne's 10th studio album sees memory of his charisma and sparkle during that mid '00s era fade further.

it's largely a successful experiment, with sumptuous keyboard melodies and live drum breaks replacing the heaped samples of old.

At times, there's the sense Tyler's charisma outweighs his content, and as such it's probably up to Earl to deliver the group's first bona fide hip-hop classic.

It's eclectic, but the linking thread is insistent dancehall beats and a sense of dumb, colourful fun.

A confusing, intriguing record, then. Not their strongest, but there's a transition underway.

More laidback than their most feted, punk-derived early albums, this nevertheless compares favourably with the new 'un by Meat Puppets fans Milk Music.

Sam Beam's fifth album sees him taking further, grander steps in the shiny loafers of a cheesy 1970s crooner with a fondness for symphonic folk and a soul groove.

The Irish duo are joined by an unnamed vocalist on a couple of tracks, but the instrumentals are the best work here.

There are plenty of familiar garage-y thrills to be found here, but a new sense of menace too.

As ever, their key skill is being extremely dark as well as mega poppy.

The jangle and thrash of Terry Bickers’ guitar and the wistful air of it all could come straight from their self-titled 1988 debut.

A Bad Wind is a meticulously crafted album.

Things are less enjoyable when musical boundaries are pushed--and at 25 songs long, albeit with nine of them shorter than a minute, it’s a joke that wears thin.

Where this album tries for a harder, more adventurous sound, they’re still stuck with one leg in leather trousers.

Cyclops Reap keeps the party going.

But Paramore have always been more pop than their fans may like to admit, and this mainstream rebirth feels like a transitional step to something gigantic.

There’s also clarity in the lyrics--some of his most direct yet.

It’s not an easy listen, but it may just be one of the most nuanced, soothing and adventurous of 2013.

Sporadically brilliant, perhaps it is The Knife’s Inland Empire--a fearless piece of work with its own logic, one that shears away all safety nets.

While it’s a good listen, every song drags.

Ready to break noisily out of the underground, the quintet have made one of the year’s most accomplished metal albums.

Only the LP’s soaring ‘Intro’ hints at greatness, and despite the raw talent on display, the dose is diluted and the sum total falls short.

The highs on The Men’s album are higher than Milk Music’s, but Cruise Your Illusion is the more cohesive statement.

Where White’s ‘Shakin’ sweated sassy evil, Moon’s is hamstrung by contrived effort.

It’s the sound of the man inside the ball feeling an unknowable fear and trying to accept it. The rest of us should join him in his strife, if only to enjoy that psychedelic drone groove. It’s an anxious riot.

This is BSP in fine, if not exactly boundary-shoving, form.

For every James Blake moment there’s a Jamie Woon one, and Seabed could do with less mopiness.

Putting the fun in grunge since 1988, Mudhoney drink from the familiar well of Iggy on their ninth album with outrageously enjoyable results.

They’ve stopped trying to do indie rock by numbers and gone back to the sort of idiosyncratic weirdness that made us fall for them in the first place.

Ride Your Heart manage to transcend the dated California girl stereotype while knowingly plugging into what still makes the myth so appealing.

While we were expecting an opus about how the coalition government’s really lame, he’s delivered a relentless bosh-pop thump that’s more ‘Bonkers’ than bonkers.

MM flash their heavy roots on ‘Miracle Temple Holiness’. They come close to pop brilliance, however, when they go full hillbilly hustle on 'White Sands.'

Early Fragments is exactly that--a bit fragmented, given that none of the songs were written to sit alongside each other. But as ‘Seer’ suggests, there could be quite a future for Fear Of Men, and this release could start it all.

The resultant album is exactly what you’d expect from this mix of personnel.

Overall Change lacks Wire’s usual focus.

Time and circumstance have not blunted his abilities, and Understated is lyrically empathetic, musically emphatic.

It’s flawed, it’s imperfect and it’s downright odd at points, but it is packed with belting tunes. Most of all, it’s fun.

Afraid Of Heights takes the formula he toyed with there and beats it into something more coherent, focusing on decorating his punk with this new sonic tinsel.

Chvrches are effortless and close to svblime.

A lot of it is quite earnest, dealing with subjects like rejecting the mainstream (‘Run Boy Run’) and, on ‘I Love You’, unrequited love.

The AM radio pulse of the title track, the San Franciscan sway of ‘Old Friends’ and the loveliness of ‘Country Queen’, with its sweet acoustic fade into ‘In The Rounds’, is overshadowed by a nagging lack of imagination.

Gone is the orchestration of 2008’s ‘Entanglements’, though the melodrama of the Portland band’s baroque pop remains.

The monotone pace is lifted by the sprightly ‘3 Days’, but ultimately Woman is cloyingly pedestrian.

They may never outshine M83 but Rituals at least establishes Team Ghost in their own right.

Both musically and lyrically, Daughter ain’t half as clever as they clearly think they are (people get serious and clever mixed up a lot, weirdly).

There are ponderous moments later on, like the uninspired ‘Teenage Disease’, but this is a band who’ve found a second wind.

Whether she’s playing loser or victor, the swathes of frenetic energy that buoy every note are always present.

Woolhouse mostly lives up to the dark nature of his moniker, but for brief moments he glimpses light at the end of the tunnel.

Bloodsports finally provides the send-off Suede’s legacy deserved 10 years ago. And, fittingly, it’s due to them thumbing their noses at the notion of growing old gracefully, and making brilliantly daft pop music instead.

It’s Dire Straits teamed with louche New York cool--a combination that shouldn’t work, but totally does.

Too often, however, Flory is prone to overcomplicating matters, and tracks like ‘In Time’ and ‘Get Down’ wind up too governed by the soulless stamp of the laptop.

Not ‘dance’ music by any stretch of the imagination, but beautiful all the same.

Henson spends 20-odd minutes working his tremulous voice--somewhere between Paul Simon and Wayne Coyne--around echoing guitar.... Then suddenly he finds the socket and ‘Don’t Swim’ rages into life, his guitar bashed and throttled.

The risk pays off.

Inevitably it’s also an adventure in need of an edit.

It’s truly dreamy.

It’s the kind of album that sounds best listened to solo.

It’s not only the boldness of Mason’s subject matter that makes this a brilliantly disquieting record, but also his ability to make it consistently warm and wholesome.

The album ends up as a tribute to each of the individual singers rather than Sound City itself.

It’s still occasionally a bit too ‘nice’ for its own good, but in a cynical world, sometimes a little hope and buoyancy doesn’t go amiss.

Only the overlong ‘Ice Age’ disappoints on a solid, often stunning record.

It’s about as exotic as a cocktail umbrella.

Because a grand and fabulous mode of theatre pervades everything about this band, you’re often a few degrees off completely connecting.

A nightmarish listen, but in a good way.

Much of the charm of The Deserters lies in the winter-blasted chime of Zeffira’s voice, and those frozen-hinterland soundscapes.

It’s mid-album epic ‘Push It’ that best showcases their dexterity, an eerie bass-drum kick blending with a beautiful crescendo of soaring violin strings and piano keys.

This record is not the sunburnt wooze of Tame Impala: it’s angrier, colder.

An album that veers between the lush pop melodies of her last two LPs and a full-frontal riot grrrl assault.

The debut album from the London five-piece is impressive enough.

The place where the anthemic, the noisy and the epic meet is where The Men sound most naturally positioned.

This collection has a tantalising flavour, the sense of an alternative history of rock.

Clearly, still in love.

All this greedy grasping means the London newcomers can’t really get a firm grip on anything, meaning Bad Blood comes out with about as much identity as a Facebook commenter without a profile picture.

The deft Tom Petty chug of ‘Indian Summer’ is anthemic enough, but there’s little else to get excited about.

On an album that rarely shakes off its shroud of unease, Suuns paint a pretty bleak picture of all our tomorrows, but their own dazzling Futur looks assured.

Tiptoeing through the dark fairytale forests of ‘Sleep Paralysis’ can be fun, but this is so woozy-sounding it should come with a warning not to operate heavy machinery while listening.

It demands that you listen to it in this moment, not that you give it an easy ride because this is the man who made ‘Heroes’; and its songs more than live up to the demand.

On Ores and Minerals, they ditch the giddy sounds of their early material and adopt a broader palette.

180 doesn’t contain too many weak moments; only the tacked-on-at-the-end ‘Brand New Song’ feels properly superfluous, an in-joke they’ve run a little too far with. Otherwise, you’re struck by the strength of the songs, and the roguish, self-assured charm with which they’re delivered.