Rossen is a master craftsman--and one of the best songwriters in modern rock--and with Silent Hour/Golden Mile he's set the bar tantalisingly high for Grizzly Bear's return.

No Gods doesn't disappoint.

When it works, as on 'Let Them Talk', it's a mongrel-pop joy. When it doesn't, as on the overloaded 'Venison Fingers', it's a mess.

They're tight in the way that only the threat of bottling can foster.

New Jersey's The Static Jacks haven't got the most ambitious creative palette.

Home Again provides a sumptuously soft place for tired ears to rest.

A reverence-inspiring return.

It is miles better than 'Innerspeaker', and quite possibly the best album released so far this year.

A stern but playful combination of caustic menace and bright hooks.

While there are clichés here that love songs struggle to escape from, I Thought I Was An Alien dumps twee cold and hard, running into pop's warm embrace.

Dry The River have made a very good debut album.

Rise Ye Sunken Ships is actually pretty great, but guys, just dial it down a bit yeah?

Open Your Heart is breezier and more tuneful than its predecessor, but this is very relative.

Breakfast turns out to be a reasonably hearty meal, definitely sausage and waffles rather than the aural porridge that "alternative hip-hop" summons up.

Wrecking Ball [is] a triumph.

The album's overall trajectory feels directed by human hands. But just as often elements feel like they've been left to lie where they fall.

Bangarang, a stopgap EP ahead of his debut album later in the year, still fails to confirm whether his unashamed populism is deeply naive or profoundly cynical.

What used to feel like surfing amid the cumulonimbus suddenly feels like snorkling in soup.

If this really is to be Lambchop's final album, it's an undeniably lovely one.

Heroux may yet have an album in him that doesn't basically sound like his favourite '80s music stapled together, but this ain't it.

Large Hadron pop that'll frazzle yer neurons.

Often shocking and consistently, unapologetically direct, every word and note here is positively swollen with meaning.

Insipid marshmallow post-rock that occasionally sniffs in the direction of Yuck or Mogwai, but mostly glowers in a dismally cloying, precious nostalgia.

Personality, his third album, conforms to type, while confounding expectation.

A cut above.

The unfortunate irony is that Sounds From Nowheresville doesn't sound much like a grand rejection of pop music at all. It just sounds a little bereft of ideas, and way too short.

Screws Get Loose is best listened to live in a mucky kitchen at your mate's cool older sister's amazing house party.

Young Magic are even more dizzyingly chaotic [than The Ruby Suns].

The way they've leapfrogged their contemporaries in terms of ambition and scope is terrifying. Sleigh Bells are, once again, in a league of their own.

That troubled kid [Mike Hadreas] never went away. It's just that this time, he's more concerned with reaching towards the light.

Ultimately, from start to finish, you know what you've ordered: proficient, precision-executed blues-rock with few genuine surprises.

The tracks have separate names but they're really just one whole impressive piece, about as far from Sheeran as you can get.

Within all the emotional turmoil, there's a lot for the listener to love.

In what might be the biggest compliment I will pay any band this year, the thing that the album most reminds you of is the medley on 'Abbey Road', in the sense that it's hard to pick out individual 'highlights' in what is an endlessly evolving collage.

This isn't just her finest album, but one of early 2012's best.

It's not as unified as previous records, but with fewer meanders towards the mainstream and more of the electronic adventures of last year's freebie 'Shearwater Is Enron', Animal Joy may herald a bold new incarnation.

For an album that you might think is merely an excuse for a megabucks world tour, it sure does, er, wail.

The LP toes a line between eclecticism and kitchen sink, but the one thing he hasn't chucked in here is a little focus.

A rather good second album that contains some of the brightest and jolliest music you'll have heard [for a long time].

There are moments when her A-Level Debating Club earnestness gets the better of her, but there's still three quarters of a great album here.

Poignant package-holiday dance, sun-drunk but urgent with passion.

Although it's not quite the perfect pop record 'Video Games' might have led us to wish for, Born To Die still marks the arrival of a fresh--and refreshingly self-aware--sensibility in pop.

All we learn from these wispy solo offerings is that Lemonheads songs are not improved by persistent cassette hiss and background noise.

E Volo Love may seem oddly relaxed at first, but acclimatising is a breeze.

The Loudest Engine punches for psychedelia and falls flat in a puddle of MOR.

Laura Marin and Quinn Luke cram excessive lyrics into songs such as 'Shake', creating stodge instead of sleekness.

The first disc here was made with several different collaborators certainly doesn't lend cohesion.

It's a dream of the psychedelic tropics, a heady explosion of colours, an album that takes what it means to be 'in an indie band' and gives it a good shake.

'Have Some Faith In Magic' sees them unbuttoning those stiff top-collars and delivering some of their finest pop bangers to date.

The '80s revival taken to its spangliest, synthiest, chino-flappiest extreme.... Our flashback to a dead decade has thrown up both guilty pleasures and glistening horrors.

Who'd have thought the best Americana record of the year would come from two Swedish siblings?

For a pair of wannabe pop classicists, Cardinal's cardinal sin is the failure to provide anything approaching a whistleable melody.

Strange Weekend's gauzy dream-pop is almost incapable of provoking anything but love.

Finn certainly takes a paddle – if not quite a dive – into fresh sonic waters.

In general it pays to avoid electronic producers with dreadlocks, but let Sumach 'Gonjasufi' Ecks be your exception.

Musically, it's nowhere near as life-changing as its subject matter, but MacNeil's mortality menagerie make cute enough companions in the void.

This one whips the spliced, spooked melodies and vintage rhythms of Blood into new, distorted shapes that at times recall the dark textures of Prurient's 'Bermuda Drain' or Fever Ray's debut.

It takes a pretty special type of artist to release 11 zip files of music for free, follow that up with three albums within a year and still pique your interest when a new release crosses the doorstep. But such is the way of Wiley.

It's Guided By Voices' finest work since 2001's 'Isolation Drills'

America Give Up is, quite simply, an effortlessly brilliant debut.

Robbie Furze and Milo Cordell's second album isn't done for by a lack of ambition, but rather the imagination required to realise it.

Tribes have roared back fiercer than ever.

A pleasant listen, but it's hardly fresh.

This album is a subtly, sweetly wonderful thing--proof that, sometimes, sonic actions speak louder than words.

The Christmas album can risk being a sonic Round Robin, of interest to few but its creators, dispossessed of all perspective as they've mired themselves deep in their icky, cosy world.

This Is Christmas is effectively hate-proof, loved-up, entertaining stuff that strikes just the right balance of humour and heart-tugging.

Their rootsy rattle'n'roll fails to connect with anything more grabbing than a vague lyrical nostalgia.

They respond to the challenge [to engage politically] in explosive style to deliver something like their defining statement.

A little more melodic resolve wouldn't go amiss, but 'Ester' is a solid, imaginative debut that leaves you aglow with the ice-warmth of a blip-literate Cocteau Twins.

Squeaking with the glamour of a rusty gramophone, 'The Rushing Dark' flashes with delicate splendour and, alongside 'Time Is Not', evokes moonlit, cobbled Parisian streets and carafes of elderflower wine.

The album is beautifully structured, leading from spare and shimmery beginnings into harder, weirder and more varied territories, all those snippets and elements and personalities crafted into a shifting, subtle whole that quietly captures your attention from start to end.

Much as there's no getting away from the fact that this is basically one long remix, it's much better than the car crash we all predicted it would be.

It's unquestionably a beautiful (debut) album, and one that may be well-timed.

Following on from a confusing but rewarding double-disc anthology, 'Rifts', in 2009 and the sublime space scapes of 'Returnal' in 2010, 'Replica' is a rallying call for people who don't see synthesisers purely as objects of retro-fetishism, but rather as agents of future creative potential.

A collection of offcuts revamped in the industrial style that has characterised his recent work--isn't [a latter-day masterpiece that will spread his appeal beyond his hyper-devoted fanbase].

Oh Fortune spans a wider spectrum than its folky core might imply, adding grandeur and a refreshing, cerebral spin to proceedings.

For 37 rollicking minutes, they give it the full gun, meeting the challenge of being the biggest garage rock band in the world head-on.

It's a shame Mr Pain needs these cameos as much as his instrument of choice--without them, the temptation for the listener would be to simply Auto-Tune out.

You know those people who moon out of train windows, in love with their own picturesque melancholy? Fionn Regan's third album is like that.

It's the less controlled, less sleek excursions that are more exciting.

This is music for message-board moderators and the greasy-haired sycophants who hang around too long after gigs, and precisely no-one else.

A tasteful set of sorrow-wallowing wet-indie covers produced by James Ford.

Cher's not proved herself nimble enough to be more than roadkill beneath its wheels.

To hope for a "Running Up That Hill" or a "Wuthering Heights" would be to miss the point, and the subtle pleasures – there's enough people walking the ways Kate cleared 30 years ago. Follow her footprints off the beaten path, and you'll find some weird winter wonders.

"Both Ways Open Jaws" is tribal, prickly and wickedly playful.

He wields the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra as deftly as he did his spliff-stained six-string.

A so-so album which suggests it may be time for Ms Fenty to take a holiday.

They tag-team across the record with a cheery glint, a self-deprecating wink and a boundless charm that's hard not to like.

There's really only one salient truth about "Ersatz GB" – that The Fall, even at nearly 30 albums old, still stand alone and aloft.

The kids of the LC! still bristle with a fundamental melodic vibrancy, and the hand-in-hand maturing of music-writer Tom Campesinos! into the realms of Sonic Youth thrashes, cranky synthetics and handclaps, harmonium, violin and bar-room piano gives the record a gravitas to counterpoint Gareth's lyrical anguish.

While it's sometimes hateful and sometimes hate-filled, "At Your Inconvenience" is rarely boring.

Its mix of clanking rhythms, bleeps and whistles is certainly insistent, although it's the vocal tracks that stick.

It's not quite pop enough to dance to, and almost shlock-country enough to make you give up listening to music altogether.

Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride have the Human League/Thomas Dolby textures down to a tee but, crucially, they haven't skimped on the songwriting

This is a hugely personable album full of gawky heartbreak and Yorkshire sad-glam that makes you feel like you know Louis as well as your oldest school chum.

That same battle between tension and relaxation runs throughout, fueling this understated gem of an album.

[Shonen Knife's] 13 Ramones covers sound exactly like you'd expect.

Following the birth of her first child, the underappreciated Laura Veirs recorded an album of mostly traditional folk songs for children, which has charm far beyond the nursery.