Bad As Me has to rank as a disappointment, since there are no surprises to match Real Gone's sepulchral funk or Orphans'... breathtaking sweep.

The entire thing is an absolute, unerring joy.

Audio, Video, Disco's success is in its album-wide consistency, and a contemplative depth of sound that outshines the expectations of their disco-biscuit crowd.

By taking what worked about Lungs and amplifying those qualities to a natural, satisfying conclusion, Florence has made a near-great pop record that should afford her the creative freedom to do whatever the hell she wants next time around. She may be away with the faeries, but she knows exactly what she's doing.

You're unlikely to play this record at your next soirée but the breadth and ambition is to be applauded.

If The Strange Boys were Brits, you get the impression they'd officially be a big deal by now.

[A] perplexing and risible album.

Festival stalwarts and vintage sonics trailblazers, their no-fuss rhythm and blues has little truck with reinventing the wheel and fizzes with the simple joy of creation.

Try not to grin inanely as the banjo-led big band play "The Bare Necessities," sob to Wilson's lounge lizard harmonies on "When You Wish Upon A Star" or find lions sexy during his restrained "Can You Feel The Love Tonight?"

You finish the record hungry for more of these febrile, insistent Kinshasa sounds--and that, surely, is mission accomplished.

A record whose luminous soundscapes are at once alien yet familiar, adding hazy heartbeat rhythms to their seductive take on ambient masters past and present such as Brian Eno, Harmonia and Tim Hecker.

It's expansively, ecstatically excellent for many of the same reasons as The Field's previous two: blissful, loop-based hymns at the intersection between shoegazing, trance and minimal techno.

The epic emoting can feel a tad weighty towards the end, but you're left with a solid impression of who Active Child is, rather than who he wants to be.

A huge step forward for them and, hopefully, for their public perception too.

It just feels like, once again, Coldplay have done the selfless thing and gone out to protect EMI's share price, and at the end of it remain peering off the edge of a cliff edge, wishing they had the courage to jump.

Another long-awaited offering finally drops and it's wonderfully enchanting.

The anti-folk pioneer's sixth album for Rough Trade is a familiar comedy of errors, full of dusky textures with a sparkling hue of optimism.

If the Dutch producer's last album 'Great Lengths' was an exercise in contemplative, spacious dubstep, then Ghost People is instinctual; muscles tensed in observance of the cerebellum's basest of commands.

Abe Vigoda, HEALTH and No Age's noise-pop inform the best parts of this fine debut LP, rendering it a swirling headfuck of manic energy mixed with blissed-out melody.

Noel's still got it. Only a fool would write him off.

Even if they're a hard band to fall in love with, this record is ridiculously easy to admire.

It's crystallised, but the light shines through.

It's a hit and miss affair.

With pace set to 'perky', the occasionally impressive hooks of (oh yes) 'Summer Fling, Don't Mean A Thing' and (oh no) 'Dumped' merge into a glossy mud from which nothing to rival All The Small Things emerges.

Still not Friday night material, then, but a moving display of one man's myriad sorrows nonetheless. Bless.

The Brooklyn duo's fifth album is less pan-pipe chill-out and more a brooding and oppressive morass of sound akin to a shamanistic Zola Jesus.

Hurry Up, We're Dreaming is itself the Little Prince: guileless and dreamy. Quite a bold statement to make, but this is an album of equal valour.

Two years, lots of touring, and a wad of cash from Domino Records later and the New Jersey four-piece have shaken off the sun-flecked dust of that haphazard genre to reveal a clean and canny record.

This third album is as good a guitar-pop set as you'll hear all year.

Gracious Tide stays with you like a dream you wish would keep recurring.

By the end, they've told a story of adolescence spent crumpling at the hands of others, while having to pick up the pieces all by yourself.

His considerable production chops can't disguise that his songwriting too often feels half-formed.

Creatures Of An Hour is a record that finds intimacy in minimalism, and lets the space in the music build to an atmosphere almost as crushing as the audible moments.

While their love of premeditated spontaneity might be admirable in jazzier quarters, in reality it means that almost every song on their debut is marred by sudden changes in time signature, key and genre.

Nostalgia aside: this is an album worth celebrating now.

It is that rarest of things, a record so particular to Björk's own artistry that no-one could ever hope to replicate it.

It may not be game-changing and it'll be slaughtered by those who have a hatred of hipsters/fun. But it's harmless entertainment, and London gets full marks for what he's best at--experimentation.

Leaping from its 2009 predecessor, Psychic Chasms, with the first notes of 'Heart: Attack', Era Extrana becomes a lesson in how to execute electronic music properly.

This time around, however, they've paced themselves and delivered an album packed with punchy, literate guitar music.

Weirdness far from gallops across the dozen songs that make up the pick'n'mix bag of The Whole Love though, as the straight up alt.pop of 'I Might' testifies, coming across something like a breezy Weezer packing PhDs and lime-topped Coronas.

Spark is right about one thing at least: this album is boring, and everyone who says otherwise is a fucking liar.

There are a few radio-friendly moments. Happily, they're so sufficiently steeped in classic rawk that songs like 'Curl Of The Burl' don't sound like cynical stabs.

Overall it sounds like the work of a man struggling to recall his motivations for making music in the first place.

Metals is, in its own right, quite simply the cat's pyjamas.

The record boasts maybe his finest solo single to date in 'Brittle Heart', plus a clutch of mid-tempo rockers that scrub up nicely--even if the seedy Soho glam of yore is replaced by a leadenly earnest tone.

Fearless himself assumes vocal duties, although Austra's Katie Stelmanis is also occasionally employed to help the music transcend the dank analogue dungeon of its creation.

After two albums treading water in the tricky oceans of landfill indie, the tides are turning.

Maybe they're just too solid, too classic, too... lacking in danger, but Bruiser proves they're still putting up a hell of a fight.

Continuing a penchant for darkness established on 2009's 'Marry Me Tonight', Work (Work, Work) is probably as grim a sounding record as you're likely to hear.

Mostly, though, Conatus gives you a more polished version of exactly what you'd want from a Zola Jesus album.

They've gone all mature, come to terms with their past and kicked on to the future too.

With 4everevolution Smith continues to avoid the genre's default Americanisms and instead dabbles in proggy electronic wizardry ('In The Throes Of It'), warped R&B ('Takes Time To') and sleekly produced, astute socio-political commentary ('Who Goes There?').

While a grisly backstory doth not always a masterpiece make, the album's finest moments come when she takes a Misery-sized sledgehammer to the youthful irreverence of yore and reduces it to rubble.

There's certainly a good ear for a melody in evidence (most noticeable of all on Imperial), but testicles are nowhere to be seen.

There's little here that's moves on from the kind of trip-hop balladeers that abounded in the late '90s or indeed the singer-songwriters that Sheeran admires such as Damien Rice or James Morrison.

It's the sound of a band knowing exactly who they are, what they want--and how to get it.

Virtuosity and accessibility have never been easy bedfellows, but Strange Mercy is one of those rare albums that makes you think and makes you fall in love.

The shimmering beauty of 'Tame The Sun' and the My Bloody Valentine atmospherics of 'Bones' serve to elevate the aesthetic that Male Bonding established on their debut Nothing Hurts to greater heights.

Because there's an awkward squirm at Girls' core, a deviant devolution of classic mores, and that makes Holy Ghost something of a maladroit masterpiece.

This is an album with much to love about it, but it falls just short of their real game-changer, West Ryder.

Killer Sounds gets away with its confused billing because Hard-Fi have always known instinctively how to navigate their way around a chorus. That skill set survives here in big, stupid bloody pop songs.

Sadly, such pop bluster is largely missing from this debut album, which is over-long and obsessed with pained R&B choruses--precisely the reasons we all went off American rap in the first place.

It [the first Mariachi El Bronx album] was a beautifully anarchistic move that's now spawned its second (more polished) album under the Mariachi El Bronx alias.

S.C.U.M may still have a way to go before they truly master their references and get a handle on their lofty metaphors, but their debut is a hymn to maturation.

Like most blasts of carefree romance, its charms may not endure--'Spun', for example, is so saccharine that it's in danger of making your teeth itch--but often in this life, the sweetest things aren't built to last forever.

From the bouncy 'Same Mistake' (this album's 'Is This Love?'), to the darkly nostalgic ballad to years past, 'Misspent Youth', it's a comeback as irrationally happy-inducing as its title suggests.

It's masochistically delightful.

He's a white man crafting beats behind street-level odes to marking out territory from the likes of Detroit's Guilty Simpson and Marv Won, plus others, and he draws on a cornucopia of cultures to do so. Latin, Middle Eastern, African and, worst of all for Starkey, freaky German (NOT THEM!) Moog music rears up on a seductive record that reveals itself in layers.

This real-life fairytale is made up of myriad difficult home truths but Marling's hejira, her flight to freedom, makes for absolutely compelling listening. Oh, and there's a happy, redemptive ending to boot.

There's just an unavoidable sense here of a band who aren't quite sure what their purpose is anymore.

In short Tha Carter IV flops not because it's straight-up bad, but because it's boring.

As it is, and considering the upheaval following Adam Kessler's departure, it's best to look at Portamento as a marker of the potential brilliance that album three could bring.

The lyrics, too, reek of a lack of inspiration.

The very fact long-time collaborator Rick Rubin is at the helm is proof enough that while the production is mostly immaculate, I'm With You is an exercise in how a multi-million selling rock behemoth plays it safe.

Taken as a whole, it's some of Nick Thorburn, Ryan Kattner and Joe Plummer's finest work to date.

A stonking collection of slick honky-tonk pop, the belting Stadium Nashville of 'Together You And I' shows Taylor Swift a thing or three, while 'Shine Like The Sun' and 'The Sacrifice' are pure Mumfords meets Miley Cyrus.

Enough talk about reinventions, this is more of an evolution. On A Different Kind Of Fix, Bombay Bicycle Club have, quite simply, found themselves.

The results are lush, psychedelic, often funky and always immaculately produced. But compared to, say, Cosmogramma, it sounds unadventurous and polite, as if Alias has grasped the sound of Fly-Lo et al rather than the spirit.

These ideas of acceptance, hope and personal reflection make The Rip Tide an accomplished, restrained record, which sees Condon forgetting his travels, and forging his own native sound.

Tassili, too, sounds neither glossily packaged for western audiences, nor too easy to please.

It's a bit like The Slits at Notting Hill Carnival. Add in lush single "Why Have We To Wait" (a cover of a track by '60s pop group The Pussycats) and it's pretty perfect.

CSS may care deeply about every song (though it often doesn't sound like it), but for the listener, a lot of the charm has worn off.

Eschewing the slacker blueprint he practically invented for off-kilter pop tracks, Malkmus has shown that he's not defined by his past.

While they mainly hit a balance between shifting symphonics, subtle keys and pyroclastic guitar, sometimes--such as on "Plainclothes," a ballad/disco/punk-funk/noise jigsaw--there's just too much going on.

Route One... is an enlightening joy because it trips all over the place, from darkness to bright to fast to slow to synthetic to organic and back again, and that's not because of any one person's influence.

It finds Toddla T cementing an identity as a producer--10 years from now, it might be seen as an important stepping stone to greatness.

There are so many distinct yet intertwined influences peppered throughout Slave Ambient it would be remarkably easy to lose the thread altogether. Yet somewhere in the haze it all just kind of… fits.

As long as he keeps on being this magnificent, Mr Ripley can be as avaricious as he damn well pleases.

The record leans at times too heavily on its basic formula of pizzicato electric guitar and seedy, somnambulant basslines. Still, as a slice of squalid glamour with a beating heart under its rusted exterior, Coastal Grooves deserves your attention.

As California dreamin' goes, this is almost as good as heading for the hills, reaching for a hand-tooled native American bong and calling yourself Moon Unit.

Nielson probably didn't know what he was getting into when he started UMO and is probably still figuring it out now. If that means more sleepless nights for him, all the better for us.

Canta Lechuza deflates its ambition by bleeping and whirring in every direction at once, landing in a confused heap of awkward samba jangle and rippling steel drums, a curious and compelling mess.

With bursts of martial snare and brass held together by a minimalist, bass-powered spine, it's reminiscent of The Neptunes' spare genius and feels like off-the-peg future pop.

We would have liked to have heard more lead vocal from the uniquely talented Cedric, but this is a small quibble when we're talking about the soundtrack to dancing like your life depends on it in 2011.

Famous First Words sounds less like a manifesto, more like a misguided step-by-step guide.

Full of distortion-drenched vocals and slacker guitar lines, Yucca is a brilliantly messy thing.

They're most fun when they're really letting loose, though, which is pretty much always.

It's the unflashy moments that really linger, though, with "Taco Delay's" measured minimalism providing some grounding to an otherwise heady trip.