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.