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.