Scruffy melodies informed debut album 'A Thousand Heys' and they return here ('Vapour Trails') but Jack Cooper's homegrown themes are interwoven expertly.

It’s heavenly, in its own troubled way.

It’s less nightclub, more drunken iPod selection, typical of late-period Tricky: brilliant, frustrating and fatally inconsistent.

Her debut LP is good, but not up to the standard its title suggests.

At times throwaway, at others raw, intimate and charming, there’s plenty here you’ll want to get your mate to ask out for you.

His outfit have returned with an album that skirts close to perfection in its 35 minutes of glorious madness and transcendent, George Harrison-like guitar solos.

They have returned hungry and wired to shake us out of our digital comas.

On this evidence, SMD aren't quite there and the result is, sadly, a bit boring.

It's a success, the influence of the body on the music making it sound positively alive.

There's something a little too ‘phone advert’ about it all to properly excite.

While the band's long-standing interest in songs about monsters, vampires and zombies is absent, Fair's yelps of enthusiasm and lightning-strike guitar could wake the dead.

It’s nothing you won’t have heard before--the clue, after all, is right there in the title--but hearing it done as well as this is rare indeed.

Carefully constructed and wonderfully cohesive, it's an album or earnest, yearning rock that shows Lonely The Brave are aiming for the fire cannons and shirtless mega-gigs that Biffy Clyro have worked so hard for.

Of course, the whole venture has about as much cultural currency now as an octopus's garden, but it's a lovely timewarp to slip into.

If there's a quibble, it's an avoidable tendency to let songs drift into overtly tasteful territory, but on point, Ballet School do their heroes proud.

Hopefully Total Control can continue because, brutal as it is, Typical System is the year's finest punk album.

Production comes from Steve Albini but here, unlike his work with (well, wouldn't you know) PJ Harvey and Slint, his less-is-more approach is the only point of weakness on an otherwise impressively dramatic record.

Fifth time round, they're proving there's still plenty of value in their elegantly downtrodden aesthetic.

A little more variation would have been nice, but you know what they say about stopped clocks.

Sadly, the promise of desert-rock heaviness is, if anything, underplayed.

Along with his collaborators (including David Byrne and Damon Albarn), he has neatly stitched a tapestry of musical cultures into a cohesive, convincing whole.

Blonde Redhead continue to splinter off into an exciting world of their own.

While they’ve never been terribly fashionable, they’ve always used that to their advantage, projecting a underdog siege mentality whilst simultaneously selling out arenas. Concrete Love, however, is nothing to beat their own drum about.

On Always Returning, their fourth album, they've delivered yet again.

It makes for a more organically toned collection that proves the grey wizard doesn’t need heavy distortion to stay at the top of his game.

Green Language is an adventurous, enthralling, emotional and frequently brilliant album, then. And yet, from an artist of such rare talent, it’s also a frustrating, slightly underwhelming one.

Nothing new, then, but the Jaxx's sound returns re-energised. Call it the Disclosure effect.

While the album may not fully scale D'Agostino's high bar, in attempting to make that leap Cymbals Eat Guitars have made their best album to date as well as a touching goodbye to a friend.