There’s just not enough that grabs you by the throat and pulls you back to listen over and over again.

You can’t necessarily call this new music, but it works because it doesn’t sound vintage, nor does it completely owe itself to any bygone era of “remember when?”.

Minor quibbles aside (Set Me Free is a little over-wrought and clichéd), True Romance is a simply stunning record.

This may be no grand revelation, but it has its moments, and overall it’s a thoroughly satisfying sit.

Whilst the majority of Stygian Stride is an abstract pulsing mass, beneath there is a narrative that draws the listener through an intense display without losing purpose.

Cruise Your Illusion doesn't disappoint; what the Washington four-piece have accomplished is as authentic as the influences that ooze from its fuzz, and warmer than an Arabian armpit.

It’s a beautiful, at times tragic album, a versatile hodge-podge of creativity and ambition whose influences are nearly undetectable (this critic hears Bjork and D’Angelo most apparently) and with nary a false note.

If nothing else can be said about The Terror, it at least represents the culmination of all of The Flaming Lips’ oddball experiments and elongated, anti-sonorous jams into a single, abrasively beautiful cacophony.

It sees the Cumbrian exiles embracing their maturity and demonstrating restraint, without scrimping on the songs.

The bottom line here is that this is a boring album, plain and simple.

Presley’s made a competent facsimile of a 60s psychedelic album.

The widening of Banhart’s previously contained and signature sound continues to pay off here, the funky and inviting rubber basslines that are scattered throughout the album particularly memorable.

Wakin’ On A Pretty Daze strikes with a gust of pent up emotions, a trailblazing record that openly affirms a personal accountability for self without slipping into heavy-handedness.

Certainly this record is relevant, and maybe even worth listening to with some regularity. But I can't help but feel that this album is just a watered down Arcade Fire rather than the aural adventure that others seem to hear.

Despite clear flaws though, enthusiastically raving about the album, even when taking into account that a third of it (including those aforementioned ten minutes of Fracking… ) is borderline irritating, feels entirely justified, rather than an exercise in willful perversion, thanks to the quality of everything else on offer.

There’s a lot more diversity in the sound of the album, and it’s there that Wolf immediately shines.

Ultimately, Time’s liquidity, while mesmerising to some, will be a distance myth to others.

It's terrific fun while it lasts, and Moon's knowingly gawky charms just about manage to stave off any lingering Jimmy Ray (remember him?) related doubts, but the general lack of content does offer fairly compromised value for money, and raises questions as to if he'll be able to think of ways to expand his repertoire without ruining the central conceit, or just end up being an oddball one trick pony.

Even though it falls apart towards the end and could stand to cut a few songs, Welcome oblivion is a powerful record, both musically and thematically.

Bleached have discovered that they have a canny knack for inoffensive rhythms, melodies and harmonies which will immediately appeal. But where this record needed to provide an abrasive counterpoint in the lyrics, they’re more sickly sweet than the music.

Bloodsports is fine, pleasant even.

Woodkid has a sound that is unique in the music landscape, and most of the songs on this album are exciting, evocative tracks that play to the most basic of emotions: love, loss and redemption.

Every weird twist and turn on The Chronicles of Marnia sounds like the work of a musician so effortlessly absorbed in her craft, so attuned to the expressive qualities of her music, that the internal logic of her songs is completely cohesive and idiosyncratic--and more importantly, really damn fun.

There’s something hauntingly beautiful about the way these tracks morph and evolve over their fairly short lifespan.

Just like the band itself, it presents something of an ongoing identity crisis for the band, one that hasn’t figured out how to advance their sound except to put more meat on the bones.

With a steadfast attention to his orchestration, it helps to illuminate his musical exploration of the West.

Stop what you’re doing and get this EP, and keep going.

Golden Grrls have put out a happy, smiley little record that doesn't overstay its welcome.

Lines is Lynch’s most complete effort, altogether more rhythmically loose and less meticulously detailed.

There’s promise here to be sure, but it’s a promise as yet unfulfilled.

Ensemble Pearl is an album of perpetual drift, expanding upon the defining characteristics of droning or ambient music.

What I hear is basically a mildly enjoyable set of songs, whose lackadaisical delivery and spacey major second chords could easily accompany my Sunday afternoon nap.

With the exception of the more melodious tracks coming in pairs and slightly hindering the flow of an otherwise excellent album, Specter at the Feast is a very good effort from BRMC, and an example of the continued revitalization that started sometime around Leah Shapiro’s arrival to the band in 2008.

The 20/20 Experience is an absolutely delicious guilty pleasure.

Wild Belle’s debut is a respectable exercise of ethereal pop.

The eleven robust tracks on Entrench are memorable not simply because of their animalistic intensity, but because they’ve taken that energy and fine-tuned it into some expertly crafted songs.

They make enough changes while doing what they do best to avoid getting pigeonholed, which is more than we can ask for from a band that’s about to start a third milestone.

Throughout its running time, Pale Green Ghosts sees Grant ably balance a sense of humour with quietly devastating content.

Nanobots is, at the end of the day, a solid and immensely likable album.

There probably aren’t enough moments that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, but after the initial struggle to get into, it’s a rewarding record to return to.

The Next Day is the best Bowie album in 33 years, but it’s perfectly reasonable to not even call it a top 10 Bowie album.

Naomi is a decent album, not a good one.

By attempting to give us what we want, and provide reassurance that the Sonic Youth legacy is in safe hands, Moore has somehow managed to make it look weaker and less appealing than it ever was.

What keeps it from the top is the lack of musical surprises. Still, these twelve songs will keep you warm as winter turns to spring.

This time around, his musings are openly candid and scarcely metaphorical, a necessary breather from all the stuffy, bookish references spread across his last two efforts.

In conclusion, solid record, but it simply does not hit home hard enough.

It’s an album of perpetual fruition, payoff meeting payoff with gratifying speed and the rush of riff-borne frenzy.

The lyrical flaws are not a fatal stab, but it’s an enormous burden.

A focused, yet relaxed, song-writing atmosphere has resulted in something completely sophisticated yet entirely effortless, and genuinely warm.

Through their first two releases, Foals were able to showcase their evolving sound, but with Holy Fire, their evolution stops dead in its tracks.

Wondrous Bughouse, with its epic sprawl and quaint curiosity, successfully captures through its music the idea that the smaller you are, the easier you’re dazzled and overwhelmed by the world around you.

Although Yorke’s songwriting prowess is still very strong, this record is by no means perfect.

While the better songs sound rough around the edges, their inferior material here sounds scrappy and juvenile.

The highlights are somewhat front-loaded; Autre Ne Veut’s schtick begins to wear by the end.

Their amalgamation of indie and electronica is by no means revolutionary in itself, but their form of guitar infused music is an important one.

This was an interesting direction to go in and it definitely has a lot of potential. But the duo will need to do a better job balancing the synths and the songs to succeed.

New Moon shows The Men, who have always been admired for their ability to pull such diverse influences but held back for their lack of originality, expanding their horizons and coming into their own.

On Flower Lane, Mondanile and the gang stepped out of the bedroom and into the studio, and the result is something just as sterile as every other song by Real Estate.

Eat Skull’s impressive new album is a healthy reminder of what can happen when these two opposing halves converge into one beautiful whole.

It’s difficult to qualify Somewhere Else as middling because it proposes a whole new set of exciting challenges for Shapiro, but it also brings about a befuddling, poorly sequenced effort that crosses out songwriting ingenuity with across-the-board dancehall padding.

We know better than to call Push The Sky Away Nick Cave’s best album, but if you want a portrait of the artist, as an artist, the album qualifies as “essential” even by the strictest definition.

For a debut album from a gal who can’t even legally rent a car by herself, this is very impressive. She attracts to a wide audience, displays restraint and obscurity at appropriate times.

Perhaps the most rousingly, entertainingly, ridiculously dumb record that 2013 will have to offer.

They pull from various sources and somehow manage to make them unrecognizable; the mélange of influences so rich and varied--changeable almost by the minute--they constantly keep you guessing.

This album may have been a growing pain in their attempt to evolve past their initial signature baroque pop, but it sounds like they missed a few steps that needed to be taken.

There’s uncertainty whether the controlled experiment of Confrontations resonates, not sonically, but emotionally.

Despite the group’s apathetic demeanor, it makes you wonder if each track on You’re Nothing’s sublime dirge is a result of those fleeting moments of carnal ecstasy, as it’s hard not to get lost in the beaten and bruised squalor Iceage expels on their grittiest--and best--album yet.

It’s nowhere near as annoying, despite my physically manifest aversion to it, but it definitely is not trying to please you, or make you comfortable, or even happy in any way.

Overall, this album was a just-in-time surprise: a musical excursion of folk, soul, rock, and soul-baring honesty--fun to listen to, no matter where or how it is heard.

The entire subject seems to be instinct, a bombardment from Friel’s own psyche, expressed in a way that words could never do. Being therefore, indescribable. But nevertheless astonishingly glorious.

Honeys may be just another rash, blustering effort, but for the first time there’s a faint hint of accessibility seeping through the cracks.

Kitty is clearly just having fun enjoying her time in the spotlight here, and for that it’s an enjoyable and endearing effort.

Largely, the band’s turn from paradoxically sweet Goth-pop to the more treaded territory jangle-pop works against them.

Despite how structurally disciplined it sounds as a whole, their chamber-turned new wave hybrid should suffice for those who couldn’t fathom it from front to back.

II triumphantly bypasses novelty for a more meaningful level of significance: An album whose songs, personality, and band-chemistry come together for something that could well outlast its own current weirdness.

By playing it safe and giving the fans exactly what they want, Coheed & Cambria have successfully delivered two of the most predictable, mundane albums I’ve ever heard.

To her credit, she has absolutely carved out her own unique sound, far from the epic, prog-punk productions of Titus Andronicus. However, in the process she failed to deliver a consistent batch of songs.

The Man Who Died avoids the stigma of outtakes releases because it’s an ideal entry point into one of the most distinctive, fascinating musicians of our time.

While they haven’t quite found out how to convert that into an entirely compelling experience as an album, Wash the Sins... is still very much a welcome step in the right direction.

mbv follows its predecessor without aggrandizing its past resources, and as such, delivers a wallop of sweet, sweet distortion in a way that comes naturally to them.

Candela has some shining moments but, overall, is an album that teases the palette instead of really satisfying.

Wonderful, Glorious is a solid Eels record, with some of the best arrangements they have ever written.

Though Owens takes precise measures to avoid it, the downfall of Lysandre ultimately comes down to this same-y-ness, as the majority of the album's tracks do very little to truly grab the listeners attention.

The record is nothing new, but he somehow manages to make it all his own.

Centralia finds Mountains in their finest form yet, indicating a new level of comfort in the space they've been carefully carving out over the past decade.

Tomahawk has since its debut defined itself and Patton provides enough of an anchor to carry the band through lamentation (I.O.U.) and noir-ish narrative (A Thousand Eyes) in addition to its heavier output, which make up the album's best moments.

As a whole, Elements Of Light might feature a fair amount of padding, and it might not be quite as original sounding as the idea would suggest (other than the aforementioned Bjork comparison, there are more than a few moments that recall Aphex Twin at his more contemplative), but even so it does offer more than enough to satisfy as a listening experience, rather than just a curiosity.

Sadly, the interesting ideas fall at the place on the spectrum where it jives for just a short time, at least for this particular listener.

They are only a few steps away from making a truly great record, because they certainly aren't lacking in talent, they just need an identity to give it a purpose.

The end result is a very ambitious piece of psychedelia-tinged indie rock that rewards patience with some truly inspired tweaks on the typical slow-jam formula.

Sometimes, the results are heavily wrought and obviously worked over (the muddled instrumentation in the chorus of Breakers comes to mind), and some of the skittering grooves (the spastic tribal pounding of Wooly Mammoth) don't quite fit in the album's overarching arc. Nevertheless, the stately elegance of Hummingbird emphasizes how Local Natives are fit for the role of indie rock saviors.

A finely crafted collection of indie rock.

Overall, Almanac is a good follow up that helps cement the band's holding in the new age of dreamy folk rock.

Though the band's approach is fairly consistent throughout the album, there are instrumental ideas explored with tracks like In The Branches of Yggdrasil and Nice Riff, Clichard, the latter of which takes a shot at some melancholic Richard D. James beat invention.

Despite rarely achieving all of what it goes for, it's hard to deny the sheer pleasure of getting the enormous hooks and noise that are constantly on display here.

What's most striking is how effortlessly Bundick seems to construct each groove without compromising the complexity of his hybrid style.

Oak Island, just out on Secretly Canadian, is a logical extension of that debut's theme and style, but is better crafted--or perhaps just better served--and stands as a good example of how subtlety can sneak up on a person and pack a desolate punch.

All that it has going for it is the promise of adolescent wit, and even in that regard it completely fails to deliver.